How I Used Strategy To Achieve Big Goals | Ep 41

In this episode, I break down what strategy really is—and how it can help you go after goals that look like a long shot from where you are right now.

Back in the year 2000, I decided I wanted to stop millions of dogs and cats from being killed in animal shelters. I had no job, no money, and no obvious way to do it… so if you were betting on me, it would have been reasonable to bet against me. The only real advantage I had was that I understood a bit about strategy, largely because of my lifelong practice of jujitsu.

In this video, I use that story as a through line to talk about strategy and how you can use it for your own life. I ask you to think about a personal or professional goal that really matters to you—something that feels hard, unlikely, and not at all obvious you can achieve. The kind of goal where most people, if they had to place a bet, would probably bet you won’t pull it off.

You’ll learn:

1. How to pick a goal that’s big enough to excite you, even if it feels unrealistic.
2. How Tim Ferriss’ “dreamline” (have / be / do) helps you get specific about what you want.
3. The difference between a strategy and just a plan.

If you care about doing something that actually matters—whether in your career, your training, or your life—this episode will help you think more clearly about strategy and your long‑shot goals.

Show Links:

Adopt-a-Pet.com

https://www.adoptapet.com/

The Four Hour Work Week (book)

https://a.co/d/0cqAnf0H

Music “Disambiguation” by Robel Borja https://open.spotify.com/artist/7j0DUZ79z4edeLkU2H1UoJ?si=eISl0YfaQ-yLThljs48j5A

This episode was directed and presented by Dave Meyer, editor & coproducer by Ryan Turner, producer & marketing Robbie Lockie, music kindly provided by Robel Borja.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

It's always easier to win a fight with someone who doesn't know they're in a fight. And when there's an opponent involved, instead of fighting against your opponent's strongest game, ideally you force a position or approach they didn't expect. You make them fight a game that they're not prepared for or that they're not good at. A good strategy is about choosing the game plan where your strengths matter and their strengths don't. Welcome to the Ageless Warrior Lab. I'm BJJ Coral Belt and Dirty Dozen member Dave Meyer, here to draw wisdom from Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and the martial arts and explore how it applies to success in business, relationships, your long-term health, and making the most out of your life. In the year 2000, I wanted to stop millions of dogs and cats from being killed in animal shelters. The only issue was I had no job, no money, and no obvious way to do it. So if you were betting on me, you wouldn't have been wrong to bet against me. But I had an advantage. I understood a bit about strategy largely because of my lifelong practice of jujitsu. So our lesson from the lab today is about strategy and how it can help you do something that seems impossible. Now let me ask you, is there something important that you want to achieve in your life? Maybe a personal goal or a professional goal or something that really matters to you, but it's not obvious that you can achieve it. In fact, what's obvious is it seems really hard and unlikely that you'll be able to succeed, the kind of thing that if someone were to make a bet, they'd bet you won't be able to do it. How would you like to prove them wrong? And if you don't have an immediate important goal that comes to your mind, shouldn't you? I mean, your life is happening anyway. Wouldn't it be cool if a year from now you had achieved something really great or even just really fun? I said in episode one called How to Get Better Faster, that no one accidentally gets to the top of Mount Everest. The first step to doing something great or achieving anything worth achieving is saying that you want to do it. So again, what do you want to achieve in your personal or professional life? Tim Ferris in his book The Four-Hour Work Week talks about creating a dreamline. It's a way to get specific about things you either want to have or want to be or want to do. Like you want to have a house, or you want to be a great singer, or you want to do something like visit Japan. These could be personal fun things, sort of bucket list items, or could be really world-changing goals, like ending homelessness in your city or ending the killing of pets in animal shelters. But the idea is to pick something that seems pretty unrealistic and something you'd be willing to work hard for. And then you list out the specific steps to get there. Now, if the steps to your goals are clear, even if they're really hard, what you have is a plan. And you don't really need a strategy. You just need some discipline and maybe some luck. I say this because people use the word strategy as a synonym for a plan. So they'll say, our strategy is to do this or that, meaning just here's what we're going to do. But often that's not a strategy. It's just the plan of action. But a strategy is something deeper. It's a special kind of a plan. I define strategy as a set of non-obvious actions designed to achieve a long-shot outcome. The key here is having a specific outcome or goal that's not at all clear that you can achieve, and then having a plan based upon non-obvious steps designed to get you there. For example, if you just want to go buy an iPhone, you don't need a strategy. Save up some money or get a credit card and go buy it. That's the plan. But if you want to defy the odds and build a successful business to compete with the iPhone or achieve something else in your life that doesn't really seem possible, how are you going to do that? Now you need a strategy. In martial arts competition, especially BJJ, we use strategy a lot. So I have an opponent who's bigger or stronger than me, and my goal is to make them tap out. I can't just say I'm going to use this move and then I'm going to use that move and then tap them out because they're going to stop me, right? We just said they are bigger and stronger. But if I know how to execute a series of things that don't directly oppose them and that they're not going to be able to or even know they should stop, but that ultimately gets me to where I need to be to be able to win, then that's a strategy. That may involve tricking them into moving into the ways I want them to move and even setting traps. Basically, I need them to be playing my game. Now, the five basic steps to creating a good strategy, useful in all areas of life, are one, define a clear and measurable goal. Two, do your research, right? Consider all your assets and everything you know about how to get there and what will block you. Three, consider all the possible paths that can circumvent any problems and find unlikely ways to move you forward. The more outside the box you think, the better. Four, make the plan, right? Define what are the key steps that you need to take and what has to happen for each one to be successful. And five, be sure you leave moments for taking stock of any new information in a changing environment and be open to course corrections along the way. Now, obviously, there can be multiple paths, and that's where you have to evaluate what are the most likely paths to success, and when will there be critical points where pivotal decisions can be made to choose one path or another based upon the facts at that time? I call those course corrections. So having a goal that's hard with no obvious way to achieve it, and understanding what you know and what you don't know, then making your best plan with the ability to reassess and alter it as new information becomes available. Now we're talking a strategy for real. Now, some goals are hard and not obvious that you can do it, but the path is still very clear. Like take a goal of running a marathon. It's a hard goal and it's not obvious that you can do it if you're out of shape. But the path is clear and well defined, right? You start like a year out, you begin with a couch to 5K program, you build a basic running base, then you graduate to a 10K program for a few months, then a half a marathon program for a while, and then a full marathon training program for a few months. Throw in some good shoes and a good diet, and you will likely complete your first marathon. So that's a plan to do something really hard, but it's not a strategy because the actions that were needed were obvious. And remember, where there's no obvious path to success, thinking outside the box is super important. That is the non-obvious bit. That's when you need to challenge your and sometimes everyone else's assumptions. Don't assume that things have to be done in the normal way. There's always a clever path to take, and you just have to find it. Now, back to whether someone would have been smart to bet on me to go from having no money or a job and wanting to impact the killing of millions of homeless pets in shelters across North America. I had a tool. I knew about strategy. I knew how a smaller fighter can beat a bigger one. I knew how to read an opponent, understand the forces they would use, and how to make a plan to turn their strength against them. So if you would have bet against me back then, it turns out you would have kind of lost that bet. And here is how it happened. I heard there was this new foundation called Maddie's Fund that would fund what they called a no-kill program designed to end the killing of animals and shelters in a target city. So I decided to come up with a credible and detailed plan to get access to that money. And that was going to take some serious time to pull together. So my first problem was how to keep myself afloat without getting a full-time job that would take up all my time. I needed the strategy to fund myself, and that strategy involved Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Specifically, my good friend and student at the time, Faraborz Azak, who was a highly respected hopkito instructor in Los Angeles, said to me that there was a need with martial arts instructors like him across the country to bring grappling into their schools. This was before the first UFC, but word was already getting out about the effectiveness of Gracie Jiu-Jitsu, which had only just started being called Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, which is a whole nother story. He said they needed some sort of curriculum on videos. Note this was in 2000, so the early days of the internet, and there was no YouTube yet and no online training tools. So I turned to my friend and fellow BGJ Black Belt, John Will in Australia, who was the most organized instructor I knew and who already had a curriculum he was using in his own BGJ school. John flew out to California and with Farabores' help and with the great martial artist Ron Balicki behind the cameras, we recorded an extensive nine-level grappling curriculum accompanied by videos I edited and oversized printed manuals that I created with the help of a graphic artist I knew. We then went to some annual martial arts instructor trade shows and we sold this curriculum. And many of the schools who bought the curriculum wanted to have me or John out for seminars to help educate their instructors on how to integrate these grappling lessons into their school. This created a built-in clientele of martial arts instructors in cities across the country who'd pay for me to come to their city for a weekend, teach a bunch of seminars to a bunch of local schools, and then I could fly home and spend the rest of the week working on the animal stuff. And this strategy of pulling together talented friends to leverage my and John's BJJs to create and sell a curriculum he already had that led to seminar weekends and leaving my work days free to help animals, it worked. Now I could survive financially indefinitely and had some time to devote to my real goal of helping animals. Now back to the animals and that no-kill plan. Humor me and let me talk for just a second about what the words no-kill should mean. A no-kill shelter is great. It's usually a nonprofit and privately run shelter that takes a stand and says if they get full up with animals that need homes, they will not kill animals to make more space. I love no-kill shelters. But here's the thing: if a no-kill shelter is full and someone needs to give up a pet to a shelter or a pet has been taken off the street and there's no owner, they still need to go somewhere. And that's why most public animal shelters are called open admission. They are not no-kill because at the end of the day, no matter how many no-kill shelters a city has, if there are more pets without homes and needing to be adopted in that community, then all the no-kill shelters will eventually be full and someone somewhere will be doing the killing. So to me, the issue isn't about having no-kill shelters. It's about having no-kill cities where the population of pets who need homes stays below the number of available homes. In other words, the supply and demand for pets needs to be brought into balance for the whole community. Then all shelters in the city are no-kill shelters, because the problem of too many pets and not enough people willing to adopt them has been solved. And it's been solved at a community level. It's not about a policy of any individual shelter, it's about the bigger ecosystem in the community. Okay, rant ended. So I had my first step for a strategy. I had a goal to end or at least seriously impact the number of pets dying in shelters in the United States. Now I needed step two, research to understand the problem and my options. Specifically, I wanted to understand what the problem was in Los Angeles, where I lived. How many animals were being killed? Why did animals end up in shelters in the first place? Why didn't more get adopted? Were lots of people getting their animals from breeders instead of shelters? And why? How much of the problem was too many animals being born versus not enough awareness about how many needed homes? And I wanted to use that knowledge to create a strategy. We started with some research, which included telephone surveys of people done in English and in Spanish, interviewing people who were dropping off pets at shelters and who were adopting pets from shelters. And the plan was to then create a strategy to bring to Maddie's fund and try to get them to fund it. Now we learned a lot from that research. Remember, to meet my goal, we needed some mix of lowering the number of animals being born and increasing the number of people who would adopt. Now I needed step three, which was to consider all the possible paths that can circumvent any problems and choose the most likely ways to move things forward. In terms of lowering the number of pets ending up in shelters, one thing we learned was that people were basically willing to have their animals spayed or neutered, which would at least help part of the problem of unwanted litters of puppies and kittens ending up in shelters. But those people needed to have it be made super easy. Many shelters at the time offered low-cost spay neuter services, but we asked ourselves, are we missing people here? What would it take to get more people willing to spay or neuter their pets? And we realized that low cost wasn't good enough. That was just the paradigm that everyone had bought into. The surgeries needed to be no cost. In fact, we realized it would be even better if we actually paid people some small amount of money to have their animals spayed or neutered. Not so much money that it made them go out to breed animals to bring to us, but enough that it made it worth the effort for them to let us do the surgery. This seemed unfathomable to people in the animal sheltering world to pay people like that. But if you're already subsidizing the cost of a surgery anyway, why not just pay a bit more to actually get more people in the door? Then we asked ourselves, is every surgery equal in how many possible births it prevents? And it turns out that the answer is no. Think about this for a second. If you put 10 unaltered male dogs in a big yard with 10 unaltered females, soon enough you will have 10 pregnant females, right? But if you were to neuter nine of the males and leave only one intact male among all those dogs in the yard, how many litters would you have then? Still 10, because that single unaltered male would happily sire litters from all the intact females. So in this example, your nine neuter surgeries have no effect on birds. But what if you switch that? What if you left all 10 males unaltered, but you spayed nine of the females? Then how many litters would you have? Only one. Strictly speaking, the number of litters in a population isn't dependent upon the number of unaltered males, but it's dependent upon the number of unaltered females, the number of intact wombs. So this means if you want the maximum effect for population control and you have limited funds, which is always the case, all other things being equal, you should first be focusing on females. We called that policy females first. Now to be clear, there are a ton of great reasons you might want to sterilize a male dog. Definitely, statistically, it improves their long-term health outcomes, it's good for behavior issues, etc. But just for population control, while having fewer intact males in the population certainly could make a difference to prevent some unwanted pregnancies. Overall, other things being equal, it's more important to address the females first, even though the space surgery is a bit more expensive than the neuter. Then we thought, okay, what could our strategy be to focus it even more to get more bang for the buck? Well, a young animal has more potential litters over their lifetime still ahead than an older animal. That's obvious when you think about it, right? So all things being equal, with your limited money, you should be spending it on surgery for younger pets first. But no one was doing that. Then consider whether a pet is ever likely to have puppies or kittens at all in the first place. If the owner wants to breed their animal, then none of this matters because they just won't do the surgery. But if they don't care, then the question becomes how likely is it that their pet might get out or accidentally reproduce? There's no sense in paying for a spay or a neuter for a pet who's really not likely to ever breed. And we learned that a pet is more likely to accidentally get pregnant if they live in a house with a yard and a gate, whether they might one day get out, and less likely to get pregnant if they lived in an apartment building. So a strategy for how to get the best bang for a limited amount of bucks available to spainter pets is to go after females who are young and live in houses. That right there is a non-obvious way to achieve a difficult goal. Now, on the adoption front, we learned that many people weren't opposed to adopting a pet, but they just never really thought about it or they wanted a specific breed or type of pet. And it was much easier just to go to a breeder of that breed rather than wander into some local shelter hoping they might just happen to have a pet on that day that you walked in. People also didn't love going to animal shelters because many of them seemed sad and kind of depressing. So our strategy to solve that was to have a database of all the pets at all the shelters that people could use to see if there was a pet they wanted anywhere in their city, saving them at least having to wander into some random shelter. People could run a pet search on a website themselves, or for the many people who back in 2000 weren't yet on the internet, they could call a toll-free phone number and talk to a live operator who we called a matchmaker who could do the search for them. And with this, the idea of the phone number and web service, 1-800Saveapet.com, was born. That name was the brainchild of my co-founder Luke, who was a marketing genius and wanted the name of the project to itself be both a website and a phone number and a call to action. So anyone who heard that name, 1-800Saveapet.com, they would instantly know our phone number, our website, and our mission, Save a Pet. The website would be literally like a birthday party for the pet you were about to adopt. I'm not kidding. We had pets in party hats, always pictured with loving people and sometimes even celebrities, all captured in Polaroid photos, which gave the sense of family and making memories. You could search for specific breeds. And what's more, we specifically advertised to get those photos of shelter pets in front of people who weren't thinking about adopting, but were headed to a breeder. That way, before someone went to a breeder, they could at least see if the type of pet they wanted happened to be already in a local animal shelter in their city. In fact, we also created a service at the time called Search Saver, where we'd save the search you ran today and keep running it for you every day so that if in a week or a month that search turned up the kind of pet you wanted, we'd just flick you an email and let you know. I could go on forever about this kind of stuff, but suffice it to say, we did step four. We made the plan built on a complex and well-thought-through strategy filled with innovative and non-obvious ways to reach our goals. Now, sadly, we never got the ability to fully execute the strategy because Maddie's Fund, although they acknowledged our plan was the best they'd seen, felt it was so ambitious and Los Angeles County was so huge, they just wanted to fund smaller and more manageable projects. Sometimes even a great strategy doesn't work for reasons outside of your control. But remember that fifth step in a strategy, being flexible and able to pivot to make course corrections. So with our own very limited funding and our own skills, we did at least launch that pet adoption phone number and website. And so 1-800Saveapet.com became real. And years later, once everybody was on the internet, we renamed it to adoptthepet.com, which is its name today. And it's grown to cover all of North America. Now we weren't able to end the killing of pets in shelters, but we were responsible for millions of pet adoptions over the last quarter century, including to many people who were not at first thinking about getting a pet from a shelter. So that's millions of pets saved, millions of people's lives enhanced, but it took a strategy and a lot of hard work. Now let me clear up a few misconceptions I think people have about strategy. People often confuse a strategy with tactics. The strategy is the plan, and the tactics are the specific actions you take to execute the plan. So people often list a bunch of actions like our strategy is to post videos on social media that go viral. That is a tactic, but not in and of itself a strategy. People also confuse a strategy with goals. People often say our strategy is to grow our revenue. That's not a strategy, that's a goal. And it's not even a specific goal, since you're not saying by how much you intend to grow your revenue and by when. Another misconception is people think a strategy necessarily means a big detailed strategic plan. Now, I'm all for a good written strategic plan, especially for businesses or for a nonprofit like the one I run. But the core strategy is the key insights on what you will do that aren't obvious but can help you achieve your hard goal and might or might not ever involve a very specific written plan. And lastly, people think a strategy is static and unchanging. So once you have your strategy, all you need to do is execute it. And they don't consider that as you work towards your goals, you get new information or the situation is actually evolving. And so you need to periodically reevaluate your strategy and make those course corrections to your approach if needed, like we did when we just launched the website. I call that adapt and prevail. And I talked a lot about it in episode 22. In fact, I have a journal in which I wrote to myself about my own life plan. The plan will be given to you, follow it exactly, modify it as needed. Reading that always makes me smile because it's Seems like an oxymoron. Follow a plan exactly and modify it as needed. But that's exactly what I meant to say. Do the plan, but there's power in adaptation. Once you have more information, or if the situation on the ground is evolving. It's like the US Constitution, right? That seems as much set in stone as anything. But within the Constitution are the rules on how to change it if needed, how to amend it. And some of the most important things we look to the Constitution now for are actually amendments: freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to keep and bear arms, the right to vote. They're all amendments. They were all course corrections. Now, in my examples, I've been talking about how a strategy helps you achieve an important goal in your life if there's no one specifically trying to stop you. There was no one specifically trying to stop us from stopping pets from being killed in shelters, but we still needed a strategy. There are plenty of times in life when you're trying to achieve something hard where it's not obvious how you're going to do it, but it's only the circumstances that are blocking you, and no person or entity is trying to get in your way. But a strategy is especially useful if you do have an actual opponent, like a business competitor you're trying to beat, or a competitor in a BJJ match that you're trying to beat. From the point of view of a strategy, it doesn't matter if there's a set of circumstances and challenges that you're trying to overcome or an opponent that you're trying to beat. It's all the same thing. Something is blocking your ability to get where you want to go, which is making you need to come up with a non-obvious plan to leverage what assets you have and figure out what actions you can take to achieve your goal. The main difference between being blocked just by circumstances or being blocked by an actual opponent who's specifically trying to stop you is when there's an opponent, whether that's a competitor in a fight or a person or a company trying to stop you getting something you want, if the opponent is active or potentially active, the challenge for you is more complicated because you need to account for how they'll react to things that you do. And the reason I say if the opponent is active or potentially active, is one important part of a good strategy with an opponent is taking actions that they can't see or aren't aware of or aren't concerned about. So they don't become active to work against you. Or at least you delay them getting active until later than they should have been. It's always easier to win a fight with someone who doesn't know they're in a fight. And when there's an opponent involved, instead of fighting against your opponent's strongest game, ideally you force a position or approach they didn't expect. You make them fight a game that they're not prepared for or that they're not good at. So when there's an opponent involved, a good strategy is about choosing the game plan where your strengths matter and their strengths don't. And remember, not all strategies, even if they're great, end up being successful. But that doesn't mean the strategy was wrong. If the goal really is hard, chances are you aren't going to achieve it. But having a great strategy and then a smart execution of the strategy gives you your best chance at beating the odds. I can give you some examples of strategies in my work with adoptbit.com that I thought were good, but that didn't achieve their goal. Early on, we were trying to get corporate sponsors to fund the website, but it was a chicken and egg problem. We wanted sponsors to give us enough money to advertise and grow the website, but the sponsors would only be interested if we already had enough traffic to see their ads or feel good about their sponsorship. So it was a bit of a catch-22. I remember we really wanted this one food brand, Pedigree, that was promoting Pet Adoption to be a sponsor. And they had their headquarters in Los Angeles, where we were based. We drove by their headquarters and we noticed that there was this big billboard just outside their building that anyone looking outside the window or going in and out of the building would see. So for several months, we paid to rent that one billboard and we put up a poster advertising 1-800-savepet.com. That was part of a small strategy to position us as a credible partner if we could ever get a meeting. Then eventually we were able to get a meeting with their marketing team. And in that meeting, they said they'd seen our billboards all over town. Now, there must be 20,000 billboards across Los Angeles County, and we had exactly one up, but it was the one that everyone in that company would see every day as they went to work. So I guess you'd say that the awareness strategy succeeded, but the ultimate goal of us getting a sponsorship didn't. Our website numbers just weren't what they needed to be yet to get a sponsor like that. And there was another great strategy I thought that we had that didn't work. As a nonprofit based in LA, we had the ability to get through to celebrities who love pets. In fact, from the day we launched 1-800-saveapet.com, the website had Alicia Silverstone on the homepage, who was then replaced for many years by Drew Barrymore. But we needed many more people nationally to see the website, Anadoppets. So we came up with the strategy. We decided to create the Save a Pet Show and then try to get the show aired on Animal Planet by making these very short episodes, like three minutes long, that they could slip in between their regular programming and we'd give it to Animal Planet for free, at least at the start. So we got my good friend Dr. Pia Sok, who's actually a brilliant and accomplished psychologist, to take on the role of the fun-loving girlish host Pia with her dog Pickles. And then we got celebrities who were well known at the time, 20 years ago, and were also well-known animal lovers to do interviews with us and talk about 1800 SaveApet.com. The result were in a bunch of these three-minute Save a Pet shows with Drew Barrymore, with Ru McClanahan from The Golden Girls, Dick Van Patten, Kelsey Grammar, Stara Frasier. If you're older, you know who these people are. In fact, here's a sample Save a Pet Show.

SPEAKER_03 27:50

The Save a Pet Show. Hi, it's Pia and Pickles with Drew Barrymore. We're hanging at the Hollywood Dog Park with our pet-saving pal Drew and her adopted dog, Vivian. What a love! Well, what do you think is so special about adopted pets?

SPEAKER_00 28:07

It's like you get such a beautiful, selfless high from saving a life. And I think there's a loyalty that comes back to you because they know that like you've saved them. And I think it just builds your relationship on a level that's like completely profound. That's right, then it is.

SPEAKER_02 28:26

Okay, you get the idea. But sadly, again, we couldn't get Animal Planet interested. You win some and you lose some, but it was a good try. Now let's talk about you. What is it that you want to have, be, or do that could use a strategy? And remember, most things don't need strategies because the steps are pretty obvious, even if the thing is hard. If you want to be, I don't know, a great dancer, start taking dancing lessons and practice, practice, practice. If you want to go to Patagonia, start saving money and plan the trip. But if there's something that's really important to you and that you'd work really hard for, but that's a real long shot without a clear path to get it done, that's what we want to talk about. And to create a good strategy, all the steps are important, but the toughest ones are doing the research and really understanding the subject matter or the landscape that you're going to work in. And then thinking really creative about non-obvious actions to achieve your goal and coming up with those. Maybe you want to build$10 million in equity in real estate that you can then sell one day and retire on or go do other amazing things you want to do with. Okay, so do you understand real estate in your area? Can you take a look at the cost of houses or even apartment buildings? Does it have to be a house? Doesn't it have to be in your area, right? Maybe you've never bought before. That doesn't matter. Could you buy more affordably in a different town, maybe an hour away or two hours away, or somewhere where you have someone else who can look after a property? If you don't have the money, or maybe you don't have the credit, can you partner with other people? Can you create sort of a consortium of people who all don't have enough money, but together they can invest and you create a legal structure to do that? Do you have family members who will loan you money or want to go in on investment? Does it even have to be in this country? Can you buy something more affordably in another country, maybe that you visited and manage that and have it grow in equity there? I'm just trying to throw these ideas off the top of my head to get you thinking that there's different ways to do things, right? There's creative ways to do things and probably much more creative ones than I just said. Or maybe you want to rise to the top of the company you work for and become the CEO or something like that. Okay, how did the current CEO get to be there? What was their path? What is the path that anyone rises to that company? Do they come from another company or do they rise from within? Are you on the right track to doing that? Is there certain education that you should have? Can you start taking of really outside the box ideas and start offering those to your managers or maybe even go right to the CEO today and come up with some sort of a plan or some sort of cool thing that helps them see something that they've never really thought? So you start to get noticed and you start to get taken more seriously. You want to start asking yourself these non-obvious questions and see what you can come up with that might be a clever way and possibly a way to try that's not super time consuming and expensive, just to see is this a path that you want to keep going on. But the idea is always to think outside the box, to train yourself to look for cleverer angles and hidden paths. And if you practice BJJ, this should sound really familiar. Now, just before we wrap up, let me share with you some successful strategies that we used to grow adoptpet.com and its ability to get pets out of shelters and into loving homes. Abby Moore, who at the time was our executive director, was brilliant and she was a huge sports fan, and she had an interesting idea. She knew that at the end of the day, pet adoption is a hyper-local thing. Most people adopt pets in their own city, and cities have their own local celebrities who might, especially at certain times of the year, be easier to get to help us promote pet adoption. I'm talking, of course, about sports celebrities. And it doesn't have to be a LeBron James or a Stephen Curry. Whatever city you live in, you have sports teams and players that many people in your city recognize. So she came up with this strategy. She would pick a sports team in the city of a corporate sponsor of ours at the time. The players were men, but women were often more likely to be gushing animal lovers, so she'd reach out to some of the wives of the players and see if they were interested in helping get some pets adopted in their city. Our sponsors at the time were Purina, based in St. Louis, and Bayer Animal Health, based in Kansas City. She ended up getting through to the wives and then to some of the players on the St. Louis Blues hockey team and the Kansas City Royals baseball team. It was off season, so these local celebs had a little time, and it turned out there were lots of players who cared a ton about saving homeless pets. So we scheduled a day of photo shoots and some videotaping that Abby then got turned into billboards and public service announcements. Public service announcements air for free, and she got the billboard companies to post the billboards for free since we were a nonprofit. And our sponsors were happy to donate the money for the printing of the billboards in exchange for a small logo at the bottom. Then Abby launched these as pet adoption campaigns in those cities with a kickoff press event where the players and their wives and all the local press came to cover it. She gave all the shelters heads up, so they made a specific effort to get all their adoptable pets posted on our website. And just like that, by executing a clever strategy, adoptapet.com got millions of dollars of free publicity in those cities, forged connections with sports stars, deepened our connections with our sponsors, and most importantly, got a boatload of local shelter pets adopted. Way to hit it out of the park, Abbey. Here's one of the PSAs she did. This one was with Major League pitcher for the Chicago White Sox at the time, Mark Burley.

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Before he was a major league pitcher, threw a no-hitter, and then a perfect game. Before he made history, Mark Burley was just a kid cut from his high school team twice. Before Bear taught himself to predict seizures and inspired thousands by saving his owner's life. Before he became a hero, he was just another dog in a Texas animal shelter. There's hidden potential in all of us. We just need someone to see it. Find it at adoptapet.com.

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I'll give you one more example of a cool strategy from those days. As public awareness of our pet adoption service was growing around the country, it didn't matter if more people came to the website if there weren't local pets listed in their city who could be adopted. Animal shelters, especially at that time, were technologically challenged and just overloaded and understaffed. It was hard enough for them to get someone to take good photos and write good descriptions of the pets to put on their own website, let alone duplicate that effort to get their pets uploaded onto ours. It was a classic case of someone struggling so hard to keep from drowning that they couldn't reach for the life preserver we were throwing. So we devised a strategy in which we would get volunteers, and they could be anywhere in the world with an internet connection, to take the adoptable pet photos and information from the shelter's own website and copy it and upload it to our website. We called these volunteers copycats, cat pun intended. And it was a way that a shelter could get their pets onto our site without anyone at the shelter having to lift a finger. Then once their pets were on our site, with all the publicity we were getting and our smart search engine optimization, the shelter quickly saw how their pet adoptions went up and they were motivated to make sure that they kept getting pets onto our site. Now, the only downside of the strategy was if a copycat moved all the data once a week, but the day after they did that, some of the pets were adopted from the shelter, which basically always happened. Our website would be showing stale data, showing pictures and descriptions of pets who were already adopted a few days before. That didn't help anybody. It could frustrate a pet adopter and could waste the time of someone at the shelter when someone calls, wanting to meet a pet who was already adopted. So we expanded our strategy to get shelter software management systems. That's the software that shelters use to run their operations, to automatically pass us the data entered into the shelter's own computer. Then adoptable pets would instantly appear on adoptopet.com without anybody doing anything, not even a copycat volunteer. This meant that almost the moment a pet was marked as adoptable at the shelter and got entered into their system that way, the pet would appear on our website. And equally important, when a pet left their shelter, the pet would be removed from our website. That helped revolutionize the whole online pet adoption process and continues now to this day. So to wrap it up, now you see what I mean by a strategy. It's not just a tactic or even just a plan. It's a clever plan to use non-obvious way to achieve a difficult goal. It won't always work, but it will up your chances of success. So I'm asking you again, what is it in your life that you want to achieve? And could it benefit from a good strategy? Whatever it is, there are likely going to be non-obvious ways to achieve it that if you only spent a little time to figure out would up your odds of success. That's what a good strategy does for you. If you've listened to this podcast, you know my whole jam is helping people be the best they can be. This is your life. This is your time to be amazing. We all know that actions have consequences, but inaction can also have consequences. So if there's greatness within you, or even just some cool things you want to have or be or do in your life, let's get to work on it. The world needs you. If it helps inspire you, check out episode 13, the clock is ticking, and episode 16, how to make your life matter, and then episode 18, which is the one about mission days. Those episodes are kind of a series. Then get out of your way for inspiration. And what I mean by that is forget your doubts and silence any internal or external skeptics and let your inner voice speak clearly and be heard. Figure out something you want to accomplish in your limited time on this planet. Then get into your way for action. And what I mean by that is get your body acting out your words and mission, like a wave crashing at your back pushing you forward. I hope what we talked about today inspires you and gives you some tools to succeed. And if there's something you want to do and it's not obvious that you can do it, then a good strategy is what you need. If you're watching on YouTube, please leave me a comment. I read and respond to them all, and I'm interested to know what you think. And if you're listening to audio on Apple or Spotify, please do take a minute to rate the show. Also, liking and sharing anywhere in social media is really helpful. I'll be back next week with more lessons from the lab. And until then, keep developing your strengths, your wisdom, and go out and do good in the world.