Transcript for

Episode 85:

Strategy vs. Tactics, and Why Spinners Need Both

Do you know the difference between a tactic and a strategy? I'm going to break it down in this episode, and explain why as spinners we need both.

Hello there darling Sheepspotter! Welcome to episode 85 of The Sheepspot Podcast. I'm Sasha, and my job is to help you make more yarns you love.

I opened this episode asking if you knew the difference between strategy and tactics and I want to start with a little story. When I was rerecording my intro for the podcast—I wanted to update a couple of things for the new iteration—I realized that I had confused strategy with tactics. I said that I was going to give you actionable strategies for making more yarns you love, when what I really meant was tactics. I wasn't offering you strategies, I was offering you tactics.

Strategy, according to Oxford Languages, is "a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim." A tactic," according to Mirriam-Webster, is "the art or skill of employing available means to accomplish an end." 

So a strategy is a plan to achieve a big goal, whereas a tactic is a concrete action taken toward that goal. One way to think about this that I've found useful is that strategy is the art of figuring out what not to do, and tactics are about what to do. 

Let's put this in spinning terms. Say you want to spin for and knit a sweater because you've fallen in love with the pattern. In this case, having the sweater is the goal. 

With the end in mind, you're going to plan your spin. So you'll make a series of choices to design a good yarn for your sweater: the fiber, how the fiber is prepared, what tool you'll use to spin it, the draft you'll use, how you'll ply it, how you'll finish it. And as you're making these decisions, you're discarding—choosing not to do—all the options that won't work for your particular sweater. You're creating a strategy to get you to the goal of having that beautiful sweater. 

Once you've got your strategy, you're ready for the actual concrete actions that will create the yarn: choosing the fiber, perhaps washing and preparing the fiber, getting your wheel set up, spinning the singles, plying, finishing, and measuring your yarn, casting on. 

But I'm actually more interested in how we create strategy around goals bigger than a single project, and specifically how to create a strategy to become the spinner you want to be, whatever that means for you. So here the big goal is you, as the happiest, most satisfied, most skillful spinner you can be. How do you get there? This is something that we spinners don't spend a lot of time talking about. 

First, I think a lot of spinners don't really have a vision of our ideal future spinning self, and in this I think I may be a little unusual. I actually did have a big vision of the kind of spinner I wanted to be almost as soon as I started spinning. I knew that I wanted to be very proficient technically and also that I wanted to be versatile. I wanted to be able to spin whatever I wanted to and feel very competent while doing it. 

I also think that mostly we're busy with the project goals and the tactics those require—and with just finding time to spin and live our lives. 

Finally, spinning educations is very focused on tactics—on the tips and tricks—and I'm as guilty of this as anyone. I love teaching people the little tricks that will make their spinning easier and their yarns better. It's incredibly satisfying. Helping folks cast a vision of their ideal future spinning selves is a lot more complicated. But the longer I teach spinning the more important I think it is to help spinners do just that. 

So I'd like to invite you to harness that great beginning of the year energy and spend some time this month thinking about your ideal future spinning self. Who is she? What's she like? What can she do well? What doesn't she bother with? What adjectives describe her? What does she aspire to? 

To help you with this thought experiment, I've created a free downloadable worksheet to go with this episode, just in case you need a little help casting this vision of your IFSS.

To get access to the worksheet, join us in The Flock, Sheepspot’s free online community for inquisitive handspinners. There you’ll find all the downloads I've created for the podcast, plus lots of other free resources, including three self-guided spinning challenges to uplevel your spinning skills.

To summarize quickly, in this episode I've talked about strategy and tactics, I've posited some of the reasons we tend, as spinners and spinning teachers, to focus much more on tactics than strategy,  I've suggested that it may be useful for you develop a vision of what kind of spinner you'd like to become, and I've created a free resource that I hope will help you do just that. So go to The Flock and grab it, and let me know if you find it useful. 

There's also a post in The Flock where you can comment on and discuss this episode if you'd like. I'll link to it in the show notes, which you can find at sheepspot.com/podcast/episode85.

That's it for me this time. I'll be back next time with another episode. In the meantime, spin something. You know it will do you good.