Book SummaryYour Next Five Moves, by Patrick Bet-David

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Your Next Five Moves

Entrepreneur Patrick Bet-David believes the key to sustained success in business is the ability to plan your next five strategic steps ahead of time. He draws on the approach of chess masters, who always anticipate what their rivals will do and devise their next five moves to block attacks, defend their territory, and achieve victory.

Bet-David recommends approaching every activity in life with a five-steps-ahead mindset but dedicates the book to learning how to think five steps ahead specifically in entrepreneurship and business. Bet-David breaks the process of becoming a better business strategist into five steps: learning about yourself and your desires, learning to solve problems more efficiently,...

Your Next Five Moves Summary The First Step: Understand Yourself

Bet-David believes that the first step of your strategic plan toward long-term success is to understand yourself. Let’s break this process of self-discovery into three sub-steps:

Sub-Step #1: Understand Who You Are Now

Understand who you are now because this allows you to accept yourself fully, writes Bet-David. Only when you accept yourself can you begin to confidently pursue goals and paths aligned with your truest desires and greatest strengths.

(Shortform note: Bet-David proposes you learn about yourself but doesn't propose specific aspects of your personality to understand. You could assess yourself based on the Big Five personality dimensions: extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience. Each dimension exists on a spectrum, meaning you fall somewhere on the spectrum between high and low neuroticism, for instance. It seems that [both your genetics and environmental factors affect where you...

Your Next Five Moves Summary The Second Step: Learn to Solve Problems Effectively

Now that you’ve taken the first step to understanding who you are and want to be, it’s time to take the second step, writes Bet-David: learning how to solve problems effectively.

Good problem-solving distinguishes a beginner from a master businessperson and is key to success in business and life. Bet-David defines good problem-solving as the ability to think through all options, envision possible consequences of every option, and make beneficial choices based on sound information. The better you become at solving problems, the more success you’ll find because you’ll start thinking of ways to prevent problems.

(Shortform note: Bet-David’s definition of good problem-solving is detailed and exhaustive. However, he doesn’t mention one important reason why learning how to problem-solve is useful: Solving problems makes you happy. In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson argues that solving problems is intrinsically satisfying and improves your life. Instead of trying to live a life...

Your Next Five Moves Summary The Third Step: Create a Winning Team

Once you’ve learned how to solve problems well, tackle the third step: assembling a winning team, says Bet-David. To succeed in business, you must work with a team—not alone—and manage it well so they’ll want to stick around.

(Shortform note: Bet-David doesn’t list the specific advantages of teamwork over solo work. These include greater creativity and skill, as multiple employees bring a wider swath of ideas and competencies than any individual can.)

Build a winning team by completing three tasks:

Task 1: Hire the Right People

Do due diligence on potential hires by asking mutual colleagues about them, recommends Bet-David. Don’t trust your gut but rather rely on hard facts that indicate whether they’re a good fit. Additionally, question your initial impression of the person by asking yourself what appeals to you about them, what skills they lack, if there are red flags on their resume, and if the background check revealed anything negative.

(Shortform note: Bet-David recommends questioning your gut instincts about a potential hire: in other words, working to remove your personal...

Your Next Five Moves Summary The Fourth Step: Grow Your Business the Right Way

In the first three steps, you learned about yourself, developed the ability to solve problems, and learned how to create a winning team. With these pieces in place, let’s now move on to growing your company. According to Bet-David, there are seven parts to this growth process:

Part 1: Raise Funds

To grow, first, think about how to raise funds, counsels Bet-David. How you do this depends on the degree of control you want to maintain: The more money you raise from outside investors who then gain a stake in your business, the more control you sacrifice. Conversely, funding yourself means maintaining control but risking running out of money. Bet-David believes outside funding gives your company a huge security boost and recommends this route.

(Shortform note: Bet-David asserts that often when you accept outside funding, you cede a degree of control to the investor. To help determine whether to accept an investment from a party that wants control over the company, [ask yourself if you’d be okay ceding control if you and the investor agreed on major decisions about the...

Your Next Five Moves Summary The Fifth Step: Position Yourself as an Industry Leader

We’ve just talked about the fourth strategic step—growing your company. Now, let’s turn to the last step of your strategy for sustained success: making the bold business moves that position you as an industry leader. According to Bet-David, there are two bold steps you can take: taking down behemoth competitors and acquiring negotiation skills to apply in high-stakes deals. Let’s discuss each.

Take Down Behemoth Competitors in Your Industry

Though this is a risky move that’s not for every company, you can try to take on the behemoth competitor in your industry, writes Bet-David. This is possible because behemoths, once they’ve grown powerful and complacent, lose agility and the willingness to work hard and take risks.

(Shortform note: Another reason behemoth companies might lose agility is because they’ve fallen out of touch with the customer. Because they’ve been around a long time and have achieved sustained success, they might not be paying enough attention to changing customer needs and trends and can lose out to smaller, more customer-oriented companies.)

To take down a behemoth, use the following...

Shortform Exercise: Understand Yourself Better

Take Bet-David’s first strategic step by understanding who you are now, who you want to be in the future, and how to get there from here.

Being as objective as possible, write down your personal qualities, your strengths and weaknesses, the circumstances in which you thrive, how others perceive you, and anything else that comes to mind about your personality. (For example, you might be extremely sociable, have a hard time focusing on long-term projects, be perceived as a social butterfly, and thrive in fast-paced work environments.)