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March 8, 2017 - March 8, 2020
In a world that frowns on displays of overt aggression, the ability to fight defensively—to let others make the first move and then wait for their own mistakes to destroy them—will bring you untold power.
We all have limitations—our energies and skills will take us only so far. Danger comes from trying to surpass our limits.
make the war expensive for them and cheap for you.
In the utilization of a theater of war, as in everything else, strategy calls for economy of strength. The less one can manage with, the better; but manage one must, and here, as in commerce, there is more to it than mere stinginess.
“Pyrrhic victory,” signifying a triumph that is as good as a defeat, for it comes at too great a cost.
the more you want the prize, the more you must compensate by examining what getting it will take. Look beyond the obvious costs and think about the intangible ones:
history is littered with the corpses of people who ignored the costs. Save yourself unnecessary battles and live to fight another day.
He whom the ancients called an expert in battle gained victory where victory was easily gained.
In life you must be a warrior, and war requires realism.
The poor are more inventive, and often have more fun, because they value what they have and know their limits.
The fruit of good conduct is pure and untainted, they say, but suffering is the fruit of passion, ignorance the fruit of dark inertia.
To become a grand strategist does not involve years of study or a total transformation of your personality. It simply means more effective use of what you have—your mind, your rationality, your vision.
the punch that puts you to sleep is not so much the hard punch as the punch that you don’t see coming.
It is less your action than their missteps that give you control.
they simply look at the same problem from a different angle.
A novice chess player soon learns that it is a good idea to control the center of the board.
realize that there is no board and no singular topology.
what is the point of being direct and frontal if it only increases people’s resistance, and makes them more certain of their own ideas?
If their position is strong, get them to abandon it by leading them on a wild-goose chase. Create dilemmas: devise maneuvers that give them a choice of ways to respond—all of them bad.
you must have an unfettered mind to create anything worthwhile.
So to win a hundred victories in a hundred battles is not the highest excellence; the highest excellence is to subdue the enemy’s army without fighting at all.
One who is able to change and transform in accord with the enemy and wrest victory is termed spiritual.
Use this strategy in the battles of daily life, letting people commit themselves to a position you can turn into a dead end. Never say you are strong, show you are, by making a contrast between yourself and your inconsistent or moderate opponents.
The greatest power you can have in any conflict is the ability to confuse your opponent about your intentions.
observation-orientation-decision-action loop (the Boyd cycle)
Test Caught in the midst of the hundred enemies, how will you manage to win without surrendering and without fighting?
The only danger in maneuver is that you give yourself so many options that you yourself get confused. Keep it simple—limit yourself to the options you can control.
Trust is not a matter of ethics, it is another maneuver. Philip saw trust and friendship as qualities for sale.
over time, the people you treat nicely will take you for granted. They will see you as weak and exploitable. Being generous does not elicit gratitude but creates either a spoiled child or someone who resents behavior perceived as charity.
The lesson is simple: by continuing to advance, by keeping up unrelenting pressure, you force your enemies to respond and ultimately to negotiate. If you advance a little further every day, attempts to delay negotiation only make their position weaker.
Understand: if you are weak and ask for little, little is what you will get. But if you act strong, making firm, even outrageous demands, you will create the opposite impression: people will think that your confidence must be based on something real. You will earn respect, which in turn will translate into leverage.
The great British diplomat and writer Harold Nicholson believed there were two kinds of negotiators: warriors and shopkeepers. Warriors use negotiations as a way to gain time and a stronger position. Shopkeepers operate on the principle that it is more important to establish trust, to moderate each side’s demands and come to a mutually satisfying settlement. Whether in diplomacy or in business, the problem arises when shopkeepers assume they are dealing with another shopkeeper only to find they are facing a warrior.
In a world in which there are more and more warriors, you must be willing to wield the sword as well, even if you are a shopkeeper at heart.
He who in times of extraordinary salience of small things does not know how to call a halt, but restlessly seeks to press on and on, draws upon himself misfortune at the hands of gods and men, because he deviates from the order of nature.
Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant (They create desolation and call it peace).
Whate’er the course, the end is the renown.
In an age of violence and bloodshed, he had realized that ideas are more powerful than force.
The difference is that with a risk, if you lose, you can recover: your reputation will suffer no long-term damage, your resources will not be depleted, and you can return to your original position with acceptable losses. With a gamble, on the other hand, defeat can lead to a slew of problems that are likely to spiral out of control. With a gamble there tend to be too many variables to complicate the picture down the road if things go wrong. The problem goes further: if you encounter difficulties in a gamble, it becomes harder to pull out—you realize that the stakes are too high; you cannot
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To go too far is as bad as to fall short.
The only real ending is death. Everything else is a transition.
As Yasuda Ukyo said about offering up the last wine cup, only the end of things is important. One’s whole life should be like this. When guests are leaving, the mood of being reluctant to say farewell is essential. —Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai (1659–1720)
A conversation or story that goes on too long always ends badly. Overstaying your welcome, boring people with your presence, is the deepest failing: you should leave them wanting more of you, not less.
So often, those who have success become soft and imprudent; you must welcome defeat as a way to make yourself stronger.
First, nothing stays new for long. Those who depend on novelty must constantly come up with some fresh idea that goes against the orthodoxies of the time. Second, people who use unconventional methods are very hard to fight. The classic, direct route—the use of force and strength—does not work. You must use indirect methods to combat indirection, fight fire with fire, even at the cost of going dirty yourself. To try to stay clean out of a sense of morality is to risk defeat.
Control people’s perceptions of reality and you control them.
that you can never, by deception, persuade an enemy of anything not according with his own expectations, which usually are not far removed from his hopes.
The key to such a strategy, says [Colonel John] Boyd, is less deception (the creation of a false order) and more ambiguity (confusion about reality itself).
Once people feel you have deceived them, they will expect you to mislead them again, but they usually think you’ll try something different next time. No one, they will tell themselves, is so stupid as to repeat the exact same trick on the same person. That, of course, is just when to repeat it, following the principle of always working against your enemy’s expectations.
Make a false move, not to pass it for a genuine one but to transform it into a genuine one after the enemy has been convinced of its falsity.
knowing to anticipate the unexpected is not the same thing as knowing what the unexpected will be.
