Your Next Five Moves | Patrick Bet-David

If I would need to share the best book I read in 2023, it is "Your Next Five Moves" by Patrick Bet-David. I found this book from the best sellers in Amazon business books list and I read it during a time where I need to answer some key questions in my career and set a new strategy for the upcoming performance review cycles. 

Let's leave the personal things and focus on this great book and its author.  According to Patrick Bet-David, "The only thing separating us from greatness is a vision and a plan for achieving greatness. When you’re fighting for a cause, a dream, something greater than yourself, you will find the enthusiasm, passion, and joy that make life a great adventure. The key is identifying your cause and knowing who you want to be." Who am I? A short question but the answer needs a long thinking. 

From my point of view, Patrick Bet-David's "Your Next Five Moves" has 2 main take-aways. First, get into the habit of thinking five moves ahead in everything you do in business.  Just working to try and do that will lift your game and lead to greater success. Second, in every industry, 80 percent of the players will be actors, and only 20 percent will be doers. The key to positioning yourself firmly in the doers camp is to be continually investing in learning and growth. Invest in yourself. Think five moves ahead.

Your Next Five Moves

People who don’t think more than one move ahead are driven by ego, emotion, and fear. Your top salesman threatens to quit if you don’t give him a raise. The emotional amateur responds by saying “Nobody threatens me” or “We don’t need him anyway.” The practical strategist, on the other hand, is plotting his next moves.

The same approach applies to parenting. Giving kids whatever they demand—whether it’s candy, an iPad, or permission to skip piano practice—feels fantastic. They smile and tell you how much they love you. You also know that the alternative—an all-out tantrum during which venom and hatred will be hurled at you—will feel awful. This scenario shows you that, as with most business decisions, one is clearly the easier choice; the other—which entails thinking five moves ahead—is the more effective choice.

I wish somebody had taught me to think this way when I was transitioning from salesman to sales manager to founder to CEO. At every stage of my development, this kind of critical thinking would have saved me millions of dollars and dozens of panic attacks. When I reflect on how I went from a hot-tempered, insecure, cocky health club salesman to a strategic, self-aware, confident CEO, I see that the key was learning how to think at least five moves ahead.

The simple questions in business are binary. Their answer is either yes or no. The trap is believing that all answers are binary. The answer to any question is actually a series of moves deployed in the proper sequence. “Experts” often make things worse by giving yes or no answers as if everyone fits into the same box. That’s why, as you’ll see, our first move is figuring out who you are and what you want.

The other problem I see is a lack of planning. Enthusiasm can be powerful, as long as it’s coupled with planning five moves ahead. Too many people want to make move number five without first going through the first four moves. There’s a sequence to it. To reach the next level, you have to shift from one-track (and one-move) thinking to seeing many moves ahead.

If we don’t necessarily think of Warren Buffett as a chess master, his sustained success comes from his patient, strategic approach. Buffett isn’t trying to win a particular trade or even the quarter or year. He’s making a series of moves to win the long game.

You’ll learn not only the skills required but also the mindset required. Along the way, you’ll see what it takes to be a better leader and human being. By the time you have studied all five moves, you will have everything you need to achieve whatever type of success in business you are after. The five moves are:

1. Master Knowing Yourself

2. Master the Ability to Reason

3. Master Building the Right Team

4. Master Strategy to Scale

5. Master Power Plays

Move 1 is about knowing yourself, a topic rarely talked about in business circles. What you’ll see is that thinking ahead is impossible without self-awareness. With self-awareness, you gain the power of choice and control over your actions. Above all, with the knowledge of who you want to be, you will know which direction to take as well as why it matters.

Move 2 is about the ability to reason. I’ll show you how to process issues and provide a methodology to deal with any decision you’ll face, no matter what the stakes. No decision is black and white, and this section will teach you how to see all the shades of gray and move forward decisively despite the uncertainty.

Move 3 is about understanding others so you can build the right team around you—the team that will help you grow. Though you may view some of my tactics as Machiavellian, at the heart of everything I do is leading people to find the best in themselves. I do so by asking questions that uncover their deepest desires. Just as I challenge people to understand themselves, I will challenge you to understand your relationships. Building trust in employees and partners creates profitable alliances, speeds up all parts of your business, and helps you sleep at night.

Move 4 is about how to implement strategy to scale to create exponential growth. We’ll cover everything from how to raise capital to how to create rapid growth and how to hold people accountable for their actions. By the time you get to this section, you’ll be thinking like a seasoned CEO and learning how to gain—and maintain—momentum as well as how to create systems that allow you to track and measure the key parts of your business.

