Quotes About Strategy

Identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours.

Great missions are transformed into great successes as the result of using small and achievable projects- little bets- to explore the concrete possibilities surrounding a compelling idea.

working on a single hard task for a long time without switching, Grant minimizes the negative impact of attention residue from his other obligations, allowing him to maximize performance on this one task. When Grant is working for days in isolation on a paper, in other words, he's doing so at a higher level of effectiveness than the standard professor following a more distracted strategy in which the work is repeatedly interrupted by residue-slathering interruptions.

He approached the task of finding good projects for his mission with the mindset of a marketer, systematically studying books on the subject to help identify why some ideas catch on while others fall flat. His marketing-centric approach is useful for anyone looking to wield mission as part of their quest for work they love. Purple

Assuming that you could probably list somewhere between ten and fifteen distinct and potentially beneficial activities for each of your life goals, this law says that it's the top two or three such activities—the number that this strategy asks you to focus on—that make most of the difference in whether or not you succeed with the goal.

The First Control Trap In which I introduce the first control trap, which warns that it's dangerous to pursue more control in your working life before you have career capital to offer in exchange. Jane's

Microsoft CEO Bill Gates famously conducted "Think Weeks" twice a year, during which he would isolate himself (often in a lakeside cottage) to do nothing but read and think big thoughts.

A good chief executive is essentially a hard-to-automate decision engine,

Según declaran los autores de The 4 Disciplines of Execution, «cuanto más queremos abarcar, menos logramos hacer».

The important thing about little bets is that they're bite-sized. You try one. It takes a few months at most. It either succeeds or fails, but either way you get important feedback to guide your next steps. This approach stands in contrast to the idea of choosing a bold plan and making one big bet on its success.

When Grant is working for days in isolation on a paper, in other words, he's doing so at a higher level of effectiveness than the standard professor following a more distracted strategy in which the work is repeatedly interrupted by residue-slathering interruptions.

It was tentativeness, not boldness, that transformed Pardis's general mission into a specific success.

The 4DX framework is based on the fundamental premise that execution is more difficult than strategizing.

If you want a mission, you need to first acquire capital. If you skip this step, you might end up like Sarah and Jane: with lots of enthusiasm but very little to show for it. Not

her mission provides her a sense of purpose and energy, traits that have helped her avoid becoming a cynical academic and instead embrace her work with enthusiasm. Her mission is the foundation on which she builds love for what she does, and therefore it's a career strategy we need to better understand.

by instating your own variation of his conversation office hours strategy. Put aside set times on set days during which you're always available for conversation. Depending on where you are during this period, these conversations might be exclusively on the phone or could also include in-person meetings. Once these office hours are set, promote them to the people you care about.

Rather than believing they have to start with a big idea or plan out a whole project in advance," he writes, "they make a methodical series of little bets about what might be a good direction, learning critical information from lots of little failures and from small but significant wins" [emphasis mine]. This rapid and frequent feedback, Sims argues, "allows them to find unexpected avenues and arrive at extraordinary outcomes.

To maximize your success, you need to support your efforts to go deep. At the same time, this support needs to be systematized so that you don't waste mental energy figuring out what you need in the moment.

This practice asks you to embrace this well-validated strategy by making time to write a letter to yourself when faced with demanding or uncertain circumstances.

execution should be aimed at a small number of "wildly important goals.

How you'll work once you start to work.

lead measures turn your attention to improving the behaviors you directly control in the near future that will then have a positive impact on your long-term goals.

how to put new technologies to use for our best aspirations and not against them. Digital minimalism is one such strategy. It's toward its details that we now turn our attention.

tactic that works well for me is to be clear in my refusal but ambiguous in my explanation for the refusal. The key is to avoid providing enough specificity about the excuse that the requester has the opportunity to defuse it.