How to Stretch Your Resources: Book Summary of “Stretch” by Scott Sonenshein
I found this book while exploring my library—ironically exercising my own resourcefulness!
I read the front jacket copy and fell in love:
“We often think the key to success and satisfaction is to get more: more money, time, possessions; bigger budgets, job titles, and teams; and additional resources for our professional and personal goals. It turns out we’re wrong.
Scott Sonenshein examines why some people and organizations succeed with so little, while others fail with so much.
People and organizations approach resources in two ways: ‘chasing’ and ‘stretching.’
When chasing, we exhaust ourselves in the pursuit of more.
When stretching, we embrace the resources we already have. This frees us to find creative and productive ways to solve problems, innovate, and engage our work and lives more fully.
Stretch shows why everyone—from executives to entrepreneurs, professionals to parents, athletes to artists—performs better with constraints; why seeking too many resources undermines our work and well-being; and why even those with a lot benefit from making the most out of a little.”
The idea of stretching resources has been on my mind constantly as I bootstrap my business.
After all, I transferred $4k to my business checking account, have no reliable employment income, have been sustaining my entire lifestyle, and have never looked back.
Turning a $4k investment into a full-time income? That is resourceful. And I’m not perfect, definitely not. But I am pursuing my dreams on a bootstrapped budget, which is pretty magical. I can use all the inspiration I can get on my journey! That’s why I loved this book so much.
The author’s story
Scott Sonenshein was recruited to Silicon Valley in his first year after college. He didn’t know anyone in CA but knew the area was “hot.” So he packed his bags and started his new role for Vividence, which had the best venture capital backers and lots of money. He wrote:
It was an exciting, growing company with new hires every week. The pantry was always packed with snacks, and there were free dinners catered nightly. I’d have my own team, a bigger title, and the potential to strike it rich. How could I say no?
He took the job that moved him away from his family and friends, saying it was “easy to get caught up in the valley’s booming growth and buzzing creativity.”
In a matter of months, Vividence crashed and burned. He even saw it on FuckedCompany.com before hearing news of the layoffs.
Just then, 9/11 happened. His colleague, Jeremy Glick, was on United Flight 93 heading back to company headquarters.
“Placed in the most harrowing circumstances, Jeremy quickly teamed up with several other passengers to resist the attackers. Short on time and tools, they mounted a brave fight with what little they had, saving many lives by forcing the plane to the ground in rural Pennslyvania, away from a major population center.”
The 9/11 tragedy and losing his friend forced Scott to re-evaluate his life. He left Silicon Valley to start a PhD in organizational behavior at the University of Michigan. There, he got to study the biggest questions on his mind:
Why do we get caught up chasing what we don’t have?
How is it possible to achieve fulfilling lives with what’s already in hand?
Having more resources ≠ getting better results
When you want to complete a project faster, you might think: add more staff. Or to help a declining product, you might think: boost the marketing budget. To make schools more effective, hire more teachers. To get Government to work better, provide a bigger budget. If you want to improve your relationship, buy a more expensive gift. The list goes on and on.
Scott writes, “There is a comforting intuition to this approach. It seems natural that the more you have, the more you can do and the better you will feel.”
However, it often fails to produce the results we want. In the process, “we chase resources we don’t need and overlook the full potential of the resources we already have in hand.”
Better use of resources = getting better results
People who stretch “ask what more they can do with what they have, instead of asking what’s missing.”
What do a lot of stretchers have in common? Constraint.
Oftentimes, we aren’t resourceful unless our backs are against the wall.
“Almost all of us face some type of constraint or limitation. We regularly encounter gaps between what we want to accomplish and what we have in hand. People who are resourceful instead ask: How do I take what I have and get the job done?”
There’s a lot we can learn from people who overcome constraints.
Stretching allows us to “see possibility in what we have.”
Engineering vs. Bricolage
French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss observed two different approaches for how people get stuff done. The first is called “engineering” and the second “bricolage.”
Engineering: Search for a specific tool
Chasers endorse this method because they take a narrow view of what resources can do.
If you need to put a nail into the wall, engineers will buy a hammer.
Without access to a hammer, engineers don’t believe the job is possible to accomplish.
“To anticipate their challenges, engineers accumulate as many tools as possible, focusing heavily on their toolbox instead of the task at hand. A lot of effort goes into looking for the right tools and not actually putting nails into walls. Without the right tools or resources, engineers are lost.”
Bricolage: Make use of the tools you already have
Stretchers love the bricolage method because it forces them to test the conventional limitations of what’s at hand. To get the nail into the wall, they’ll pick up a rock or brick.
The challenge of the bricolage method is to free ourselves from conventional thinking that pushes us to always want to use a hammer. There’s psychological discomfort that comes from using things in different ways. That’s why our gut instinct is to buy a hammer and only use resources like rocks or bricks if times are desperate.