Move 5 is about power plays. We’ll discuss how you can beat the Goliath in your industry. You’ll also see how to control your narrative and leverage social media to frame your story. You’ll learn about psychology and gain insider secrets from one of the most notorious business organizations in the world: the Mob (yes, the Mob—and you’ll soon see why!). We’ll close out with some incredible stories that show how winning entrepreneurs think five moves ahead.

MASTER KNOWING YOURSELF

I believe that having questions is better than having answers because it leads to more learning. After all, isn’t the point of learning to help you get what you want? Don’t you have to start with what you want and figure out what you have to learn in order to get it?

 —Ray Dalio, author of Principles: Life and Work and investor, on 2012 Time list of world’s 100 most influential people

It all depends on how honestly you can answer this question: Who do you want to be?

Those who can tolerate pain the most—the ones with the most endurance—give themselves the highest chance of winning in business.

The only thing separating us from greatness is a vision and a plan for achieving greatness. When you’re fighting for a cause, a dream, something greater than yourself, you will find the enthusiasm, passion, and joy that make life a great adventure. The key is identifying your cause and knowing who you want to be.

It’s those moments of feeling powerless, angry, or sad that clue you in to your deepest drive. Don’t underestimate the power of shame to motivate you. When Elon Musk left South Africa for Canada at age seventeen, his father had nothing but disdain for his eldest son. In Neil Strauss’s November 2017 Rolling Stone profile, he quoted Musk’s description of his dad’s send-off: “He said rather contentiously that I’d be back in three months, that I’m never going to make it, that I’m never going to make anything of myself. He called me an idiot all the time. That’s the tip of the iceberg, by the way.”

Michal Jordan’s late father said, “If you want to get the best out of Michael Jordan, you tell him he can’t do something.” Five years after he retired from the NBA, when Jordan gave his Hall of Fame induction speech, guess what he talked about most? All of his haters and doubters. He still hadn’t gotten over those who had put him down.

 A phrase I use all the time is future truth. It means to live in the present as if your future truth has already become a reality.

I’m inspired by this quote from IBM founder Thomas J. Watson:

IBM is what it is today for three special reasons. The first reason is that, at the very beginning, I had a very clear picture of what the company would look like when it was finally done. You might say I had a model in my mind of what it would look like when the dream—my vision—was in place.

The second reason was that once I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company that looked like that would have to act. I then created a picture of how IBM would act when it was finally done.

The third reason IBM has been so successful was that once I had a picture of how IBM would look when the dream was in place and how such a company would have to act, I then realized that, unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there.

In other words, I realized that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one.

Did you get that last sentence? You must act like a great company (or a great entrepreneur/intrapreneur) long before you ever become one.

Use Your Heroes and Visuals to Remind Yourself Who You Want to Be

To take things to the next level and set the bar even higher, aspire to be heroic. Think about your heroes, and ask yourself how they would act in such situations.

Asking what someone else would do forces you to take a time-out and consider your next sequence of moves. The second thing it does is challenge you to embrace greatness. I believe so strongly in challenging myself to reach another level that I hired an artist to create a unique visual for my office.

Who do you have in your mentoring vault, whether dead or alive, that offers perspective and counsel?

Creating a visual of your heroes will challenge you to live up to the ideals of those you seek to emulate.

I challenge you to find a way to create a visual that reminds you to be heroic. Start with something small. You don’t need to hire an artist; Photoshop will do.

Our heroes inspire us. That’s why it’s so powerful to surround yourself with them. The more we see them and the more we see them looking at us, the greater our chances of acting heroically.

Who do you want to be?

That’s the question we started with, and it’s the one we’ll end with.

Study the Most Important Product: You

Become who you are by learning who you are.

 —Pindar, ancient Greek poet

It’s only in the movies that someone gets hit by a lightning bolt of inspiration and suddenly knows exactly what to do with his or her life. The reality is that knowing who you want to be is a process that requires effort.

In his insightful book Principles: Life and Work, Ray Dalio said, “I learned that if you work hard and creatively, you can have just about anything you want, but not everything you want. Maturity is the ability to reject good alternatives in order to pursue even better ones.”

When you’re honest about who you are, you learn to stop wanting everything.

Envy is an indicator that alerts you if you’re being honest with yourself. If you can look at someone who has things you don’t and say, “You know what. I really don’t want that,” you know you’re in a good place. If you say you don’t want something but don’t mean it, envy will eat away at you. What it’s telling you is that you really do want it but are afraid to work for it.

I had taken the time to learn what drives me.

Now it’s your turn. You can start by breaking down drive into four categories: advancement, madness, individuality, and purpose.

