No matter where are you are in life, you must plan ahead to move from where you are to where you want to be. In this book, Patrick Bet-David explains the 5 moves you need to succeed as an entrepreneur, CEO or business leader. It answers the questions: Is entrepreneurship suitable for you? And, what does it take to become the best possible version of yourself? In this free summary of Your Next Five Moves, you’ll get an overview of the 5 strategic moves and what they entail.
About the book: Your Next Five Moves
The author, Patrick Bet-David, is a self-made entrepreneur. He never graduated from college, grew up in a single-parent home, and was told he wouldn’t amount to anything. Yet, he successfully built a YouTube channel (Valuetainment) with >2mil subscribers, advised business-people from startups to CEOs of billion-dollar companies, and founded a financial services marketing firm PHP Agency (which grew to >15,000 agents with 120 offices in 10 years).
This book captures the lessons he learned from his own experiences, successful people he met/studied over the years (e.g. Sheryl Sandbert, Bill Gates, Ray Dalio, Robert Greene, Kobe Bryan) and his insights after reading >1,500 business books.
One of Bet-David’s key messages is this: to succeed in business (or virtually any area in life), you need to plan several steps ahead. Specifically for business, he recommends planning 5 moves ahead since:
• This is enough to let you know your possible moves and countermoves without overthinking them; and
• There are 5 key moves required for success in any business: understand yourself, solve problems effectively, build a winning team, strategize to scale, and master power plays.
In our full summary of Your Next Five Moves, we’ll elaborate on each of these 5 moves in detail. Meantime, here’s a quick overview!
Taking Your Next 5 Moves
MOVE #1: UNDERSTAND YOURSELF
To be the best you can be, you must first know who you want to be, where you wish to go, and what factors should drive your decisions. Bet-David breaks this down into 3 parts:
• Knowing who you want to be (including your deepest desires, core beliefs and values) and start behaving as if you were already that person.
• Knowing where you are now, by being totally honest with yourself on your strengths/weaknesses, what motivates you, and what you truly want (not what you think you should want).
• Knowing your ideal path. Does entrepreneurship really suit you? Or are you better off striking out as an intrapreneur within your company?
Check out the Strategize to Win summary to get more strategies on finding your ideal career. Or, get the complete version of Your Next Five Moves summary to dive into each of these areas and start discovering yourself!
MOVE #2: SOLVE PROBLEMS EFFECTIVELY
To achieve success and fulfillment, you must handle thousands of problems and decisions. Hone your problem-solving skills to get better outcomes and pre-empt problems in the future. This requires that you:
• Learn how to process issues rigorously. Bet-David shares the “Investment-Time-Return formula” you can use to optimize your resources, and how to take full responsibility for your desired outcomes.
• Learn to “Solve for X”, i.e. find and address the root causes or underlying issues behind a problem or situation.
MOVE #3: BUILD A WINNING TEAM
No matter how brilliant you are, you can’t do everything alone. Surround yourself with the right people who can address your weaknesses and blind spots, multiply your strengths, and help you and your business to grow.
This move probably warrants a book all by itself. Bet-David addresses several key aspects, including:
• How to hire and retain the right people. This involves attracting the right talents and advisers, having a robust recruitment process, and developing an attractive compensation plan to retain people.
• How to build a winning culture. This involves establishing common values, principles and beliefs, translating them into concrete behaviors in your daily work, building trust, developing a succession plan, encouraging constructive conflict, and tailoring your approach to each team member’s love languages and motivators.
Read more on team-building and performance management in the summaries for Work Rules! and High Output Management.
MOVE #4: STRATEGIZE TO SCALE UP
There are several strategic elements that determine if your business will grow, stagnate, or even collapse. To scale up and achieve exponential growth, you must:
• Raise and use capital wisely, to generate both linear and exponential growth.
• Grow your people alongside the company. Demand the best from people, hold them accountable for their own career or life goals, role-model the expected levels of rigor and accountability, and track the key metrics in your business.
Looking to scale up your company? Learn more from the Scaling Up summary!
MOVE #5: GET GOOD AT POWER PLAYS
Power plays can determine if you emerge a winner or loser. Master your strategic maneuvers to beat established incumbents, frame your story, and leverage social media. This move is about:
• Finding the right levers so you can beat the giants (i.e. the huge, established market leaders in your industry) who have much more resources, experience and capital than you. Bet-David advocates using social media as a key marketing tool to engage your audience, shape your story and influence public opinion.
• Learning to negotiate, sell, and influence. This requires that you do your homework before every major meeting, build strategic partnerships, and progressively develop your negotiation skills and power.
Here’s a visual recap of your next five moves:
Conclusion and Other Details in “Your Next Five Moves”
It takes drive and persistence to keep pushing yourself to the next level. The only way to reach your potential is to want it badly enough, and mastering the 5 moves above—knowing yourself, problem-solving ability, the right team, scalability, and power plays—will increase your likelihood of success. If you’re ready to start , do check out the our full book summary bundle that includes an infographic, 18-page text summary, and a 27-minute audio summary.
The book includes numerous references to different books, stories about successful people, as well as Bet-David’s observations from the books he read and the people he met/studied. It also comes with 2 appendices with a “Personal Identity Audit” and a “Solve for X worksheet”. You can purchase the book here or visit patrickbetdavid.com for more details.
About the Author of Your Next Five Moves
Your Next Five Moves: Master the Art of Business Strategy was written by Patrick Bet-David–an Iranian-American entrepreneur known for his unorthodox approach to business. He was born in Iran and migrated to the U.S in 1990. After high school, he enlisted in the US army, sold health club memberships, then entered the financial services industry. He founded financial services firm PHP Agency, Inc. at the age of 30, and owns a leading YouTube channel for entrepreneurs, Valuetainment.
Your Next Five Moves Quotes
“There’s a path for everyone—as long as you have self-awareness and the willingness to think five moves ahead.”
“The answer to any question is actually a series of moves deployed in the proper sequence.”
“Nothing matters unless you understand what makes you tick and who you want to be.”
“Studying others gives us knowledge, but studying yourself ultimately leads to an incredible amount of freedom.”
“What determines if you win in any game (or business) isn’t how good you are; it’s how good you are relative to your competition.”
“Don’t complain that the game is rigged. Instead, find a game in which you have a differential advantage.”
“A richer life—financially, emotionally, intellectually—is possible only when you take responsibility for your own success.”
“You’ll know you’re succeeding in life when others are winning simply because of their association with you.”
“Selling is about believing in yourself, believing in your business, and believing in the value you can offer to the other person.”
“The first rule of self-promotion is that you have to be shameless.”
“A great leader is someone who is able to get others to do things they wouldn’t do on their own.”
Click here to download Your Next Five Moves summary & infographic
