The word ‘strategy’ scares most people. It sounds like hiding a sort of complicated procedures and methods ordinary people cannot grasp. Many years ago when I first heard it I felt the same. It sounds tangled, but it is unbelievably simple. Any concept or idea we don’t know about looks complicated. But once explained, it starts to be very simple. The same happens with ‘strategy’. If you want a very simple explanation, the strategy is knowing very well why we do what we're doing. In other words, having a strategy means to work for a clear goal following a plan that makes sense for us. Every one of us has strategies. And everything we do is part of a strategy. Let’s take an example. Some close friends are coming to us tonight and I want to make a chocolate cake for them. So, here’s my goal: make a cake for my friends. Why should I want to do this? Simple: I haven’t seen them for months and I want to make them a surprise (knowing that it is their favourite cake!) Now, how am I going to do this? I have to accomplish a few steps: 1. gather all the ingredients 2. assemble the ingredients and prepare the composition 3. bake the cake 4. arrange the cake to be served I know very well what I’m doing and I know very well why I’m doing each action I take (read carefully the recipe, take the sugar and the chocolate from the cupboard, the eggs from the refrigerator, take all the dishes I need, bring the mixer, crack the eggs, mix them with sugar and on and on…) Now, let’s imagine another scenario:
My mother in law comes to us and decide to bake a cake for us asking me to help her. She doesn’t tell me the recipe. She just asks me to do some actions without explaining to me why are they necessary. She asks me to crack the eggs without mentioning if I have to separate whites from yolks (so I need to ask…), then she asks me to bring some baking paper without saying how big it should be (I need to ask her again…, etc. Can you just imagine how I feel and how annoying these tasks are for me? And it’s normal. As long as I don’t understand exactly what am I supposed to do and why, and what cake my mother in law wanted to prepare, I am confused. I do everything mechanical, and my strategy is to do everything possible to reach the goal of not upsetting my mother in law. If she would have been told me what exactly she intended to back and explained to me how was she going to do it, it would have been simpler for me. I would have done my best to help her as efficiently as possible and save her a lot of effort. (Fortunately, my mother in law doesn’t cook anything in our kitchen!) We can go further and take another example. Let’s think about how an employee spends her time at work. Most employees accomplish the tasks listed in their job descriptions or required by their superiors without questioning why are they supposed to do them or what is their role in the organization they are part of. They are not interested in the meaning of their activity. They just want to keep their jobs. Immersed in their daily routine, they don’t even think about where all the activities they’re doing daily will bring them in a few months or years. Their goal is to cash in their monthly checks and to comply with their obligations. And their strategy is to put to their employer’s disposal a certain amount of their time (about 40 hours a week). A soldier too has a strategy. Even if he doesn’t know what and why his superior’s goal is, the soldier executes the corporal’s orders. Executing the orders without questioning is his strategy and his goal is to not have problems. Even when we want to be lazy we’re having a strategy! We want to avoid doing some chores and we find a lot of excuses and explanations of why it would be better to not do them and find ways to simulate that we’re doing other ‘important’ things. Our goal is to relax and indulge in doing nothing without annoying other people. Understanding what a strategy is and how we’re employing strategies in our daily lives helps us in realizing how we can settle and reach meaningful goals in our lives. It is not at all difficult to apply a strategy in accomplishing a goal. What we have to do is to clarify what are our most meaningful and important goals (what we want to achieve and why) and then figuring out how we could reach them. That’s exactly what strategic living means.
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I don’t know if there’s a single person who doesn’t dream to be able to do whatever she wants whenever she wants. No obligations and constraints. Showing up each day in the same place to accomplish the tasks assigned in order to get paid once a month is for most people the only imaginable way to make a living. The employee status used to be the most desirable way of making a living. In the last decades, a good-paying job has equalled for many of us to safety and financial security. The dream of almost every college graduate was – and for most youngsters still is – to get a nice place in a powerful corporate environment, and then to climb the ladder up to top positions. I also have bought into this idea and was caught in this trap for many years. I may say that during my employee’s stage of my life I had some nice jobs, but I never was happy. I felt like I was the prisoner of my own material needs. The idea of having to sell my time to make a living was for me a permanent source of frustration and unhappiness. While going each day to the office, I shared this frustration with many of my colleagues. And we always got to the same conclusion: There’s nothing we can do except living in compromise. That’s life! As long as their jobs seem to be safe and supply the resources to make them able to live a decent life, most people probably have no reasons for changing from employee to entrepreneur. But I think people too easily accept to live unfulfilled lives and give up their dreams thinking dreams are simply impossible wishes. I heard this too many times: “That’s life; there isn’t anything that can be done to change it.” I was thinking like this long time, but fortunately, I arrived at one point when I said to myself that I have to do something about that. And I took the decision that entirely changed my life. I was raised with the idea that being successful in business is only a matter of luck or the result of a special skill only some particularly gifted people can acquire.
The idea that entrepreneurship isn’t for everybody is still quite largely spread. Being an entrepreneur seems to most people as being a very risky endeavour that probably doesn’t worth the effort. I was taught that there are people meant to be employees and people (very few!) meant to be entrepreneurs. Starting a business used to be associated with high risk, struggle, too much responsibility, hard work, no weekends and no holidays, and low probability to ultimately succeed. That’s the way I thought about the possibility of doing business on my own too. But I was still curious to find out more about entrepreneurship. I felt that this isn’t the truth… Challenging my beliefs about making money from my own business lead me to find out that entrepreneurship isn’t a lottery-like most people believe. On the contrary, it is a process that can be learned and applied by everyone willing to take life into her own hands. When I was a child, my favorite books I devoured were about heroes succeeding to overcome their poor condition and achieving big, unbelievable dreams. Later, I started to read biographies of real people who almost incredibly succeeded to accomplish daring dreams. And I thought that if they succeeded, it must be a way for everybody to succeed. Why accept a life of struggle and frustration? And for which reason? Who might benefit from it? Why spend your time doing what others want you to do and not what you want to do? Why accomplish other people’s goals and not your own? |