There are four reasons that may trigger you to reassess what drives you:

1. Boredom
2. Declining results
3. A plateau or stagnancy
4. A feeling that your talent is declining

If you’re feeling any of those, now is the perfect time to dig deeper and determine what you really want.

Graduate to Your Next Why

Everybody has a why. The challenge is that the majority of people never graduate from their initial why.

My challenge to you is: no matter what level you’re at now, get clear on your purpose.

We tend to overuse the expression “This will change your life.” In this case, I’m speaking from experience when I say that conducting a Personal Identity Audit (a series of questions that lead to self-discovery) changed my life radically and exponentially.

All the disruptors, founders, leaders, and athletes you admire didn’t get there by luck. There was a moment (or many moments) when they were brutally honest with themselves. It’s a private time when they face their vices, their fears, and their limiting beliefs that have been stored in their hearts and minds and have been holding them back. This usually happens after adversity strikes.

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).

Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.

 —Ayn Rand

One thing I can tell you with certainty is that becoming an entrepreneur cannot be about the money. I know that sounds odd to say when you’re focused on becoming a millionaire or billionaire. If your motivation is only money, you’ll stop at some point. You’ll become lazy or complacent. If you want to be an entrepreneur, your reason has to go beyond wealth.

Five Qualities of a Successful Intrapreneur

1. An intrapreneur thinks like an entrepreneur.

2. An intrapreneur works like an entrepreneur.

3. An intrapreneur possesses the urgency of an entrepreneur.

4. An intrapreneur innovates like an entrepreneur.

5. An intrapreneur protects the brand (and the money) like an entrepreneur.

Google hires creative people, and to leverage their skills, it created a policy to foster intrapreneurship. In their IPO letter, its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, described their “20 percent” idea:

We encourage our employees, in addition to their regular projects, to spend 20% of their time working on what they think will most benefit Google. This empowers them to be more creative and innovative. Many of our significant advances have happened in this manner.

Products created during this 20 percent time include Google News, Gmail, and AdSense.

Katie was a perfect example of an aristocrat and a bureaucrat. In the book Barbarians to Bureaucrats: Corporate Life Cycle Strategies, Lawrence M. Miller described how companies go through multiple states—prophet, barbarian, builder, explorer, administrator, bureaucrat, and aristocrat—and once in a while a synergist shows up to save the company from going out of business. At the time, there were many lawsuits against that insurance company, not to mention a reputation for unethical practices that damaged its brand.

Because Katie was stubborn and unwilling to change, she ended up costing the company a few hundred million dollars. That’s not a small number. She was arrogant. She was pompous. She reminded me of Cersei Lannister in Game of Thrones, the villain who thinks she’s above everyone. What may have been worse is that the company tolerated Katie’s behavior. This is very common when the original prophet leaves and the existing builders and explorers give way too much power to someone who doesn’t deserve it.

Katie forced my hand. She cornered me. At the time, I didn’t see my next move as investing all my savings to become an entrepreneur. Before making a decision, I scheduled a meeting with Katie, the executive team, and their attorneys. There were several people in that room whom I respected tremendously. I went there to share my next five moves and see what they had to say.

They didn’t say much at the time. It was only later that word got back to me that they’d thought it was all a ploy. They had assumed I was threatening to leave so they would give me cash to stick around. The president of the company at the time was a man I really respected. He said to me, “Patrick, this is very common in this industry. A major player like you comes and makes demands to get money or else he leaves. The company isn’t buying your bluff.

It’s worth mentioning a second time that I don’t see myself as a victim in this story. Things are going to happen in business that are beyond your control.

How you choose to react to them will determine whether you become a master at your craft.

Sometimes you are forced to make your next move sooner than you previously intended to. I was clear about my nonnegotiables, and once they were compromised, I had to return to the chessboard of my career and devise a new plan of attack.

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, professors at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, was published in 2004. This book was the key resource that led me to find a game in which I could win. The premise of the book is that 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.

In Blue Ocean Strategy, the authors warned against trying to beat competitors at their strengths. They insist that it’s a losing position and offer a ton of evidence to support their claim. They believe instead in focusing on blue-ocean marketing, going into areas that are relatively fresh and open to superior growth.

When you compete against people whose knowledge and skills are inferior to yours, you’re likely to win. No business is risk free, but you can decrease the risk by choosing a game in which the odds are in your favor.

Master Knowing Yourself

1. Whether it’s solitude, talking to a mentor, or using the questions we discussed in chapter 1, set aside time to get clear on who you want to be. It will help if you tap into your pain. Create a visual that is in your face constantly to remind you of your future truth.

