Review: ‘Your Next Five Moves’

If you want a peek into the development of a CEO, then this is your book. Patrick Bet-David discusses his take on what a “Grandmaster” CEO needs to do to be successful. His five moves are: Know yourself, know how to reason, build a principled team, build in a strategy focus, and establish strong plays in the Market. You can tell that Patrick Bet-David comes from a Sales background because he’s pretty aggressive in approaching feedback and setting expectations of you throughout the book.

Side note about the audiobook: You know how you can usually speed up professional narrators? You can’t speed up Patrick Bet-David because it will be unintelligible if you do. If anything, you have to slow him down. This is another indicator that he came from a Sales background.

As an example of his thought process, there is a part of the book where he talks about hiring “Lions,” people that will go after it, and (in the same breadth) laments sensitive people or “Lambs,” as he calls them. What separates him from accidentally becoming the Alec Baldwin character in Glengarry Glenn Ross is his reflective, analytic, and distinctly human approach to career success — even if he sometimes comes off as harsh. His stories are pretty fantastic and eye-opening and he appears to pull very few punches with these stories. Some of them are pretty wild, but all of them have a lesson. His self-inventory exercises are fantastic. In the end, he definitely knows what got him here and his willingness to share in depth is what separates this book from others. “Advancement is rarely based on merit alone” is a great mantra if you are trying to grow but, as Patrick Bet-David would say, you have to know what you want in order to get there. Start with his first move, “Know Yourself” and start asking what your future self looks like and what would have to be true to make it happen.

More from the Reading List here.