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 can be an effective tactic to maximize productivity in a given week. Not only will you accomplish more, but a week of working evenings is unlikely to lead to burnout or a divorce.

However, working overtime every other week for several years in a row makes burnout and divorce much more likely.

Similarly, sending a sales email to your mailing list is a good tactic for increasing sales. But if all you send to your mailing list are sales emails, people will eventually stop reading them.

Some tactics are useful but should not become strategies; they are suited for short time horizons but not long ones. At most, they should be used sparingly and wisely as components of a longer-term strategy.

This means that:

• Long-term strategies may include risky projects, but those projects should only be risky in the sense that they might not succeed, never in the sense that their failure could jeopardize the strategy.

• Long-term strategies can employ tactics that consume long-term assets (such as health and trust), but they must use these tactics sparingly and alternate them with sufficient periods of rebuilding the assets they deplete.

Good long-term strategies are Constructive

If you have three shots to throw a ball into 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 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: undertake 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 within the context of a strategy that cannot fail.

Do not take “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 to 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 a lesson you don’t want to learn.

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

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

From that one question, you can 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 identified three properties of good long-term strategies: they are sustainable, constructive, and make success inevitable. Now, let’s look at a few red flags indicating a poorly designed long-term strategy:

• It is not sustainable: it may provide some early growth but cannot sustain it over time.

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

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

• It is not actionable: it lacks clear next steps you can work on today.

• It relies on the future remaining unchanged: it does not incorporate learning and adaptation.

• It focuses on a single area of your life while neglecting the rest. This might lead to a pyrrhic victory, where you achieve your objective, but it may still be insignificant because you have compromised another important area of your life.

There are more red flags for a bad long-term strategy, but the ones listed above are the most important. Adding more to the list would dilute its impact and make it less effective.

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