2. Don’t wait for a crisis to look for clues about the most important person (you). Make the time now to inspect yourself. Become at ease with asking yourself tough questions and become clear about what drives you. The

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. Whether you want to be an entrepreneur or intrapreneur or hold some other position, be strategic about how you’re going to build your wealth.

You have control over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

 —Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

It’s why my answer about the key to success for people at all levels of business is “Know how to process issues.” Life is always happening; the way you respond is based on how you process issues.

What differentiates mediocre people from exceptional ones is how deeply they process. Most people are surface-level processors, but the best of the best go much deeper. Long-term thinking versus short-term thinking is the difference between a grand master and an amateur.

Surface-level processors are looking for a quick fix. They are thinking only one move ahead, and their goal is to make the issue disappear for now. Deep-level processors look beneath the surface for causes. They are thinking several moves ahead and planning a sequence of moves to make sure the issue doesn’t happen again.

The Great Ones Own Their Role

 “My bad.”

These are two simple words that all the great ones use constantly. Winners also use phrases such as “This mistake is on me” and “We have no one to blame but ourselves.”

I feel strongly about taking responsibility and owning your role in what happens. Acting like a victim is the opposite of being a grand master. At the same time, let’s recognize that things do happen outside your control.

There’s a wise expression that makes perfect sense: when you’re in a hole, stop digging. The problem is that when you’re in that hole, you’re often too angry and too emotional to do anything but fight for your life. Those are the moments when it’s important to have smart people around you who aren’t afraid to pull you out of the hole. Thankfully, with nudging from my inner circle, I finally relented and threw in the towel on the founder, accepting the loss and getting back to work on my primary business.

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. I was reminded of how Magnus Carlsen, after a loss, would analyze every decision he had made to see exactly where and how things had gone wrong. 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.

The people I know who are expert processors have very different personalities and business strategies, but they share the following eight traits:

1. They ask lots of questions. Having more data leads to making better assumptions. What caused this? How can we solve it? How can we prevent it from happening again?

2. They don’t care about being right or wrong. They’re interested only in the truth. Great processors want to handle the situation and move on. If someone else has a better idea, great. Ego doesn’t become an obstacle to making the right decision.

3. They don’t make excuses. Wasting time and effort on why things went wrong isn’t their style.

4. They like to be challenged. Their priority is handling a situation quickly and effectively, and if other people have a solution—even if it differs from their own—they want to hear it. They relish people who cause them to consider alternatives or defend their position.

5. They’re curious. You can’t solve problems without knowledge.

Processors are always learning more about their business and how it works. They love critical details as much as big ideas.

6. They prevent more problems than they solve. People who are really good at processing issues are also really good at spotting yellow flags before they turn red.

7. They make great negotiators. Curious problem solvers use logic to find a win for all parties involved.

8. They’re more interested in permanently solving a problem than putting a Band-Aid on it.

Your mindset is everything. When you start viewing a crisis as an opportunity, you are winning the game.

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. It’s the same for business as it is for algebra. That’s why people often hear me use the expression “Solve for X.”

Think about X as the unknown variable. In math, once you figure out what X is, you solve the problem. In business and in life, if you identify X, you also solve the problem.

If you’re not fulfilled and happy with the current results in different areas of your life, it’s most likely due to your needing to make some adjustments in some of the formulas you’ve been using for a while. Your way of thinking got you to where you are today. In order for things to change, your way of thinking needs to change. And this may be, by far, the most difficult thing for you to do. It’s not easy to admit that many of the decisions you’ve been making have been based on a broken formula.

Solving for X means isolating your problem. It’s not enough to say that your problem is your boss. You need to drill down to determine if it’s a lack of autonomy, merit-based pay, or intellectual challenge. You can’t solve for “your boss.” You can solve for a more specific, isolated issue.

The Latin root of the word “decision” means “to cut off.” When you make a decision, you are cut off from taking some other course of action. Now, that may sound limiting, but it’s not; it’s liberating. Plus, the alternative is indecision and stagnation.

It’s human nature to have blind spots. Laziness, fear, and greed all cause us to accept the information we’re given and not dig deeper. As a result, we often miss a critical piece of the puzzle and make bad decisions—or fail to make good ones.

Be patient. If you keep working at becoming a better processor, the result will be more than worth it—it will make a huge difference in your business and your life.

Master the Ability to Reason

Moving forward, take 100 percent responsibility for anything that doesn’t work out. See your role as the one who created the issue and has the power to solve it. Apply the Investment Time Return (ITR) formula in order to make better decisions and stretch your resources. Reflect on any possible mistakes or weaknesses, and make your next move(s) accordingly.

