Personal Strategy Power: 3 Steps to Break Out of the “Busy” Trap and Master Your Destiny
Transform your life by moving from being reactive to making choices
“Until you make your unconscious choices conscious, they will direct your life, and you will call it fate.”
(Adapted from Carl Jung)
Everyone today has more coming at them than ever, but we all only have the same 24 hours to do them.
So we attempt to “brute-force” everything by outworking everyone else, starting at the top of our to-do lists and working our way down.
And we miss and procrastinate.
Real life gets in the way, and when the end of the day comes, we say, ”Tomorrow, maybe I’ll get more things done.”
But our lists keep getting longer.
While we may even get some things “done,” we don’t seem to be getting any closer to our goals, the things we care about.
Why?
Hacks Miss the Point
Because “productivity hacks” and better planning can only make us more efficient in working towards the things we’ve already unconsciously prioritized.
But are those indeed the most important things we could be doing?
Or are we optimizing for things that are not only meaningless but actively taking us in the wrong direction?
And more importantly, as we rush around doing all these things, are we happy with the person we’re becoming?
The “busy” badge
As companies trim workforces, asking fewer people to do more and rushing from meeting to meeting have become the standard.
But when we’re ready to let go of the “busy” badges we wear as we try to slog through our endless to-do lists, we open the door a tiny crack to the possibility of a set of far fewer but far more meaningful sets of choices that get lost in our daily whirlwind.
We always have a choice
How? By recognizing we hold the power to make choices.
But before we can do that, we’ll need to take a higher viewpoint. We’ll need to step back and look at our life objectively so we can stop feeling stuck “in” the system, acting on autopilot, and constantly feeling behind.
Instead, we must shift to working “on” our system of underlying choices for the first time.
This is how we change our fate
In this piece, I’ll share how Personal Strategy can help us break free of the manic “busyness” that doesn’t serve us.
We’ll also learn how the choices of strategy can help us design a set of choices that allow us to break free of our “fate,” either personally or professionally, and create a different future, a future we choose.
The ultimate productivity “non”–hack
Personal Strategy represents our ultimate productivity “hack” because it isn’t a “hack” at all.
It’s stepping back and understanding how we decide what choices control what we see as “important,” opening the door to consciously making a better set of personal strategic choices.
The 3 Steps are:
1: What is Personal Strategy?
2: How to Design Your Own Personal Strategy
3: How to Know You’re on the right track
Let’s dive in and take control of our destiny.
1: What is Personal Strategy?
Based on the work of Roger L. Martin, strategy is a problem-solving framework made up of five choices to influence things we accept you have little to no direct control over.
Personal strategy applies the same strategic choice-making approach successfully used by global multinational corporations to create blockbuster products, turbocharging our personal and professional effectiveness.
This image from Roger L. Martin brilliantly sums up the essence of Personal Strategy:
2: How to Design Your Own Personal Strategy
The centerpiece of Roger L. Martin’s “Playing to Win” strategy framework is the “Strategy Choice Cascade.”
We’ll review each box below.
The Five Choices of the Strategy Choice Cascade
As we step through each choice, we’ll use the example of a creator’s personal strategy as they evolve their niche, creating content to help fledgling newsletter writers find their audiences alongside their 9-5 role.
Winning Aspiration – Our “Mission” or “Vision”
“Winning” in this context isn’t about “beating” anyone else.
It’s about being the best we can be in our chosen area for our chosen target customer and deciding what’s meaningful to us.
Example “Winning Aspiration”
An example of a “Winning Aspiration” for our part-time creator would be:
“Be the go-to thought leader and coach in the area of Search Engine Optimization (“SEO”) for newsletter creators.”
Where to Play
”Where to Play” is our “playing field” where we decide to focus our skills.
And where we choose not to compete.
We can break this down into a few key areas:
Where, physically, will we play?
For whom are you doing this, or will we do it? Who are we serving?
Through what channels are we serving them? In person? Via email, Zoom, Slack, Discord, or other chat?
Example “Where to Play” for our personal creator strategy:
“Direct message newsletter creators on Substack and beehiiv with zero to 500 users specializing in technology, finance, and life sciences content.”
How to Win?
How will we improve these people’s lives and solve their problems in ways that provide outsize value?
How can we make things
Super-easy
Lowest-cost
Or otherwise “distinctive” and differentiated
Our goal will be to offer disproportionate value at every touch point.
Example “How to Win”:
“Help newsletter creators just starting to double their audience in 60 days through a proprietary system of landing pages and keyword-optimized content that boosted me to 20,000 subscribers in 6 months but requires only 30 minutes of daily effort to provide maximum results.
Through my proprietary system, I guarantee that the newsletter subscribers you gain are high-value readers who will stick with you for the long term as you grow your business and sell different products.
Offer different coaching packages at various price points, from weekly personalized emails and check-ins to daily emails going deep into analyzing stats and trends, weekly calls, and hands-on editing of their pages.”
