The Elegant Strategy: Why Hustle Culture Isn’t Enough

This article was originally published on Inc.com.

Seth Godin is a marketing expert and the author of several bestselling books, including Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable, and The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick). His newest book, This is Strategy: Make Better Plans, is out this week, and offers business leaders a new perspective on working smarter. Here, Godin writes about a concept he calls “elegant strategy,” and highlights his book’s action items for entrepreneurs and business leaders:

Small-business leaders are waking up to a surprising truth: hustle culture can be toxic. The 5am wake-ups, the social media frenzy, the relentless sales calls, the double-speed audiobooks — it’s exhausting. But what if the problem isn’t that you’re not trying hard enough? What if your strategy is out of whack?

After all, it doesn’t matter how fast you’re going if you’re headed in the wrong direction. 

In my new book, This is Strategy: Make Better Plans, I challenge leaders to become intentional about their actions. If you can’t comfortably articulate your strategy, you’ve already identified your first problem.

Seth Godin’s new book: This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans. Image courtesy Inc.com/Simon & Schuster.

The right strategy — an elegant strategy — multiplies our efforts. It helps us achieve more with less, making our work feel effortless and guiding our customers to their desired destinations.

Elegance is simplicity, efficiency, and effectiveness combined. It’s not just about getting results but finding the clearest, least complex path forward. An elegant strategy offers leverage for the change we seek to create.

You can begin to craft an elegant strategy by considering these four components of strategy.

Time Success rarely happens overnight. Day one’s job isn’t to be successful — it’s to set the stage for day two. Embrace the power of “yet.” It’s not working yet, but the assets we’re building will be stronger tomorrow.

Games Approach your work as a game. Consider the players, the rules, and the potential outcomes. What moves can you make? How might others respond? Games aren’t for kids, they’re serious attempts to see that others have goals and choices as well.

Empathy Engage with your customers, partners, and even competitors as people. They have choices, beliefs, and desires that almost certainly differ from yours. Can you serve them anyway? When we offer the humility to give others a choice, we find a platform to serve the people we want to work with. 

Systems Systems are the invisible forces that push us to choose. “People like us do things like this.” Systems fuel everything from expensive weddings to how a startup founder chooses to get her funding. When we can see and name the systems in our industry, we can make a critical choice: Is this something I need to embrace and play along with, or do we have enough resources and time to actually change the system we see here?

An elegant strategy doesn’t fight the system head-on. Instead, it uses the system as a tool for change. It might seem roundabout at first, but it puts existing structures to work for you, not against you.

This approach compounds over time. Word spreads. Trust grows. Each engagement leads to more engagements.

We can race to the bottom and decide that our motto is “you can pick anyone, and we’re anyone.” This requires more hustle. It means you have to answer every request for proposal, cut your prices, and get the word out.

Or we can choose to race to the top. To be the one and only, the one that is worth seeking out. “You’ll pay a bit more, but you’ll get more than you pay for.” What assets are you building? Do they increase in value over time?

As small business leaders, we started our ventures to create value. We knew we had something unique to contribute. But being strategic about our choices is an essential part of leadership.

Great surfers don’t simply try harder — they find better waves.

Where is your elegant strategy?