Several times a day, Napoleon believed a commander should ask themselves, “What if the enemy were to appear now to my front, or on my right, or on my left?” We can imagine that the point of this exercise was not to make his generals anxious. No, it was to make sure they were prepared. Yet we’re too worried about “tempting fate” or “manifesting bad energy” to practice this kind of diligent leadership. And it is in fact the leader’s job to think about the unthinkable. For more than two thousand years, military leaders have had some version of the same maxim: The only inexcusable offense for an
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