MASTER BUILDING THE RIGHT

No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.

 —Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn

I stopped asking how other people could make my life better, and instead, I asked: How can I make everybody else’s life better just by the benefits that I offer them?

Think about these three questions:

1. What benefits are you currently offering to others?

2. In what way do people improve by associating with you?

3. How many lives have you changed positively in the past year?

Everyone Needs a Consigliere: Finding Trusted Advisers

Even the greatest entrepreneurs aren’t solo acts. For many reasons, they require help. They only have so many hours in a day. Their knowledge is limited to certain areas. They need other perspectives to help shape their own.

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.

I always give people working for entrepreneurs this advice: Go to the top person, and ask what you can do to own a piece of the company. If he or she says, “Nothing,” leave. If he or she says, “Something,” stick around and hit the goals you set up together as a condition of ownership.

What You Must Recognize in Order to Retain Talent

People want to be compensated properly for their efforts.

Outstanding performers want to participate in the success of the company.

People want to be judged based on a clear set of expectations given to them without the goalposts constantly changing.

People want to know that they’re part of an organization that’s making an impact.

People want to be recognized in front of their peers for the work that they do.

People want to know that there’s an opportunity for them to grow within the company.

Letting people know where they stand accomplishes three important objectives:

1. They know the specific actions they must take to keep their job.

2. If they fail to perform those specific actions, letting them go will seem fair and objective.

3. You can begin the process of finding someone else to complete their tasks. The best-case scenario is the person will improve and you will have deepened your “bench.” If that doesn’t happen and the person leaves, someone else can step in and take over his or her job seamlessly.

Patty McCord summed up my philosophy perfectly: “If we wanted only ‘A’ players on our team, we had to be willing to let go of people whose skills no longer fit, no matter how valuable their contributions had once been.”

Hire slowly; fire quickly. Take your time to be sure you hire the right people, but when you’re convinced that someone is the wrong person, don’t let the individual linger and hurt productivity and morale.

I hope that by now you are thinking beyond being a solopreneur. A company of one has a limited impact. No one builds a billion-dollar company on his or her own.

Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence.

 —Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook and founder of LeanIn.org

As Dad and Dalio Say, Never Be Afraid of the Truth

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.

If you have a plan in place for how to replace every key member of your team, you can handle an unexpected exit without missing a beat. Plus you’ll sleep better at night, knowing your next several moves are already planned out.

Six Strategies for Replacement and Skill Transfer

1. List your tasks and skills. Make a list of all your tasks and skills and determine which ones you are the best at and which ones you are not. Focus on your strengths, and replace yourself on all the other tasks.

2. Identify who’s seasonal and who’s not. You can’t assume that everybody is going to work for you forever. You need to identify who is there to fill a six-year role and who a six-month role. If you determine that now, you won’t be surprised when someone needs to be replaced.

3. Know the different languages spoken by your sales, support, technical, and executive teams. Sales leaders generate revenue and build a company through their efforts. Employees are hired to support those efforts. You need to know the difference between them. Executives require empowering language that makes them feel autonomous and respected.

4. Know who can maintain the company culture. It is very important that whoever replaces you will fit the culture you established so that the business can keep growing after you leave.

5. Know your company’s practices and procedures. You need to put pen to paper and write down each department’s practices and procedures.

Replacements will then have a manual to follow, regardless of their level, making the transfer of specific skills quick and painless.

6. Develop leaders to help spread the right mindset. Have one-on-one conversations with your future leaders to inject the company’s mindset into them now, before they need to replace someone. Your having mindset of leadership development will also increase the value of your company.

Entrepreneurs need to play a continuous replacement game, replacing parts of themselves.

Going back to personal relationships: Show me a marriage in which the couple never argues, and I’ll show you a marriage that’s headed for a blowup. If you and your spouse don’t argue, one of you has probably found someone else to argue with.

We need friction in all areas of our lives. It’s healthy, and it stimulates growth, creativity, and learning.

If you want to build an effective, principles-based culture, learn not only to embrace friction but also to create it.

Talk Behind People’s Backs

Your parents probably told you, “Don’t talk behind your friends’ backs. It’s not nice.” Your parents were right. It’s not nice. But if you want to produce results, it can be a winning tactic.

In How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie talked about giving people a reputation to live up to. Others call it identity building. If you constantly praise a particular skill or character trait, a person will manifest it more often. The praise, in turn, is repeated by that individual and becomes part of his or her character.

