Work The System by Sam Carpenter – Summary With Notes and Highlights

📕 Book Summary in 3 Sentences

What can I say about the book in 3 sentences?

1. Life is a collection of parts that come together to achieve a result.
2. Break your life into manageable parts: your business, your body, your relationships, your family, etc.
3. Break these into more manageable parts and fix them one at a time. For instance, viewing your business as a collection of parts, you can focus on fixing the sections that matter.

🤔 Major Insights/Ideas

What are the significant insights or ideas in the book?

1. Insight 1: A business comprises parts that come together to achieve results. You can then list the different parts of your business and fix them one at a time. The idea is to isolate the whole into smaller pieces and fix each at a time. This makes business a more manageable entity to assemble and reassemble. By breaking a massive task into manageable parts, there is more clarity for action to be taken.
2. Insight 2: The improvement of the business is geared towards improving parts of the systems. For instance, comparing your body to your business, if you have leg pains, you fix it to enable your body to move better.
3. Insight 3: You manage the collection of parts to fix what needs work, throw away what is not working, and add new parts.
4. Insight 4: A well-oiled collection of systems produces intended results. Random results come from unmanaged parts of the business.
5. Insight 5: There are three critical documents to establish a business. The direction, the principles that guide decisions, and the working procedures.
6. Insight 6: The business has to have an aim or objective. You need to know what you want to achieve.
7. Insight 7: The guiding principle for making decisions is crucial to build a value system. Is your business about work-life balance? Is your business about treating your employees as family?
8. Insight 8: The working procedure builds the running wheels of the business. The working procedure is for documenting the repeated actions in the business. It’s similar to an SOP or standard operating procedure. When a business figures out a solution to a process, it writes it down so it doesn’t need to relearn it.
9. Insight 9:Documenting your business processes is the difference between a successful business and a struggling one.
10. Insight 10:Documenting your life – journaling – is the difference between an organized, successful person and a person struggling.
11. Insight 11: Create a mindset of being a project engineer. You work on tweaking your collection parts in the business. You treat your business as a car. With parts to fix, preventive maintenance, and regular maintenance

💬 Notable Quotes

What are your top quotes?

• Your life is a collection of individual systems. Fix those systems, one at a time, and you will fix your life.
• What you say or think is irrelevant. It’s what you do that counts. Failure is not taking action.
• First, work on your systems. Then, your systems do the work.
• My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake and live in a constant, total amazement state. – Patricia (Meg Ryan) from the Movies Joe vs the Volcano.

✍🏼 My Personal Reflections

How has your life/behavior/thoughts/ideas changed after reading the book?

• It was a mindset shift for me to view my business as manageable parts. It made it easier for me to quickly identify the parts that were not working and discard or fix them. I appreciate the working parts, and I do more of them.

💡Actionable Steps/Ideas (if any):

• I started documenting my life. I started journaling again. I use my journals to determine which part of my life system works.
• I also established a Standard Operating Procedure for commonly repeated tasks in my business. It means my team can now use their time to create new solutions instead of remembering stuff.

🔆 Book Highlights

1. Fundamentally, every business is a system: a collection of processes that reliably produce an intended result together.
2. The more you focus on improving your business systems, the better results you’ll produce. It’s as simple as that.
3. Your life is a collection of individual systems. Fix those systems, one at a time, and you will fix your life.
4. A successful business is a self-sustaining entity of worth that creates value for all involved.
5. My father says that almost the whole world is asleep. Everybody you know. Everybody you see. Everybody you talk to. He says that only a few people are awake, and they live in a state of constant, total amazement. – Patricia (Meg Ryan) from the Movies Joe vs the Volcano.
6. Your primary job is to manage your collection of systems : to fix the broken ones, to discard the ones that are dragging you down, and yes, to introduce some new ones.
7. By perfecting your life’s individual systems-by identifying them and then rebuilding them one by one-order and peace will accumulate incrementally.
8. And remember this rule of thumb: unmanaged systems produce random results, and random results always add up to chaos.
9. First work your systems. Then your systems do the work.
10. Know the times you are low on energy and never make important decisions (Late Afternoons and Evenings)
11. Management works in the system. Leadership works on the system. -Stephen Covey
12. Avoid becoming caught up in the work. Instead, step outside, look down, and isolate individual systems. Then, deciding overall what you want them to accomplish, identify defects as well as outside changing situations. Then improve the systems while always documenting the revisions.
13. The difference between a large successful business and a small struggling one? Documentation. The former has it. The latter doesn’t.
14. What you say or think is irrelevant. It’s what you do that counts. Failure is not taking action
15. For any given primary system (Car, Body, Business, a relationship) , to ensure desired results occur over and over again, the task is to adjust its subsystems so the correct components are being used and they are sequenced properly.
16. What are the 3 critical documents to establish a business?
17. First, I would create the strategic objective, which would define us and set our direction.
18. Second, I would put together the general operating principles document, which would serve as our“guideline for making decisions.”
19. Third, we would begin to write out working procedures, which would exactly detail every recurring process of the business.