Use Strategic Thinking to Create the Life You Want

RAINER STRACK: Strategize Your Life takes the principles of strategy, and also strategic thinking, used in the world's boardrooms and applies them to your own life. By going through a seven-step program, you will have developed your own life strategy on a single page. I spent almost half my life at the Boston Consulting Group doing countless strategy projects for our clients.

Before that, I studied physics at management. In physics, and also in nature, you often get new insights by applying methods from one discipline to another discipline, such as the mechanics of fluids to the flow of traffic to predict traffic jams. What if I took strategic thinking and applied it to my own life?

That was the birth of Strategize Your Life. Corporate strategy is an integrated set of choices that positions an organization to win. Now, if you substitute corporate with life, you would get life strategy is an integrated set of choices that positions a person to win.

But life is not about winning. Life is about living a great life. So our definition of a life strategy is life strategy is an integrated set of choices that positions a person to live a great life.

A typical corporate strategy project has seven steps. Number one, how does the organization define success? This translates for the individual, how do I define a great life?

Two, what is the organization's purpose? What is my life purpose? Three, what is the organization's vision?

What is my life vision? Four, how does the organization assess its business portfolio? How do I assess my life portfolio?

What is actually a life portfolio? Number five, what can the organization, and also I, learn from best practices and benchmarks? Number six, what portfolio choices should the organization make?

What life portfolio choices should I make? This is the central step where all the first five steps come together. So where you define your integrated set of choices that gives you the way towards a great life.

And finally, step seven, how can the organization, and also I, ensure successful, sustained change? The symmetry is really striking here. How do you define a great life?

Most people think through education, through social media, it's about money, fame and power. But only, let's say, money has to a certain extent only in effect because you feel yourself hedonic adaptation. So if you get a pay rise, very quickly your happiness goes down to initial level.

On top, you have also social comparison, which means you always compare yourself with other people in certain areas. Money, fame, power has only a certain effect. What then?

A lot of other methodologies and frameworks came up. And one of the newest comes from positive psychology from Professor Seligman, which is called PERMA, which was later developed into PERMA-V. PERMA-V are six letters.

It's P stands for positive emotions. So do I have a lot of contentment in my life? E stands for engagement.

So am I feeling in a flow of what I'm doing? It could be a great project. It could be a great hobby.

R stands for relationships. So deep relationships with your significant other, your family, and also with other people. M in PERMA is about meaning.

So making the world a better place. A is achievement. So do you have a lot of, let's say, levels of achievements?

So goals that you achieve. And the V stands for vitality. So there's an old saying, if you are healthy, you have 1,000 problems, but if you are ill, you have only 1 problem.

So this is a model that you can adjust also and also to contemplate with some other parameters. In corporate portfolio management, we elevate business units in which to invest capital with respect to certain parameters, like market growth or market share. If you plot these two parameters on the x and y-axis, you get the famous 2-by-2 BCG portfolio matrix.

Now, what is the equivalent of a business unit in life? Here we propose strategic life units in which you can invest time, money, and energy. Now, a week has 168 hours.

24 times 7. How do you spend these hours? First, you can spend it with your significant other, our first strategic life unit.

Yes, I know what you are thinking. Only a consultant could come up with the idea of calling your significant other strategic life unit one. But wait.

Bear with me. Now, you could also spend it with your family, with sports activities, with jobs, with your faith, and with a lot of other things. All in all, we have identified 16 strategic life units that we bundle into 6 strategic life areas.

Now we need three pieces of information. Number one, take an average week of the previous year and divide it among these 16 strategic life units. So how much time do you spend on each of them?

Secondly, rate the importance of each of these strategic life units on a scale from 0 to 10. And finally, define the level of satisfaction with each of these 16 strategic life units. So 0, not at all satisfied.

10, very satisfied. So how satisfied are you with your relationships, with your job, with your physical health, et cetera? Now you can plot all these pieces of information in a simple 2-by-2 matrix.

We call it the strategic life portfolio, where you plot importance on the y-axis, satisfaction on the x-axis, and then you plot your 16 strategic life units. And the size of the bubble is roughly proportional to the time invested. Let me give you an example.

And this is an example of Tony, an engineer. He went through the exercise. In the upper left, you find four topics.

Upper left means high important and low satisfaction. So these are your urgent strategic life units. And for Tony, it was significant other because he didn't have one at the moment.

And therefore, you can hardly see this dot. You find mental health. You find societal engagement.

And you find education and learning. 95% of our workshop participants had at least one topic in this upper left corner. High importance, low satisfaction.

And many had, really, two or three of them in there. And you find a bigger bubble on the lower right side. So a lot of time invested in online entertainment.

Now do the same. Go through the exercise. Drft your first sketch.

It only takes you 20 to 30 minutes. And it will be very enlightening. Now you rated the importance, you rated the satisfaction of each of these strategic life units, and you allocated the time.

Actually, you can change all three parameters. Importance might stay a little bit longer on the same level. But satisfaction level and size of the bubble is absolutely under your control.

In the upper left, you find topics where you are either not satisfied with or where you don't spend enough time on. And it could be both, quite honestly, in certain areas. If you have a big issue on relationships and you say you are not really satisfied with this, a quick win would be just to reach out and reconnect with three friends from school.

Go on your phone, give them a call, and then see how this might evolve. For a lot of people, social media is a real problem. And they spend a lot of hours there.

So usually, you have a big bubble there. The question is how to reduce this. And I had people in our workshops who just deleted in the workshop their Instagram or their TikTok account because this would free up so much time for other activities.

What is the right portfolio? So a right portfolio we would see as a portfolio that is aligned to your dimensions of a great life, that supports your purpose, and also supports your vision. Very often it means that you have a lot of big bubbles in the upper right area.

These are your very important topics, but you are also very satisfied with it and you spend a lot of time there. This is not yet your life strategy. It's only one step out of seven steps you have to go through.

Can we really come up with a strategy for your life? Yes, we would say. Even in uncertain times, you need to know your direction.

As the stoic philosopher Seneca said, "If you do not know which port you are sailing to, no wind is favorable. " But you have to be open for opportunities and serendipity. Now you could say, isn't a great life a chain of lucky events?

Fortunately, Seneca said something to this too. "Luck is when preparation meets opportunity. " And strategize your life helps you with the preparation.