Make saying positive things behind your teammates’ backs a habit, not just a once-a-year behavior. If you don’t do it, your workplace will lack the friction that produces creative problem solving and positive peer pressure. Don’t leave friction to chance. Create a culture in which you spread good words about people.

If your primary goal is wanting to be loved by everyone, you’re in the wrong racket. It takes courage to have difficult conversations. If you believe strongly enough in your principles, you’ll find the courage needed to be radically transparent.

Trust = Speed: The Power of Reliability

The more you know each other, the more you know what each other’s thinking, the faster you can accelerate the trust and confidence in one another when you get on the field.

 —Tom Brady

Trust is multidimensional, not one-dimensional.

You may trust one of your people to handle sales but not human resources. You may trust someone with information about your current plans but not your future strategy. Trust is nuanced. For instance, I trust my enemies; I trust that they’ll spin a story with the intention of trying to drive me out of business.

Experience is the best teacher. If you don’t have personal knowledge of someone or know an individual who worked with him, put him into the category of Stranger and don’t trust him until you know more about him.

I recommend reading The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts by Gary Chapman.

You need to stop asking what motivates people and instead ask: What motivates a person? Whether you choose to look at this through the prism of hot buttons or love languages, you’d better take the time to understand what works for each individual. Each of us is motivated by different things.

Do you want to excel as a leader? Show people that you take the time and care needed to understand what they want. The mistake most of us make is that we give love and appreciation the way we like to receive it. If you like to receive praise, you’re probably good at giving it. If you’re more of a “money talks” person, you probably have a great comp plan. The truth that you’re going to run into is that everyone on your team is motivated by different things.

I read a book titled Thank God It’s Monday: How to Prevent Success from Ruining Your Marriage that made a lot of sense to me. The author, Pierre Mornell, was a marriage counselor, and after twenty years, he finally found the best solution that worked for him and the families he was counseling: give each of the people closest to you five to fifteen minutes of undivided attention every day. I’m not suggesting you do this with everyone, but your key leaders and rising stars need more one-on-one time with you than you may think. It’s easy to try to develop leaders just by conference calls or Zoom calls, but nothing is more effective than giving them your undivided attention.

You need to paint pictures for people about the future. Especially when they’re in the grind, you have to tap into their senses and create a picture of what they are working for.

Constantly ask people their opinion and solicit feedback. Constantly ask people what they think you need to do next.

 Master Building the Right Team

I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.

 —Alexander the Great

The number one product of all is human capital. You have to know what happens when one person is down, why another is not all in, and why a third is being a little forgetful. Take a person who is having problems out to lunch and talk to them and ask, “Is everything okay?

How is your wife doing? Are the kids good?” Good business is about relationships.

If you get the timing right, you will double your impact. There’s a saying that speed kills. That’s right; it kills the competition.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, talks a lot about regret minimization—about projecting himself forward in time and then thinking about what, theoretically, he might regret not having done. For Bezos, this is a way to make sure he takes calculated risks, since even if he fails, it can’t be worse than not having tried at all.

Turns out that Wayne Gretzky, the leading scorer in NHL history, said one more timeless thing: “You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.”

The Four Hazardous G’s

1. Greed

2. Gluttony

3. Girls/guys

4. Gambling

If you can’t adapt, you’re going to fail quickly. “Pivot” is a useful buzzword; it means the ability to turn quickly as situations shift.

Too many entrepreneurs are convinced that they have to stay the course, that they have to double down on a strategy that isn’t working. Just because Strategy A worked and helped your business prosper last year, that doesn’t mean it’s viable this year.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.

 —Sherlock Holmes

In business you should be constantly asking yourself: What can I track?

When I was in the army, we had a saying: “Stay alert; stay alive.”

The same holds true in business. You’ve got to be alert for what can go wrong. Don’t be naive and think all your people are loyal and hardworking and will function perfectly well without supervision.

Before you launch a new product, make an investment, pull the trigger on an acquisition, or make any type of major move, ask yourself this question: What are the very worst events that might happen as a result of my action?

In The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene, Law 18 states, “The world is dangerous and enemies are everywhere—everyone has to protect themselves. A fortress seems the safest. But isolation exposes you to more dangers than it protects you from—it cuts you off from valuable information, it makes you conspicuous and an easy target.”

Greene makes the point that as hard as it is to trust people, the alternative, working in isolation, is much worse.

How do you find wise mentors? Let me share some hard-won lessons. I’ve worked with lots of coaches and consultants, and I have discovered that many of them offer advice based on their reading rather than their experiences. It struck me that when it comes to mentors or advisers, you can choose from three expertise levels: Theory, Witness, and Application (TWA).

