Good advice is often so obvious that it feels inevitable once you encounter it. Sometimes the act of following it can be a strategy for approaching life in itself. In the early days of the pandemic, I began reading Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy / Bad Strategy and found in it, shall we say, a strategy forward, even though I was mostly confined to my living room at the time.
In his excellent book about strategy, Good Strategy / Bad Strategy, Richard Rumelt spends an inordinate amount of time devoted to analyzing bad strategies and why they are so seductive. Bad strategy, Rumelt explains, appeals because it replaces platitudes with the hard work of actually identifying the challenges and barriers we’ll face as we try to achieve our goals. The appeal of bad strategy is that it so often is a mere reiteration of goals without a clear analysis of the challenges that must be overcome to achieve them. Good strategy, Rumelt explains, always includes an honest diagnosis of the challenge and a coherent and coordinated guiding policy for approaching the challenge. Strategy comes about from an understanding of your limitations and also from a keen understanding of your advantages; it is not about platitudes of leadership, but is about understanding the problem, choosing a solution, and following through. Bad strategy, on the other hand, explains Rumelt, “ignores the power of choice and focus, trying instead to accommodate a multitude of conflicting demands and interests.”
But how do we choose which solution is best when we’re trying to find our way out of a problem or toward a goal? How do we choose the areas that will best benefit from our focus? Rumelt offers an interesting solution that is so obvious and yet so obviously the right thing to do that the advice itself is almost inane: make a list.
The Power of the List
One of the most compelling moments in Good Strategy / Bad Strategy is when Rumelt tells a story about the $10,000 business advice a young man once gave Andrew Carnegie. The story goes that a young man, Frederick Taylor, was at a cocktail party in Pittsburgh. Taylor had just begun to gain some recognition in business circles for his consulting work. When Carnegie met Taylor, he challenged him to give him some good advice about management. Carnegie promised that if the advice was effective, he’d give the man $10,000. It’s important to note that in the story, it’s 1890. In 1890, $10,000 would have the same purchasing power of approximately $280,000. So, really Carnegie was offering Taylor $280,000 for a piece of advice.
What was Taylor’s advice?
He told Andrew Carnegie to make a list. Taylor said, list the top ten most important things you can do and begin to take action starting with number one.
Did Carnegie take the advice? Did it work?
Rumelt writes: “The story goes, a week later Taylor received a check for ten thousand dollars.”
Why was this advice so good? Richard Rumelt suggests that “Carnegie’s benefit was not from the list itself. It came from actually constructing the list.” Strategy involves not just critical thinking about the tasks we need to accomplish to achieve our goals, but a deeper kind of thought that looks further into the reasons why we want to pursue those goals in the first place. Sometimes, we can achieve our goals circuitously.
Spotlights and Blind Spots
Making lists allows us to take the spotlight away from just one thing, and consider our various goals. List-making of this kind also helps us combat the Zeigarnik Effect. This is the psychological phenomenon whereby a person is more likely to remember the tasks that remain unfinished rather than the tasks she has finished. Creating a list not only allows you to write down the things most pressing on your mind (the things that remain unfinished), but a longer list allows your brain the space to explore areas of activity and creativity you might not have visited because the pressing weight of more proximate unfinished tasks were on your mind. Creating a list also affords us the pleasure of checking things off, which allows us to visualize what we have accomplished. Because it is easier to forget all we have accomplished, creating a list allows us to more realistically assess our workload.
This kind of robust list making forces us to look beyond the immediate problem that might be occupying our attention. As we become focused on one problem area in our lives, we may lose track of other important areas that need work. The list is important because it invites us to not just focus on career, but to list the ten most important things we need to do–period. If you analyze what you put on your final list, you can often read between the items on the list and discover your values.
Making a list like the kind Taylor advised Carnegie to do invites us to dig deeper into purpose, values, and deeper goals. It forces us to look beyond the daily mechanical actions and towards the actions that will truly make a difference.
In the process of creating my own list, I found that some of the things that came up as important were things that had nothing to do with my job, or my projects, but had to do more with connecting to people I care about, apologizing to people I had to apologize to, and taking inventory of how my own actions may have been holding me back in achieving all the other goals on my list. When making my list, I was forced to look beyond my immediate professional and creative goals and look more deeply at my underlying reasons for wanting to achieve those goals. Was I doing something to make a difference, or to satisfy my deeper yearnings to love and be loved? Was my attention-seeking helping other people and myself, or stoking the dark soil of the ego? Were there better things I could put on the list that would better reflect my values?
The list forced me to not just think of the work I wanted and needed to do, but to think harder about the reasons why I was doing the work in the first place. Once I had my list clear, I could see the ways in which I had been a barrier to my own success, and could see the ways in which some goals were competing with one another. I could rethink my goals so that they were less contradictory. Ultimately, I could get out of my own way. The fact that I knew I’d have to tackle items on the list in order of importance also forced me to think critically about which tasks I wanted and needed to prioritize.
I’m in the process of tackling that list, but only after spending some good time thinking through my priorities. After all, sometimes the greatest barrier to success is nothing and no one else but our own selves.
The first thing on my list? “Call your little brother; see how he’s doing.” I did that a few days ago and I feel so much better.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.