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ABOUT
- Title: Your Next Five Moves
- Sub-title: Master the Art of Business Strategy
- Author: Patrick Bet-David
- About the author: Patrick Bet-David and his family escaped the wars and bombings in Iran and found a home in the U.S. Pat never got a college degree and enrolled in the army. Following that he went from selling memberships at Bally Total Fitness to selling financial services. Since then, he has founded his own agency, PHP, and created the Valuetainment YouTube channel that has over 2 million subscribers. He became a successful entrepreneur himself and has interviewed some of the world’s most influential individuals.
- Pages: 320
- Published: 2020
- Link to book
HIGH-LEVEL SUMMARY
RECOMMENDATION
TOP 25 TAKEAWAYS
1. There are parallels between chess and business. In both, you have to think many moves ahead to succeed. You must think beyond your first strike to execute an effective strategy.
2. Nothing matters unless you understand what makes you tick and who you want to be. The purpose of Move 1 is to identify what matters to you the most and help put a strategy together that fits your level of commitment and vision.
3. Those who can tolerate pain the most—the ones with the most endurance—give themselves the highest chance of winning in business. Make pain your fuel. Use haters and doubters to drive you.
4. Aspire to be heroic. Think about your heroes, and ask yourself how they would act in such situations. Creating a visual of your heroes will challenge you to live up to the ideals of those you seek to emulate.
5. Your vision must align with who you want to be. Your choices must align with your vision. Your effort must align with the size of your vision. Your behavior must align with your values and principles.
6. There are four areas that drive you: 1) Advancement 2) Individuality 3) Madness 4) Purpose.
7. When you study the most important person (you), you will begin to learn how to conquer the most important person who is holding you back (you).
8. In addition to entrepreneurship, look for opportunities for intrapreneurship. Intrapreneurship is when you’re part of a company and create a new business unit, lead a new initiative, or work out incentives that reward you for driving growth and innovation.
9. Find your blue ocean in business to succeed. The “Blue Ocean Strategy” entails the following: rather than competing in games where you’re an underdog, find unexplored new markets in which you can win—and ultimately make the competition irrelevant. Don’t try to beat competitors at their strengths.
10. Emotion can get the best of all of us and cloud our judgment. It’s why my answer about the key to success for people at all levels of business is “Know how to process issues.”
11. If you’re going to lose, don’t lose the lesson. Again, you’re going to use experiences to become either bitter or better. To get better, you must reflect on your mistakes. Every master, both in chess and in business, learns more from studying the moves that led to defeat than the ones that led to victory.
12. The ability to solve problems well is the ability to take a complex issue you’re facing and break it down into a step-by-step formula that helps you identify the root of the problem.
13. No matter what your line of work, staying successful means working well with other people, whether they are clients, customers, employees, investors, partners, or outside vendors.
14. Insecure leaders surround themselves with “yes people.” Effective leaders surround themselves with people who challenge them. They also find and hire people who are much smarter than they are—especially in areas in which they are weak.
15. The less your business depends on you, the more valuable it is. The more your business depends on you, the less valuable it is. There’s no exit opportunity if the business relies on your personality. You simply cannot scale your business without creating the systems for it to operate without you
16. Before agreeing to any major business deal, you want the following to be agreed upon: 1. Liability cap: What’s the most we can lose? 2. Indemnification: You can’t sue me. 3. Finite term: Once it’s over, it’s over.
17. If you implement the right innovative campaign and develop leaders, you’ll gain momentum. The challenge will be maintaining it.
18. In business you should be constantly asking yourself: What can I track? Systems help you with follow-through and follow-up, and they also help create a culture in which nothing is ever unclear.
19. The difference between being smart and being wise is that a smart person thinks he knows all the answers while a wise person is comfortable knowing he doesn’t.
20. Recognize how unproductive it is to take things personally. Your ego is your enemy. Building a business is not just ugly; it’s messy. It’s not just a cognitive effort but an emotional one. When you take things personally, you get drawn into the chaos and can’t think clearly.
21. Turn off the noise of negative friends and small thinkers. Turn off the noise of family members who don’t support what you want to do. You also need to cut the fat out of your life. Anything that holds you back from thinking big needs to stop.
22. Break down your goals into small steps. Committing to incremental success will help you outimprove anyone. If you can outimprove others, you will catch up to them and pass them.
23. Networking, negotiating, and selling are power moves that will have a massive impact on your bottom line.
24. To reach your capacity, you’re going to have to “compete up” and not be afraid. Seek to beat your prior best in all areas. The irony is that each time you step up, you have to start at the bottom.
25. Challenges never stop coming, so you’d better learn to love them and thrive on them. Every struggle is an opportunity to grow and improve.
WHAT I LIKED
BENEFITS TO YOUR LIFE AND CAREER
10 ACTIONS YOU SHOULD TAKE
1. Always think beyond your first move. Anticipate how others will respond and deploy additional moves that can’t be counteracted.
2. Subscribe to the Valuetainment YouTube channel for educational content.
3. Take the personal identity audit at the back of the book to learn more about yourself. The goal is to have a breakthrough.
4. Discover what role suits you best and who you want to be. Examples include being an entrepreneur, intrapreneur, CEO/Founder, support team member, solopreneur, influencer, salesperson. Find the path that allows you to use your unique talents with the best odds for the highest possible return, and that also fires you up.
5. Before making a decision, start out with the “rule of three” by creating three different proposals for dealing with an issue. It will allow you to compare them against each other to have some sort of reference.
6. When you lose, fail, or make mistakes, reflect on the situation and learn from it. Don’t lose the lesson. Great processors rarely repeat their mistakes.
7. Look at life as a big list of mathematical problems to solve. For effective decision making, solve for X to isolate your problem.
8. Don’t be afraid of friction. Friction is good. Whether in life or business, it takes both courage and skill to be direct with people.
9. When running your business, do not compromise on speed, execution, or efficiency. Look for ways to compress your time frames.
10. When selling, negotiating, or influencing, instead of thinking only about what’s in it for you, think about how to find wins for those you are working with.
RESOURCES
Your Next Five Moves can be found on Amazon at this link here if you are interested in reading.