Theory. These are well-read individuals with degrees from prestigious universities. Most consultants and professors fall into this category. They’re smart, but they may not be wise. Wisdom comes from practical experience, and these people offer suggestions based on theory. They will teach you how to run a business, but if you ask if they’ve ever run a business, they will likely answer, “No, I have not. But I’ve consulted many. I’ve read all the books.” That’s a theory-level mentor. There’s nothing wrong with that. They can still give you good advice, but they’re the lowest-level mentors.

Witness. These advisers have worked directly with successful entrepreneurs and, thanks to that vantage point, can tell you exactly how successful leaders built their business. For example, Guy Kawasaki often shares what he learned working with Steve Jobs on the original Macintosh team.

Witnesses didn’t run the business, but they worked closely with someone who did. For example, if you wanted to be mentored by someone in real estate, you could ask, “Have you ever done real estate before?” If he answers, “I never have, but for ten years I was the assistant for the number one real estate agent in Beverly Hills and learned a lot from her,” that’s valuable right there. That person can tell you what the person did, how she worked, how she treated her clients, what she did when she almost went out of business, and so on.

Application. Application means that the information is coming directly from the source. These are the people who can tell you what they’ve done that has worked for them. The most valuable mentors are those who have walked their talk. Fellow entrepreneurs can share what didn’t work in their businesses in a way that someone operating from theory or observation simply can’t.

Those who possess all three characteristics—theory, witness, and application—are called “trifectas.” And by the way, they’re tough to find.

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. You become furious and vengeful.

As difficult as it may be, step back and view situations analytically. Don’t let fury or shame dictate your decisions. I’m not saying to strip yourself of all emotion. You’re entitled to whatever feelings you’re feeling. Just don’t let those feelings cloud your judgment.

I’m not a businessman. I’m a business, man.

 —Jay-Z

For every story of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, there are tens of thousands of stories of individuals and companies that lost everything. Beating Goliath is doable, but it requires being someone who can tolerate pain. If you’re still thinking about trying to do it, keep reading.

Things to Know Before Facing a Goliath in Business

You’ll be afraid. As scary as the thought of losing money is, it may be even more painful to your ego to put yourself out there and fail.

You’ll have panic attacks and anxiety. If you don’t, it’s a sure sign that you haven’t put yourself out there. Putting yourself out there means you have to devote everything you’ve got to delivering. That’s going to cause tremendous stress.

You’ll have to work ten times harder than you think. Just when you think you are at your limit, it will take ten times that to defeat Goliath. Time with your family, of course, will decrease, and you can pretty much forget about hobbies, which is why it isn’t for just anyone.

You’ll have to stay healthy to have the energy to compete. I’ve worked myself into exhaustion and hospitalization multiple times. It’s helped me build a tolerance for hard work as each time I’ve come roaring back even harder. I’m telling you this not because I want you to fear burning out, but so you can be prepared for doing so when you’re in the throes of fighting Goliath.

My challenge to you is to self-promote. Put your fear of being judged aside, and put yourself out there. Say or do something bold. Let people know who you are and what you stand for.

Do a mental inventory and write down:

1. Your five most painful moments

2. Your five most successful moments

3. Five moments when you felt untouchable

State the affirmations and include the validation:

1. Start with “I will be a great leader” or “I’m going to make the greatest comeback ever.”

2. Add the story, drawing on your pain and triumphs. Use the word “because” to provide the evidence: “Because I came through”; “Because I’ve been there before”; “Because I’ve overcome more.”

I’ll leave it to Zig Ziglar to tell you the moral of the story: “Have an absolute and total belief that what you’re selling is worth more than the price you ask for it. Your belief in your product should be so great that you ought to be using it.”

The late Amarillo Slim, a gambling legend and 1972 World Series of Poker champion, said, “You can shear a sheep a hundred times, but you can skin it only once.”

Even a hustler like Slim recognized that the key to a long career is treating people in such a way that they want to keep doing business with you. In any game, the goal is not to make a score; it’s to build a partnership in which both parties make scores in perpetuity.

When you’re confident about your delivery and you are committed to coming through, you can push the envelope. If you don’t execute, you’re just another arrogant loudmouth. The delivery on your promises is what gets you respect in the marketplace.

If a man is proud of his wealth, he should not be praised until it is known how he employs it.

 —Socrates

Everybody likes you until you’re a competitor, especially if you’re a formidable one.

The person who really has the leverage is the person who needs the deal the least. Options give you power. If you can walk away from a deal, you’re in the best position to negotiate the best terms. If you must make a deal happen, you’re going to be at the mercy of someone else’s power, and you’re probably going to make a lousy deal.