With our crucial “Where to Play” and “How to Win” choices clear, we now move from the “strategy” choices to “executing” against those choices through a unique matched set of Capabilities and Management Systems.
Capabilities
What is it that we will do or offer, uniquely and distinctively, that we can do better than anyone else?
And how can we do these activities in value-enhancing ways that reinforce our “Where to Play” and “How to Win” choices?
Combining these elements in unique ways will create a situation our competitors either can’t or won’t copy.
Example Capabilities
Deep knowledge of how to write and configure Substack and beehiiv content for maximum effectiveness
Deep understanding of how to create pages that are easily indexed and prioritized by Google’s search algorithm and how things are shifting to more AI-driven search results
Daily short-form content posting, interaction in comments on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Substack Notes
Weekly long-form posting to my Substack newsletter
Management Systems
What are our unique systems that tell us how we’re performing against our “Where to Play” and “How to Win” choices?
How can we understand what’s working and where we need to improve?
Strong management systems can help us continuously improve our capabilities to deepen the gap between what we offer and others can’t, reinforcing our competitive advantage.
Example Management Systems
Use a Customer Relationship Management (“CRM”) platform to keep track of coaching leads for our newsletter SEO service.
Segment them into two different personas to focus on my ideal customer:
New newsletter writers just starting out
Established newsletter writers whose growth has stalled
Deep experience using search tools to establish baselines for each client and measure their improvement over time, pinpointing which techniques create the most traction with their chosen audiences.
Keep track of the most successful users and get video testimonials to convince other potential coaching clients.
Designed together
The five choices represent an “integrated” set that works together and reinforces each other.
For this to happen, we must toggle across the five boxes as we design our choices.
Ideally, we wouldn’t take an answer from one set of choices and randomly slap it together with another choice from another set.
3: How to know we’re on the right track
Once we’ve made our choices, how will we know we’re on the right track and moving in our chosen direction?
For that, we’ll need a way to expose the assumptions underlying our choices to understand whether or not they still hold true over time.
And there’s a question that can help us expose those assumptions.
Another of Roger Martin's most significant strategy breakthroughs is not asking what we believe is true but what would have to be true for these choices to make sense.
“What Would Have to Be True?”
Asking “What Would Have to Be True?” helps us creativity to imagine how different forces outside our control may affect our strategy.
For each of our current choices, we need to ask, “What Would Have to be True?” about:
Customers:
Are they responding as we hope & expect?
Why Not?
Company:
Do I/we have the capabilities to crush this?
Why not?
(I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people, teams, and companies create brilliant, ambitious “strategies” about what they will do without ever considering whether they can accomplish them.)
Competition:
In what ways can I bring my unique capabilities to bear in a way that the competition either can’t or won’t copy?
Who’s doing this better than I am?
What can I learn from them?
What can I intentionally not do that they’re doing, and vice versa?
There’s always someone or another group competing for our customers.
While you can’t know how they’ll react to your strategic choices, you can try to think ahead and prepare.
Example “What Would Have to Be True?”:
Customers
It would have to be true that:
My ideal customers would find my offer compelling enough to sign up for and have the money to pay for it.
That customers would get enough perceived value to keep paying for my coaching, month-over-month.
Company
It would have to be true that:
My proprietary system continues to improve customer rankings
I can stay on top of SEO trends and continue providing value despite algorithm changes.
Competition
It would have to be true that:
No one is targeting the same ideal customers as I am with the same value proposition
No one is undercutting my prices and offering better results at lower price points
They might offer to boost newsletter subscribers, but the traffic they’re offering is low quality – No one can get you higher-value, more loyal readers than my system can.
Our “early warning” system
When we lay out our “What Would Have to Be True?” conditions, we can hang them over our desks and watch them closely daily.
When they no longer hold true, it’s time to revisit the five choices of our personal strategy.
Takeaways
“Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have 24-hour days.”
Zig Ziglar
How do some people achieve so much more and get closer to their dreams while others are drowning in tasks and work and never able to get their “heads” above water?
Hint: It has nothing to do with money, status, or power.
Productivity “hacks” can’t help because “hacks” or heavier planning can only make us more efficient in working towards the things we’ve already unconsciously decided are important.
But even when we achieve those things, they may not take us where we want to go.
Our goal is to shed our “busy” badges and recognize that we can make better choices today.
Mastering our fate
Personal Strategy is the ultimate way to move from constantly reacting to what life throws at us, continually playing “defense,” to making choices, being proactive, and going on “offense.”
We can move from constantly falling behind in serving other people’s agendas to selectively choosing when and how best to support them while keeping our own longer-term best interests in mind.
We can start improving our lives by using personal strategy as our problem-solving framework and focusing our choices on solving what’s most important to us.
Getting better at the five choices of the Strategy Choice Cascade can turbocharge our effectiveness, take control of our destiny, and allow us to become the people we choose to be.
Don’t wait– there’s nothing more important than starting this journey.
