What is Strategy

Every day, you are faced with numerous decisions and courses of action at home and at work. No matter what course of action or non-action you decide on, there is a price to pay. Sometimes it is an obvious decision, like:

Should I go to work in the morning?

Yes

Save your vacation/sick days for when you really need/want them
Prove yourself and earn a promotion
You’ll miss the office gossip
Your workload will pile up if you don’t go

No

I don’t want to deal with my annoying boss
I don’t like the tasks on my plate
Too much traffic
I’d rather go to the beach

If this is a one time thought, you might actually consider staying home. However, if this is an internal debate that you have regularly, you already know that if you want to be able to continue to pay rent, you need to keep your job.

Often, the decisions aren’t as clear cut:

How should I respond to an email?
Should I consider looking for a new job?
I think my manager made a poor decision. Should I do something about it, and what?
Should I tell my spouse about something that is really annoying me?

How do you make decisions and decide upon a course of action? More importantly, life is often like a choose your own adventure book. Tomorrow’s reality, as well as that of the future, will be based on the decisions made today. If you want to give yourself a high-level view of the decision as well as the potential or likely ramifications, you have to make use of strategy.

Strategy is often mistakenly thought of to be only relevant to business leaders and executives. However, this is not true. You can learn strategic methodology and apply it to any situation that you find yourself in. According to Wikipedia, strategy is defined as a high level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty.

In the upcoming articles, I am going to go through strategic concepts and show how:

it applies to you
you can use them in your everyday life
you can take advantage of them to improve your decision making abilities.

Comments

Use all that you have

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Everyperson's strategy

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