Reproducible Success Strategies

The three properties of long-term strategies

Good long-term strategies have three properties.

1. They are sustainable. They do not require risks or sacrifices that you cannot take for long without severe consequences or that would clash with your other long-term goals.

2. They are constructive. They play iterated games and build, instead of consuming, the long-term assets that bring long-term success (such as trust, know-how, relationships, capital, etc).

3. They move towards inevitability. They proactively surface and address problems; they learn and adapt. They do not merely provide a chance of success but do what’s required to almost guarantee it.

As you can see, long-term strategies not only have a long-term time horizon but also embrace it and leverage it to achieve better and more certain outcomes than what a short-term strategy can reliably achieve.

Let’s see the three properties in greater detail.

Good long-term strategies are Sustainable

Working overtime is a great tactic to maximize this week’s productivity. Not only will you get more done, but a week of evenings spent working is unlikely to cause burnout or a divorce.

But work overtime every other week for several years in a row, and burnouts and divorces become much more likely.

Similarly, sending a sales email to your mailing list is a great tactic to increase sales. But if all you send to your mailing list is sales emails, people won’t read your emails anymore.

Some tactics are useful but shouldn’t become strategies: they are suited to short time horizons but not long ones. At most, they should be used sparingly and wisely as parts of a longer-term strategy.

This means that:

– Long-term strategies can contain risky projects, but those projects should only be risky in the sense that they might not work and never in the sense that their failure might endanger the strategy.

– Long-term strategies can use tactics that consume long-term assets (such as health and trust) but must use these tactics sparingly and alternate them to enough periods of building the assets they consume.

Good long-term strategies are Constructive

If you have three shots to throw a ball in a distant hole, it doesn’t make sense to use all three shots to attempt a hole-in-one. Instead, use the first shot to get closer to the hole so that the other two shots are more likely to go in.

Similarly, too many people fail to achieve their life goals because they spend years working on projects that are “hole-in-one shots.”

Not only do “hole-in-one” projects have low chances of success, but when they miss, they do not make the following projects more likely to succeed.

If you have a long-term horizon to achieve a goal, it doesn’t make sense to use tactics that are optimal for holes-in-one. You want to use strategies optimal for a hole-in-three. Strategies that progressively get you closer to your goal.

Ask yourself: what assets (skills, habits, relationships, resources, etc.) would make your future projects more likely to succeed?

Long-term strategies take the time to build these long-term assets, even when it doesn’t seem like a good moment to do so.

The key to success is to spend more time on important-yet-not-urgent activities than most of your peers.

Good long-term strategies are Inevitable

Many long-term strategies are variations of the following: do a few projects that might fail, but do them in such a way that failure doesn’t compromise future projects, and in such a way that even in failure, you still build know-how, trust, and relationships. If you do so, eventually, you will succeed.

As you can see, good long-term strategies often include projects that might fail, but only in the context of a strategy that cannot fail.

Do not take the “cannot fail” too literally. Whether a 100% success rate is possible is irrelevant. What matters is not to be satisfied with less than that and continuously ask yourself, “What might cause me to fail, and what can I do about it?”

Asking that question might reveal that you are taking too many risks or perhaps not enough.

It might reveal that you are going too fast, skipping steps, or perhaps that you are being too slow or complacent.

It might reveal that there is some lesson you don’t want to learn.

It might reveal that there is some help you refuse to ask.

It might reveal that you’re using the wrong strategy.

From that one question, you might learn a lot.

The point is, never treat your strategy as you would treat a tactic. You can tolerate tactics that might not work, but you cannot tolerate strategies that might fail.

After all, you only get one life. Make your strategy inevitable.

Bad long-term strategies

We have seen the three properties of good long-term strategies: they are sustainable, constructive, and make success inevitable. Now, let’s see a few red flags of having designed a bad long-term strategy:

• It is not sustainable: it might bring you some early growth but cannot sustain it over time.

• It is not constructive: it doesn’t build the long-term assets required for long-term success.

• It is not inevitable: it might lead you to success but might also not.

• It is not actionable: it has no clear next step you can work on today.

• It relies on the future not changing: it doesn’t incorporate learning and adaptation.

• It focuses on a single area of your life and neglects the rest. It might bring you to a pyrrhic victory, in which you achieve your objective, but it might still not matter because you compromised another important area of your life.

There are more red flags of a bad long-term strategy, but the above ones are the most important, and adding more to the list would dilute it and make it worse.

Note: this was an excerpt from my book, "Winning Long-Term Games."