Scott wrote, “What if we intentionally avoided the hardware store and forced ourselves to make the most of what we have?”
The costly game of chasing
Chasers spend more money on tools. But more importantly, they misalign how they spend their time.
Chasers think they need more resources to accomplish a job and worry about not having enough resources. They spend their lives accumulating resources instead of building something meaningful.
Is your goal to accumulate resources or to achieve a particular goal?
I think many of us can relate to having goals that are entirely based on accumulating more resources, sometimes without even asking ourselves what we want to do with those resources—or why. This certainly comes to mind as I think about my own income and net worth goals.
Why do we have a tendency to chase resources?
Pick your poison:
Social comparison: We accumulate resources because we’re comparing our lives to other people (we need a bigger house, fancier vacations). Social media has exacerbated this for many of us
Functional fixedness: An inability to use a resource beyond its intended use
Mindless accumulation: We accumulate resources, not because we have a goal in mind, but rather just to collect more
How many Dove Bites can you really eat?
One study assigned certain participants to be “high-earners” and others to be “low-earners.” The high-earners had to push a button 20 times to receive a Dove Bite. The low-earners had to push it 120 times to get a Dove Bite.
High earners received 10.7 chocolates on average while low earners acquired 2.5 chocolates.
After earning, the participants were allowed to eat the Dove Bites. High earners ate 4.3 chocolates on average, compared with 1.7 for low earners.
Both groups accumulated more chocolate than they needed to eat. High earners in particular focused on accumulating the most.
And who was more satisfied at the end of the study? The low earners—because they had capped conditions.
“Chasing sometimes leads us to get more stuff, but it’s stuff we don’t often need to pursue our goals and it frequently burns us out. The more important question we should ask: what do we really want to accomplish?”
Chasing not just money, but also endless knowledge
When we think of resources, we often think of money. But there is also the drive to endlessly acquire knowledge in hopes that it will solve something for us. I can personally relate to this. I’ll read books and devour podcasts in hopes that it will finally give me a golden nugget of knowledge I need on my journey. But sometimes, reading more and more books on a topic can actually overwhelm us and distract us from the task at hand. Action breeds clarity.
Why psychological ownership leads to more ‘stretching’ and therefore better financial performance
The most relatable example is thinking how we’d spend $10k of our own money versus someone else’s. If someone handed us a $10k check, would we blow it on a vacation because it feels like free money? Or would we invest it?
Perhaps that’s the beauty of bootstrapped businesses. We consider our own resources much more deeply because they are our own.
When franchised store owners have a high sense of ownership, they financially perform better. They cut costs and examine their profitability.
Why?
Because they don’t want to lose their precious resources and what’s on the line is gaining more of resources that they would own.
Perhaps that’s why we work harder in our own businesses than we do for someone else.
This gives us two concrete ways to motivate ourselves to be resourceful:
Give ourselves constraints
Focus on our ownership of the outcomes
Why are the cheapest people often the most successful?
Scott outlined example after example of people who grew up poor or experienced financial devastation only to go on and build billion-dollar companies. What do they all have in common? Making the most of what they have.
The “just do it” example in the snowy Alps
There’s a remarkable tale of Hungarian soldiers who got lost in the Alps in snowy conditions. After they returned unharmed, their lieutenant asked how they made their way back and one of the soldiers said he found a map in his pocket. “After examining the map, the lieutenant was baffled. It was a map of a different set of mountains—the Pyrenees.”
When our bearings our lost, the saying goes that “any map will do.”
Even though their map covered a different territory, it “prevented them from panicking about what they lacked and got them moving.”
“By moving, they learned about their surroundings and kept talking about their shared goal of getting back to camp safely. The map’s value rested not in its accuracy but rather in its ability to be a catalyst for action. Even though we often give credit for our success to our professional and personal maps—our plans—it’s our actions that usually explain the results. The problem is that many of us like to stay put, getting lost in the excesses of planning or, especially for chasers, waiting for the right resources to fall into place before action.”
European sailing versus the Trukese method
Scott regularly asks his classroom full of students how they’d approach sailing across the ocean if they were alive several hundred years ago. Most of them say they’d study maps, look for an optimal route, and chart a course. When he tells them there might be unpredictable storms, they say they’ll adjust the plan as they go.
“Under European navigational approaches for hundreds of years, this is the correct approach.”
And it seems to be the predominant way that most of us think even today:
Formulate a plan
Accumulate resources for the plan
Implement plan
Track progress
Reformulate as needed
This approach serves us well “when we have reasonably good information and sufficient time. But what if we lack information about the future? What if the future is always changing?”
Scott says, “That’s when we need a different way of sailing.”
So if not the European approach, what are other approaches?
