Strategic Thinking In Everyday Life
Hey! This is the first Tuesday newsletter of the new year, 2023.
Happy New Year!
I decided to start this year with an article that hasn’t been published so far. It is about strategic thinking, but not in business. I will share my experience of everyday strategic reasoning in this story. You’ll also find some relevant links to the articles I published in 2022. Enjoy your reading.
Strategic Thinking In Everyday Life
We need to think strategically to change our lives for the better.
Have you ever felt that your life is far from the one that you’d like to have? Has it seemed to you that you had a dream, but the years passed, and it was still a distant dream? Have you compared yourself with others who seemed to live the lives they wanted?
I have.
I used to be a CEO. I had a decent salary, an outstanding intensive package, and many diplomas and awards hanging on my office’s wall. I had a corporate car with a driver and a personal assistant. I didn’t know how to buy flight tickets and refuel a car.
My job was rewarding and exciting, but I wasn’t particularly happy. And now I know why. In this article, I’ll share some practical tools I used to change my life for the better.
We often think living a better life is a matter of discipline. And that if our lives are not good, it means we don’t work hard enough. But that’s not true.
Our brains limit our thinking capabilities
Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.
Arthur Schopenhauer
We believe that our brains are excellent computing machines. But they have many limitations. And modern scientists would disagree with Mr. Schopenhauer.
We inherited our brain capabilities from our ancestors. The bad news is that our brains evolve at a snail’s pace. So, technically humans have the same “computation centers” in their heads that people 500 or 1000 years ago had. Technologies have greatly changed our lifestyle, but our operation system is impossible to upgrade.
What did our ancestors not do thousands of years ago that we do now?
They didn’t worry about their pension plans
They didn’t pay their mortgages
They didn’t think about their granddaughters’ education
So, we inherited an outdated operating system for today’s tasks. And it has at least two shortcomings preventing us from thinking and acting strategically.
The two flaws
The first flaw is that we are lousy strategic thinkers. An experiment that I mentioned in one of my articles showed that we worry about our “future self” not more than about complete strangers. That’s why people do so many stupid things that bring pleasure right now but will lead to terrible consequences in the long-term future.
Every time when you eat a cake instead of jogging, or drink too much, you do it because of this flaw. Your “present self” seeks immediate pleasure. And the person who’ll suffer from the consequences, your “future self,” is some other guy - from the point of view of our brains.
The second flaw prevents us from reaching our long-term goals. This is because our brains are not good at distinguishing the imaginary from the real.
Close your eyes and imagine you’re sitting in a falling aircraft. You’ll feel scared even if you’re at home and safe. Or imagine that your boss invites you to their office for a difficult conversation. You’re still at your desk, but start reacting physically and emotionally as if you’re in the middle of a fight.
Jack Lewis and Adrian Webster offer another experiment in their book Sort Your Brain Out. Envision, as vividly as possible, that you eat a piece of fresh, yellow lemon. If you do, your mouth will be full of saliva, even though this lemon exists only in your head.
And that’s exactly what occurs when we envision our goals as vividly as most self-help gurus advise. The brighter the picture in your imagination is… the more your brain believes it has already achieved this goal. And if it has - why bother to do anything?
When we set long-term goals, we fall into many pitfalls (read more here), but these two are the main ones. But it doesn’t mean we have to give up.
A thing that matters more than goals
“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”
Marcus Aurelius
Garry Kasparov, a former world chess champion, is credited for the idea that thinking long-term in chess is overstated. The more essential, Kasparov supposedly said, is to analyze the current situation. If your assumptions about it are wrong, every next move will lead you further away from victory.
I love this idea because I see people make this strategic mistake in their lives and businesses. And I made it myself. Ten years ago, I was a CEO and strived to be a better one. The problem was that I didn’t want to be a chief executive officer deep inside.
We believe that strategic thinkers are people able to see the future and think long-term. That’s not true. They know who they are and how to put themselves in the current context better than others.
Success lies at the intersection of our best features and external opportunities. It sounds like a cliché, but that’s how it works.
Setting long-term goals is helpful, but only after you know yourself. From my experience, only few of us know that. But we all can.
Knowing yourself
You can see a therapist if you have plenty of time and money. You’ll spend months on a couch traveling through your childhood. If you’re lucky, you’ll find the answer.
But there is an easier way.
You can buy a notebook and keep a diary. At the end of every day, make two lists:
A list of things you were happy to do during the day. They may be things that inspired you, actions that put you in a flow state.
A list of things that you didn’t like to do during the day. They may be tasks that made you procrastinate or something you had to do but didn’t want to.
Analyze both lists once a week. Look for patterns. If you keep this diary for at least one month, you’ll see them. And you’ll find out that you always love to do some things and always hate to do others.
You may feel that you have already known that. But this is an illusion. Only systematic work for one must at least will reveal the essential nuances.
By the end of this work, you’ll know yourself much better than before. One of the two crucial parts of strategic thinking is analyzing your daily routine. Try to add as many tasks you like to do in it as possible. And, vice versa, try to eliminate tasks you dislike wherever it makes sense.
But there is the second part.
Context analysis
“I don’t get mad at a photograph because it wasn’t taken today”
― Dave Chappelle
The world is changing. Even if you’re relatively young, you know that the world of your childhood was much different from today’s one. I am so old that I remember rotary phones and TV sets without remote controls.
But most changes are not huge leaps, as were electricity or Internet inventions. The world changes incrementally. We often overlook these changes or pay little attention to them. We notice them too late, when they’ve become commonplace. My kids began using a new online service a long ago, but I learned its name – TikTok – only in 2019.
So, to think strategically, we need to trace these changes. Reading a lot of articles about technological trends, social shifts, and political changes helps, but it’s not enough. We need to match them with our strengths.
I use a very simple technique, and I recommend adopting it.
Whenever you see a change, write this information down somewhere. It can be a mobile application, a Google document, or a file on your computer. Create your bank of trends, your database.
Examine your list once a month. Ask yourself a question: what opportunities and threats it brings to me, given the things I like to do?
What actions should I take according to this?
Remove the irrelevant changes from the list. Highlight the ones requiring immediate reaction. Adjust your plans and goals.
Conclusion
Things described in this article are not enough to have a complete strategic life plan. But they’ll help you think strategically.
Know yourself, your strengths and weaknesses
Scan your environment. Notice as many changes as you can
Analyze these changes, look for opportunities and threats
Adjust your sort- and long-term plans and goals according to them.
Some more articles on the topic:
Strategic Thinking ≠ Long-Term Thinking
Today’s decisions and actions are more important
Strategic thinking trap
You will change your future as soon as it comes
We still need good old long-term thinking
“Fast-changing world” is a dangerous myth
See you next week,
Svyatoslav Biryulin