Seeing Time: Seth Godin on the Art of Strategy

This is the third in a series of occasional Sunday Reflections from Rufus Griscom, Next Big Idea cofounder. Check out his recent conversation with Seth Godin on Apple and Spotify.

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I have occasionally wondered — if a superintelligent AI of the future understood my personal goals and aspirations, and everything about my current circumstance, how would it advise me to navigate my life? If it took control of the helm, what would it do differently?

I try to be intentional, strategic about my long term aspirations. And I think I have been relatively effective in planning for the long term in some areas of my life – building community, doing work I care about, and investing. But like most people, I have a long list of aspirations that have foundered for decades — like learning to play the piano, building wood furniture, writing a novel. So when Seth Godin’s new book, This is Strategy: Make Better Plans, came across my desk, I jumped at the opportunity to talk with Seth.

Here’s what he told me —

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“I think almost no one knows what strategy is. … The number of people who have actual intent, systemic awareness, who can see time and who bring empathy to the change they seek to make is vanishingly close to zero.”

This idea that most people “don’t see time” is really interesting to me. It's reminiscent of Bill Gates’s comment, “most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year and underestimate what they can accomplish in a decade.” Most of us do not have an intuitive feeling for the relationship between what we wish to do, and the time required for it to happen. We often ache to force outcomes that simply need time to mature. In this sense, much of what matters in life may be more like gardening than war, or chess.

Seth makes another point that I find insightful — our strategies will only work if they are based on an accurate understanding of how the world around us works. The world we live in, Seth says, is made up of systems. Seemingly infinite, often invisible, intricate, inescapable systems. Whenever we work together to create something, achieve something, solve a problem, we create a system. And those systems, in many cases, stick around for a long, long time.

What are examples? The art market is a system, with different stakeholders who benefit, and others who are excluded. The wedding industrial complex is a system that is highly effective at separating you from your money. The ride sharing business is a system that has largely replaced the taxi system that preceded it. The book publishing business is a system, one that is increasingly under pressure from competing systems for delivering ideas. It’s next to impossible to stop a system that is working for the people who participate in it. What you can do is choose which systems you interact with, and build new better systems that over time replace existing ones (much as the founders of Uber replaced taxis).

Does this resonate for you? What do you think? Listen to our conversation on Apple or Spotify, and let’s discuss below!

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Seth also offers some great marketing advice for startups like ours in This is Strategy. And we need marketing advice! Seth says there are three essential steps:

1 - Tell a story, a true story, about your product.

2 - Tell it only to your core audience, the group that cares, the group that is listening.

3 - Give this group a reason to share the story with others, something that will increase their status and their affiliation with others.

Okay, here goes:

1 — We are a small team at Next Big Idea — just 7 people. Deeply curious. Trying to understand the world, and trying to get better at our lives. We face the same challenge that you do — there is too much information. Oceans of it. Millions of new books published every year. Too many. That’s where we come in. Our mission is to find the very best new ideas — the ones that could accelerate your business, deepen your relationships, change your life for the better — and deliver them to your inbox, to your doorstep, to your ears , wherever you would like to receive them.

2 — I am telling you this because you opened this email, and read all the way to the bottom. You are special. And you deserve something special.

3 — We’d like to offer you 50% off this newsletter, or 30% off our box and ebook subscriptions (use promo code HOLIDAY30). It’s the perfect gift for business colleagues, friends, family, or for yourself. You deserve it.

Seth says we should offer you status and affiliation. Okay, let’s give that a try. The Next Big Idea community is, as it happens, highfalutin company. As you may know, our four Next Big Idea curators – Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, Adam Grant and Daniel Pink – are legends. So far this year our podcast guests have included Bill Gates, Michael Lewis, Kim Scott, Sebastian Junger, Yuval Noah Harari, Kara Swisher, Nate Silver, as well as plenty of brilliant thinkers you haven’t heard of who may be, in a decade or two, household names. It’s a great thrill, for us, to bring you these conversations.

But my favorite part of what we do — the reason we get up every morning — is what Seth calls “affiliation.” This is the fun part. We don’t just want to deliver ideas, we want to talk about them with each other and with you. We are deep into our calendar for 2025, and it's going to be another spellbinding year of ideas. The world is many things right now, but it is not boring. Let’s talk about it. Let’s hang out. Join one of our zoom conversations with a leading thinker, or at one our live events. Hope to see you there. And in the meantime, please accept our deep gratitude for your support, if you choose to join us.

— Rufus Griscom

P.S. If you want to share the gift of NBI with a group of friends, family, or a larger team, we can offer special pricing for groups.