“Far from Europe live the Trukese, native inhabitants of the tiny island of Chuuk in the Caroline Islands of Micronesia. They don’t make detailed plans when they’re navigating the seas. They don’t even chart a course. When sailing, they see how their movements interact with their surroundings and make adjustments along the way, carefully responding to the currents and winds. If you were to ask a Trukese captain how he planned to travel the high seas, he would have difficulty answering the question because he doesn’t know until he does it. Simply put, they just do it.”
Do we really need plans, maps, and excess resources while pursuing our goals? Or are they just comfort objects like holding a teddy bear as we embark on epic quests? We might not be sailing across the ocean but maybe we’re building a business from scratch, pursuing a career goal, or just trying to manage the daily demands of family life. Could we be a bit more like the Trukese and…just do it?
If you ask me how to build a business, I could show you a map but in reality, I won’t know until I do it. And even then, no two businesses are alike, so maybe the advice, “just do it” is the most motivating and helpful thing of all.
The role of improvising
The future is hard to predict: new competitors emerge, our audiences’ taste changes, and we might experience professional and personal setbacks. Our most perfect plans go awry. So would you rather be a skilled plan-maker or a skilled improviser? Improvisers act fast in ever-changing situations.
Scott wrote, “We don’t need a script, we just need to call ‘Action!’”
I’ve seen this in my own business. I have a tendency to spend time planning and not doing. I want the best time management system before I get started. I often procrastinate out of fear. I want my work to be perfect. But the only work that matters is the work that is shipped out into the world (like this article). No one will ever see my perfectly curated Trello board, even though it does help me stay on task, but they will see this article. This article can actually help someone. In many ways, the content creation efforts of any business owner is improvisation. We keep creating and learning what our audience likes.
That’s all we can ever do in life and business. Take action → gather data on the results (what Scott calls “listening”) → continue to take action. We’re not always going to get it right, but what matters is we keep going.
Resourcefulness in our businesses
As a business owner, there are a few ways I’ve forced myself to be resourceful:
I keep a list of all recurring expenses and examine them regularly to make sure there are no subscriptions that I don’t use. I also look for free alternatives when possible.
Focusing on organic marketing versus paid
I could sponsor a newsletter for $450 and get 20 new email signups
Or I could DM 100 people on Twitter telling them about my newsletter and watch as 20 new people sign up
SEO and content marketing is my favorite organic marketing tool. Articles like this one rank in Google and new site visitors land here every day. Learn more about Content and SEO here.
Re-investing profits in the business versus looking for new outside resources
Avoiding expense creep as the business grows. One of the reasons why I chose this business model is that my expenses can stay relatively flat while revenue grows
Getting mentally comfortable with using the resources I already have and seeing it as more than enough to grow a successful business
The Greek fisherman and the Harvard businessman
If you haven’t heard this famous fable, you can read the whole thing here. The fisherman has a great life fishing all day, eating fresh food, taking a mid-day nap, and spending time with his family and friends in the evening. The Harvard businessman convinces him to make his fishing enterprise bigger and bigger. The fisherman keeps asking why? “So you can have millions and then one day sell it and have free time to fish, nap, and spend time with your family.” The fisherman already has that! We can skip the headaches of building a billion-dollar company and just enjoy what we already have (the things that matter most).
It’s easy to think that what we want is on the other side of accumulating resources.
But accumulating resources actually distracts us from the task at hand and what matters most.
How to know when you’ve crossed the line from frugal to cheapskate
“All virtues become vices when taken to their extreme” —Aristotle
Scott used this as an example: “A cheapskate is someone who has the means to repair their house but chooses to let it deteriorate to the point of hazardous instead.”
In other words, they avoid spending money to the point of deteriorating their lives and businesses.
Scott notes that stretchers spend money when they find enough value, whereas chasers have an unquenchable thirst for consuming goods.
Give yourself constraints with not just your money, but also your time
I’ve noticed this in my own work life. If I give myself 8-3pm to get my work done, I’ll meander through the day and take unfulfilling breaks. If I tell myself I can get the tasks done from 8-10am, suddenly, I’m laser-focused.
In the first version, I’ve “worked” all day and gotten a few things done.
In the second version, I’ve worked for two hours, got a few things done, and have the rest of the day free.
Stretching resources gives us more of the resources we crave. The person who is chasing money is likely spending tons of money to get there. The irony!
We can also give ourselves constraints in other areas. This is the art of minimalism. For example, how might owning less clothes make you happier as you get dressed every day? We can constrain our closets, the size of our houses, etc. When we give ourselves constraints, we find a way to make it work, often in ways that make us happier in the long-run.
Stretchers are satisfied; chasers are not
I believe we inherently like challenges and constraints.
It motivates us to think creatively.
Therefore, challenge isn’t something to be avoided. It makes us brave, interesting, creative, resourceful, and—satisfied—something that chasers almost never feel.
When you stretch your resources to accomplish a goal, you have more mastery and pride in what you’ve accomplished.
Scott encourages all of us to “unlock the power of less to achieve more than you ever imagined.”