 That’s an obvious concept. The question is how to put it into practice. The short answer is: whenever possible, cultivate multiple options. Instead of looking for that one dream home (the same idea applies to a car, an office building, and a key hire), survey the market and find three options you would enjoy. Then when you go to make a deal with your top choice, you’ll have the advantage, because you’ll have other options that would also make you happy. If you sense that you are the seller’s only option, now you really have leverage.

The key to power is having options.

It doesn’t matter how much money you’re making. When your revenue stream is concentrated in one customer, that customer is in control.

You can make yourself more attractive to anyone if you keep yourself in good shape. In business, that means outworking, outimproving, outlasting, and outstrategizing your competitors.

Power plays are all about the long game. Why do you think we’ve been talking so much about chess masters? If you want referrals, if you want to build long-term relationships, the next time you meet anyone (much less a key influencer), don’t go up to him or her and say, “Do you want to go to bed with me? Can you give me what I want?”

The power move is to flip it and instead ask, “What can I do for you? How can I help you?” It’s a life-changing move that requires a complete shift in mindset.

If you want to gain power, you must create opportunities to shadow others. If you want to be exceptional, even after winning championships, you must jump on every opportunity you can to shadow powerful leaders.

Leadership Is Knowing What Drives People

No matter whom you are managing, remember that the fastest way to lose them or frustrate them is to try to change them.

Instead, find what drives them and position them in a way to win at the highest level. It may require you to change the lens through which you view them.

Stop trying to fix people. Thinking you can change or fix people is delusional behavior.

People want to be heard. Taking the time to understand them is critical for effective leadership. After that, if they possess an inner drive to excel, they’ll self-correct. They’ll do their part in achieving their best.

Because the number one factor in reaching your potential is simple: It must matter to you.

You have to want success. You have to want it so badly that it hurts. Persistence, dedication, drive—these are traits that all elite people from athletes to chess masters to CEOs have. I know I keep reminding you how hard it is, because I know that you’re going to need another gear to take your talent to the highest level imaginable.

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.

You will be tested. Again, what will determine your success is if it matters to you.

PBD’s Top 52 Business Books

1. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne

2. Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio

3. The Five Temptations of a CEO: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni

4. Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You by John Warrillow

5. Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors by Michael E. Porter

6. Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter by Liz Wiseman

7. Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company by Andrew S. Grove

8. Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout

9. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni

10. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries

11. The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller

12. Mastery by Robert Greene

13. 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson

14. Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: What You Must Do to Increase the Value of Your Growing Firm by Verne Harnish

15. The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene

16. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

17. Sam Walton: Made in America by Sam Walton

18. The Essential Drucker: In One Volume the Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management by Peter F. Drucker

19. Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a

Thriving Organization by Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright

20. Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle

21. Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel

22. The Power of Ethical Management by Ken Blanchard and Norman Vincent Peale

23. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

24. The Art of War by Sun Tzu

25. The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup by Noam Wasserman

26. Innovation and Entrepreneurship by Peter F. Drucker

27. The Accidental Millionaire: How to Succeed in Life Without Really Trying by Gary Fong

28. Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras

29. Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares

30. Up the Organization: How to Stop the Corporation from

Stifling People and Strangling Profits by Robert C. Townsend

31. Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur

32. Growing Pains: Transitioning from an Entrepreneurship to a

Professionally Managed Firm by Eric G. Flamholtz and Yvonne Randle

33. High Output Management by Andrew S. Grove

34. Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki

35. Trump: The Art of the Deal by Donald J. Trump

36. The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz

37. The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (a Little) Craziness and (a Lot of) Success in America by John D. Gartner

38. The Law of Success: The Master Wealth-Builder’s Complete and

Original Lesson Plan for Achieving Your Dreams by Napoleon Hill

39. The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber

40. Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant

41. Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger, Expanded Third Edition edited by Peter D. Kaufman

42. Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

43. Ego Is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday

44. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance

45. Lincoln on Leadership: Executive Strategies for Tough Times by Donald T. Phillips

46. Michael Jordan: The Life by Roland Lazenby

47. The CEO Next Door: The 4 Behaviors That Transform

Ordinary People into World-Class Leaders by Elena L. Botelho and Kim R. Powell

48. Power vs. Force: The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior by David R. Hawkins

49. The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene

50. I Love Capitalism!: An American Story by Ken Langone

51. Barbarians to Bureaucrats: Corporate Life Cycle Strategies by Lawrence M. Miller

52. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie