Do we over-romanticize motivation?

Our culture worships the leap. The refusal to quit. The will to win.

Motivation gets celebrated. Strategy? Not so much. In fact seen as an 'OK Boomer' word in many meeting rooms.

Richard Rumelt makes a brutal point in Good Strategy Bad Strategy: motivation is necessary but nowhere near sufficient.

He illustrates this with Passchendaele from World War 1.

1917.

British General Douglas Haig plans to break through German lines. His advisors warn him: shelling will destroy the dikes, flood the fields. He proceeds anyway. The bombardment churns soil into a quagmire that swallows tanks and horses.

Haig's response? One last push. Rally the troops.

The Germans decimate them.

70,000 Allied soldiers dead. Five miles of mud gained.

These weren't men lacking courage. They were extraordinarily brave. What they lacked was strategy—someone willing to decide where to fight, not just whether to keep fighting.

The startup ecosystem puts a premium on grit. And rightly so—building anything meaningful requires irrational persistence. But we talk less about the other hard thing: making painful strategic choices.

Killing a product that took eighteen months to build. Walking away from a market you publicly committed to. Telling your investors the thesis was wrong. Shutting down a business unit your co-founder loves.

These decisions don't get standing ovations. No one writes Twitter threads about the market you chose not to enter. There's no conference talk titled "How I Quit."

Both require courage. One just looks more heroic on a podcast.

The job of a leader isn't only to demand one last push. It's to create the conditions where that push actually moves you forward.

From My Reading of Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt.