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  It’s important to determine which barriers and enablers exist in your life because when you go intro strategy formulation, you must take particular care to design a strategy that mitigates your barriers as much as possible, while leveraging your enablers.

  When it comes to mitigating barriers, this is much like how one seeks to mitigate risk, so one can classify barriers according to probability and impact. Meaning, how probable is it that they will affect you, and how large is the associated effect. For instance, I aspire to hit the gym 5 days a week, I also travel a lot and have a hectic schedule, the probability that my travel- or work schedule will interfere with my ability to get my workouts in is very high. The effect of missing a single workout isn’t a problem, but the effect of missing perhaps a full week of workouts or more can become a major problem rather rapidly.

  I cannot alter the probability that my work schedule or travel will interfere with my gym time unless I change my job. However, what I can do is reduce the negative effect of my schedule on my workouts. I research hotels in advance to find those that have good gyms, I have a body weight training program that I can do in a hotel room in about 30 – 45 minutes, and perhaps most importantly, I keep my diet on point even during travels.

  When it comes to correctly leveraging enablers, this can be very domain-specific or it can be more general. To exemplify the former, a person with limited local fame for whatever reason, can utilize this as a display of higher value. For instance, a businessman who is well-known in his local community, and has a lot of status can leverage this towards a higher SMV, however, once he steps outside of this local bubble, his local fame loses some of its power. On the other hand, general enablers are things such as wealth, this is effective no-matter where in the world the person goes.

  I tend to focus 80% of my efforts on general enablers and 20% on very domain specific enablers. This stems from a philosophy of adaptability, that if you build yourself around something that is highly domain specific (only valuable in a small set of contexts), and which is dependent on something outside of yourself, then you develop a dependency on things that you do not control.

  One of my general enablers is that I’m well-educated, adaptable and have a very good memory, so I can converse on a wide-range on topics with a wide-range of people, this helps with anything from game to business transactions. What is in your mind can never really be taken away from you, barring degenerative ailments.

  Much of this deals with finding the combination of innate traits and experiences that form your core competencies, and when leveraged becomes your competitive advantage. However, it also deals with finding those things that will hold you back and which you have to be aware of and prepared to mitigate.

  Example:

  To continue from above, the man who desires the hedonistic playboy lifestyle, has some positive character traits, he’s disciplined, determined and has a track record of accomplishing what he sets out to do. He also achieved a small amount of local fame from playing in a popular music act, and is 6 ft 3 and in shape.

  Among the barriers that he faces is that he did some time in jail and is more infamous than famous. He has a history of sleeping around with women, and many women are wary about him due to that and white knights pop up left and right every time he’s out with a girl.

  As you can see, the sum of barriers and enablers are roughly in equal numbers, however the fact that our man is infamous on top of famous, means that he will struggle to leverage his local fame to the extent possible, because while the fame will attract some women, it will scare off others.

  Good looks will work in his advantage, but the white knights will somewhat dimish the effect, and so will the fact that it’s a dry county with poor date logistics. Therefore, in the current environment, despite having quite a few enablers, he will not be able to leverage them fully due to the barriers. Thus, my conclusion for this case would be considering finding a new environment that is more conducive to his Vision and Misson.

  Suggested tools and Techniques

  - PESTLE analysis

  - SWOT analysis building on the SWOT analysis in the previous chapter

  - Risk Impact/Probability assessment

  Strategy Formulation

  Michael E. Porter, the Harvard Business School guru of strategy, was once quoted as having said “Strategy is as much about deciding what not to do, as it is about deciding what to do”. I like having this as a starting point for strategy formulation, because quite often people will find themselves trying to be everything to everyone, which means that they run themselves ragged, and most likely run their company into the ground.

  When you sit down to write your personal strategy, it’s important that it be informed from the work that has been done in the preceding chapters. Your Vision is the highest-level objective and the ultimate desired outcome from your life. Your mission is informed by your vision, this is what you have to do in order to realize that vision. Your strategy should include the areas that you outlined in your mission, and a plan for achieving them. This is really all a strategy is, a comprehensive plan moving from point A to point B.

  The internal and external analysis serves to give you a foundation for how your external environment affects your strategy, and how your internal states affect your strategy. To exemplify, if your vision is a life filled with meeting and sleeping with beautiful women, having multiple plates in rotation, and otherwise filled with hedonistic pleasure, but your external analysis shows that you live in a 2 horse town, with at most 50 women under the age of 30, 3 hours or more away from a major metropolitan area, that will be a problem. You will never be able to build a strong pipeline of prospects simply because the market is not there. If your internal analysis reveals that you have strong social anxiety, and a gap in social skills, then that also creates a problem in execution for your vision.

