1, #76 - Strategy is scarcity’s child
Estimated Read Time: 52 seconds.
I talk in my sleep.
Shortly after we got married, my wife woke up to the sound of me making (loud) engine revving noises, while sitting up in bed and rotating my hands around an imaginary steering wheel. “What… what are you doing?” she asked, disoriented. Apparently, I snapped my head around, irritated at being interrupted, and responded with a single word: “Strategizing.”
So, it’s fair to say that strategy is on my mind, literally, day and night.
This week, I’ve been reading Richard Rumelt’s iconic book, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, and thinking about how this topic is connected to recurring themes in this newsletter: essentialism, prioritization, hard decisions.
I particularly loved this quote:
“But the essential difficulty in creating strategy is not logical; it is choice itself. Strategy does not eliminate scarcity and its consequence—the necessity of choice. Strategy is scarcity’s child and to have a strategy, rather than vague aspirations, is to choose one path and eschew others. There is difficult psychological, political, and organizational work in saying ‘no’ to whole worlds of hopes, dreams, and aspirations.”
In business and in life: It’s painful to choose. It’s difficult to make decisions that inevitably close doors. But you can (literally, again) rest assured: accepting the reality of trade-offs and choosing between them is the only way to move forward.
Otherwise, your mind will be racing all night, too.
Insight inspired by Richard Rumelt.
My takeaway: I know that saying no to others can be hard, but saying no to myself--that's a whole different level of difficulty. Since strategizing involves saying no to myself, it will take an emotional and psychological toll. And that's great to know--I can prepare myself in advance to deal with those effects of strategizing and prioritizing.
Have you ever watched Sleepwalk With Me?