You Need More Than a Dream

You need a strategy.

If you want to get something done, figure out a strategy.

I’ve been immersed in the idea of strategy these past months, since I purchased Seth Godin’s latest book, This Is Strategy. It’s a wake-up call. In the book Godin writes,

We’ve been taught to follow our passion, to do what we love and the success will follow.

That’s what my dad taught me. ”Your gift will make a way for itself,” he would say. I repeated his adage lots and lots because I liked the way it sounded. It made my gift sound powerful and special.

“Alas,” Godin wrote, “it might be that our passion and intuitive instinct came from a system that doesn’t actually support the work we seek to do or the change we seek to make.”

We may need a strategy to reach success with our passion.

Godin defines strategy as

• a compass, not a map

• a better plan for a better tomorrow

• more than hope

• not a goal or a list of tasks but a set of choices we make.

He suggests we answer 3 questions.

1. What is the change you seek to make?

2. Who are you here to serve?

3. What is the system (because every strategy uses a system)?

Deep in the book Godin suggests a basic outline for creating a strategy—as opposed to a business plan. I took his outline and made it into a template, which I’m sharing here. You can see this would be particularly useful for a Shark Tank idea, but to be honest, it could be used with anything you plan to do to make

• your life better

• the world better.

Question

What writing project do you have in mind that would make tomorrow better? Answer the 3 questions above—the change you seek to make, who it’s for, and how you’re going to do it. If it’s a book you intend to write, how will you publish it? What system will you use?

I’d love to hear what happens if you decide to fill out the template. Can you suggest any changes that would make this more useful for a creative?

And here’s to tomorrow being better for all of us.

P.S.

I made the template for my journaling workshop, Journaling the Way Forward. We met on Sunday and talked strategy. Next week’s theme is Empathy. If you’d like to join, be in touch.