  These should be listed as both barriers in the barriers and enabler analysis and in the External and Internal environmental analysis.

  Strategy comes from the Greek word “stratēgia”, which means “Art of Generalship” and is a high level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty. In the preceding chapters we have determined the desired outcomes in increasing detail, we have established knowledge of the battle field (external analysis), the state of our resources (internal analysis), the favorable conditions we may exploit (enablers) and finally, those conditions that are likely to have a negative influence on our stated objectives (barriers).

  The strategy is the plan that takes all of these things into account and creates a plan that includes leveraging favorable internal and external conditions, while maximally exploiting enablers, while seeking to mitigate barriers, and unfavorable conditions. A strategy can be a massive missive written in great detail with many sub-plans, however, I tend to take a “necessary and sufficient to create a true and fair view” approach. What this means is that your strategy should cover every necessity in sufficient detail that you can get a solid perspective with a high degree of accuracy.

  Just like in a battle, you need to have plan for the war, a strategy for the battle, and the battle strategy will include many tactics of different levels and of different importance. When you are trying to do simple things, a simple one page strategy that outlines the present state, available resources, barriers, enablers, desired outcome and how to get from A to B is sufficient. However, if you are making a major change, then it requires much more planning, and interdependencies have to be accounted for.

  A very common mistake I see with recently red pilled men, is that they want to fix their life in 6 months, and they often tell you things like “Yeah man, in the next 6 months, I’m losing 50 lbs of fat, gaining 50 lbs of muscle, getting lean and ripped, going to learn game, get laid like a rock star and fix my credit score”. Such passion, exuberance and desire can be inspiring, but they are trying to do too much too fast and they are setting themselves up for failure. They know their goal and present state, but they have very
little understanding of what it will require of them.

  Before we go into the example strategy, and before you start crafting your own, here are some pointers to keep in mind when doing the design:

  A strategy should establish a direction and a scope for your long-term actions, that garners you an advantage through leveraging your enablers, and unique configuration of resources within a changing environment to achieve your long-term desired state.

  A good exercise to formulate the first draft of your strategy is to take a blank piece of paper, write “I will achieve my mission by” then listing out activities and goals in a cause and effect manner.

  Example:

  We will use the recently red pilled man from above as an example. I will cover this in more detail during the full case study at the end of the book. We have his present state and desired future state:

  Present State

  Desired Future State

  An excess of 50 lbs of fat

  Lean

  A deficit of 50 lbs of muscle

  Muscular

  Doesn’t know game

  Rock solid game

  Bad credit score

  Good credit score

  There are two areas I would pay particular attention to with the goals outlined above, the first one is the timeline, the second is how well the goals are defined. The timeline is fairly simple to work out as below:

  His timeline for this is 6 months. The maximum rate of recommended fat loss from a medical doctor is roughly 2 lb per week, 6 months is 25 – 26 weeks, so this is an attainable goal. A beginning weight lifter can put on 25 lbs of muscle in 12 months, assuming perfect diet and recovery, however since he wants to lose fat 2 lbs a week, he has to be in a calorie deficit of 1000 calories per day for the first 6 months. At minimum, this change will require 12 months assuming perfect adherence to both his training and recovery program.

  The timeline on game depends a lot, if you deep-dive into it and practice every single day for six months, you can get a lot better very quickly, however this assumes that you have the time to sit back and reflect on interactions, what worked and didn’t and so on.

  The bad credit score is not an area I know a lot about, but some marks on your credit report can stay on there for 7 years or more, and it takes time to build a solid credit history if you’ve got a bad credit past.

  The definitions of the goals are wholly, they are defined but not defined. Did he find out that he needs to lose 50 lbs by having a dexa scan, or another form of body fat measurement or was it just a convenient, round number? A much better present state vs. desired state table is the one below:

  Present State

  Future Desired State

  250 lbs, 33% body fat.

  200 lbs 15% body fat

  No dates in 2 months, no lays in 4 months.

  Go on at least 2 dates per week, and get laid once per month.

  580 credit score

  800 credit score.

  In the table above, all present state and desired future state goals are defined with solid, trackable metrics that allows the person to chart out the progression between point A and point B. Such metrics are critical for long term strategies, as you always want to be aware of where you are relative to the scheduled progression.

  If I was creating a strategy to get from the present state to the future desired state in the table, I would divide it into 2 phases, 1 leaning out phase and 1 bulking phase, 7 months leaning out and 5 months focused on building muscle, with heavy weight training for the whole duration, and just increase the volume during the 5 months of muscle building.

  For game, start out by creating a solid sales funnel using online game due to convenience, plus girls live on their phone and some text game is required these days. Set off 1 week at the start to grind out approaches in a major city using a proven model for day game like the “London Day Game Model”, then once you’re comfortable start practicing day game as part of your day to day life.

