Book Review by Taylor Berrett
Can you master the business world the same way a chess grandmaster develops total control over the chess board? According to Patrick Bet-David and his book, Your Next Five Moves: Master the Art of Business Strategy, you can. In his guide to confronting the business landscape with coolheaded strategy, Bet-David outlines the five most important forms of mastery required to take control and set yourself up for long-lasting success.
Patrick Bet-David is an entrepreneur and investor, having immigrated to the United States after his family escaped from his embattled former home of Iraq and then lived as refugees in Germany. Bet-David later served in the US army, worked at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, and eventually started his own financial services and life insurance firm. PHP Agency Inc. now employs over 12,000 agents in almost all 50 states as Bet-David’s social content accounts for over a billion total views— and he’s done it all with no college degree.
So when an author like him outlines the five most important moves in business, it’s worth taking notice. Fortunately, he does so in an engaging and informative way throughout Your Next Five Moves, which is broken down into highly digestible sections.
The Five Moves or ‘Masteries’
Patrick Bet-David identifies the five most important moves in business as follows:
- Master knowing yourself
- Master the ability to reason
- Master building the right team
- Master strategy to scale
- Master making power plays
Apart from outlining these five key moves, the author also identifies ways to get into the habit of thinking five moves ahead more generally. He advocates for future-centric thinking that anticipates moves, their effects, and any countermoves that may help react positively to changing circumstances in an unpredictable business landscape.
The Bottom Line
While Patrick Bet-David’s book can at times seem to stretch out its ideas more than is necessary, Your Next Five Moves is generally an excellent guide to anyone looking to be more proactive in business instead of simply reacting to what’s thrown at them. One of the most memorable points he makes is the differentiation between ‘actors,’ who simply play a part based on the circumstances they occupy, and ‘doers,’ who actually shape those circumstances to their will. Bet-David offers plenty of advice for how to be a doer, and the majority of it is actually quite useful.
Like an extra chess piece on an already crowded board, what more can you ask from a new business book in a flooded market?
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Taylor Berrett is a Contributing Writer at Soundview. He is also a freelance writer, editor, and host of the podcast Alone in a Room. His other book reviews can be found here.