This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans (Create a Strategy to Elevate Your Career, Community & Life)

People like us do things like this. Tension comes with change the same way shadows come with sunlight.

If it doesn’t help, why bathe in it?

What happened yesterday already happened. It’s a gift and an asset from your previous self. You don’t have to accept it if you don’t want to.

Who’s it for? What’s it for? If you tell us that you’re making this movie for you, your muse, your scrapbook, then whatever you wrote or staged or edited is exactly right. It’s not wrong. Keep it. But if your strategy is to delight the audience, and the film doesn’t do that, it’s wrong.

All effort comes with an opportunity cost, and sometimes that effort turns into an asset. When the asset isn’t helping you any longer, you can forgive your effort, decline the asset going forward, and go make the change you signed up for in the first place.

Ignore sunk costs. Money and effort you spent yesterday should have nothing to do with decisions you make tomorrow, because each decision is a new one.

When making a new decision, we must ignore what we acquired yesterday.

Culture defeats motivation. And culture is distributed and rarely happens all at once. Culture is a system’s way of defending itself, and if we’re to build a system, we should be mindful of the culture we create.

We change systems by building our own systems—systems that cause change as their output.