  One could formulate the statement as “I will achieve my goal of 200 lbs with 15% body fat through monitoring my diet and lifting weights at least 3 times a week.”

  Suggested tools and techniques

  - PORTER 5 Forces Analysis

  - Black Label Logic adapted Boston Growth Share Matrix

  - Core Competencies

  Critical Success Factors

  A critical success factor is defined as those things that must go well in order for an organization or a group to do well, they are things that must be given continual and special attention throughout a process. They are generally viewed as critical not only because they are important factors in and of themselves, but due to the influence they have on other parts of the whole.

  For instance, a classic example in software development is user involvement in the process. In the case of self-improvement, there are 3 major critical success factors that must be monitored. The first one of these, and perhaps the most important is consistency. It’s very common for people to think self-improvement is a quick fix, but in order for the new you to stick, it requires you work it into a habit and stick with it for a long time.

  The identification of critical success factors is the first step in the strategy implementation process, and should ideally be isolated in the planning stages of the process. If you are unable to identify them early on, it’s very unlikely that you will be successful in implementing and executing your strategy.

  The gym is a prime example, there is a huge influx in January of people who made a new years resolution to get in shape, and by the end of January most of them are gone. They never make any meaningful improvements because they go gung-ho for a week, then slowly stop going and returning to their old comfort zone.

  The second factor that must be monitored is efficacy, what is the relationship between inputs and results. To some degree people are trained to monitor effort, we expect that big effort equals big results, and that a lot of effort in a short time equals big and fast results.

  The third factor, that all self-improvement is inherently egocentric, and a lot of men struggle with being more focused on themselves and less focused on others. If you do not monitor the relationship between your self-interest and the self-interest of others, it’s very easy to stop improving you when it starts to “hurt” others.

  So, how does one identify critical success factors that apply to a given endeavor? The consistency, efficacy and not letting the ego investments of others undermine your rational self-interest, are general critical success factors that will apply to any self-improvement strategy you ever make. There are others as well, ensuring that you have the necessary resources, mental, physical, financial, time and so on. Coordinating your self-improvement efforts so that you do not over-tax yourself and finding synergies between the different tactics.

  A critical success factor to the strategy of losing fat and building muscle above, is accurate tracking of weight room performance and caloric intake, along with recovery. If you cannot track your progress, and have no control over the important inputs to the process, then you have no control systems in place to ensure you stay on track.

  There are many potential success factors in any strategy, however not all of these are critical. To continue with the example from above, you can get some pretty good progress lifting weights as a newbie, even without a solid program and with less consistency than an advanced lifter would require. However, you cannot out-train a bad diet, so while consistency, frequency and program design are not critical success factors to begin with (provided a minimum volume is achieved), controlling your diet is a critical success factor.

  You can get away with not identifying all success factors, but if you have an incomplete list of critical success factors, then if you are not getting the results you expect from your strategy, you will have trouble identifying why. When we make our list of critical activities in the next chapter, these are based on the critical success factors. If we are missing one or more critical success factors then we will be
missing critical activities and if we are not executing activities necessary for achieving the strategy then our results will be sub-par.

  A second reason why you need a complete list of critical success factors, is that once you make the activities required to achieve them a habit, for instance transferring your salary over to a separate account and putting up an auto-transfer to your debit card, in effect giving yourself an allowance each week, you can add more things to your strategy.

  To identify your Critical Success Factors, ask the following 3 questions, feel free to add your own, but these are the 3 questions you should always ask:

  What things have to be done to realize the strategy?

  Do I have to do this to realize the strategy?

  If I don’t do it, can I still realize the strategy?

  Good critical success factors have 3 characteristics. They should be action-oriented, meaning that they should take the form of “I have to…”. They should be meaningful, and void of unclear language things like “I have to execute according to the best program” doesn’t mean anything, it’s much better to write “I have to go to the gym 3 times a week and follow Stronglifts 5x5”, this is very clear about what you need to do. Finally, they should be creative, it’s very easy to do what is familiar and what has worked before, do not fall into this trap.

  Suggested techniques:

  - Value chain analysis

  - Delphi or other brainstorming techniques

  Critical Activities

  Critical activities are those activities that must be done in order for an organization or a project to be successful. For instance, in our example above, the activities that must be done to drop the fat would be critical activities, in that if they are not executed, the remainder of the strategy is null and void.

  The difference between critical activities and critical success factors, is that the critical success factors are quite general in nature, where the critical activities are quite specific. A critical activity may be “Going to the gym” whereas the 3 critical success factor principles above, all influence the results you gain from the critical activity.