Lessons and Strategies – ElPropósito3 min de lectura

Two tools for the past, the present and the future

Photo by Belinda Fewings on Unsplash

The past holds resources that serve us now and will serve us in the future. The question is how to ask the questions that gather what we need to keep moving forward. We often look at the past through the simplest, easiest lens, judging it by what went wrong. Two great opportunities keep coming our way: drawing out lessons learned and drawing out winning strategies. Lessons learned live in the past, and their job is to keep us from repeating mistakes. The past is also where we find the strategies that have worked time and again to keep delivering success.

Lessons and strategies look unrelated, yet they share the way we analyze certain situations. A lesson learned always comes from an event in which we were pursuing something. It’s how we’d do things differently if the same event happened again. A strategy usually has a cause and an effect, and every time we put it into practice it delivers a result.

Life brings both kinds of scenarios: the one that yields lessons and the one where we can evaluate our strategies and how well they work. In practice, though, many events hold endless resources that could give us the best of both. A mistake we see every day is believing past success guarantees the future, without ever analyzing, for lessons or for strategies, what caused that success. Another huge mistake is believing current failure is simply the fruit of past events.

The most basic yardstick by which we can judge ourselves as people, teams or society is action. Every action we take has an effect (strategy), and that effect leads down two or three paths: things move forward, stall or slide back. For any of those to happen, there had to be an original action. Being stuck in the past comes from a lack of action, and anxiety about the future is part of inaction too.

Action has always been, and always will be, part of both strategies and lessons. Action guided by purpose will always give us the chance to draw out the best lessons and strategies for our lives and for any organization. There are also actions with no meaning and no north. They come from doing what’s simple and easy, what takes no thought, and they always bring immediate results. The medium and long term, though, is a glass of water we drink cold, thanks to the training we’ve kept up for years.

A big hug and all the best,

Rodrigo Baccaro

• P.S. This week’s VELA:
• What I was watching: Apollo 11. A very good film, especially for understanding the power of action and of a goal
  – What I was listening to: 12 Rules for Life. A very good summary for anyone who doesn’t want to read the book
  – What I was reading: Authentic Happiness. A reread that will keep me company for the next two weeks, by Dr. Martin Seligman, often cited by another of my favorite authors, Mario Alonso Puig
  – What I was learning: 4 lessons from Marcus Aurelius. Meditations is one of my favorite books, and these 4 lessons are very powerful

Author: Rodrigo Baccaro

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