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Deep knowledge of the terrain will let you process information faster than your enemy, a tremendous advantage. Getting a feel for the spirit of men and material, thinking your way into them instead of looking at them from outside, will help to put you in a different frame of mind, less conscious and forced, more unconscious and intuitive.
Confidence, fearlessness, and self-reliance are as crucial in times of peace as in times of war.
You must find a way to put yourself in the thick of battle, then watch yourself in action. Look for your own weaknesses, and think about how to compensate for them.
You do not want to lose your presence of mind in key situations, but it is a wise course to find a way to make your enemies lose theirs.
You are your own worst enemy. You waste precious time dreaming of the future instead of engaging in the present. Since nothing seems urgent to you, you are only half involved in what you do. The only way to change is through action and outside pressure. Put yourself in situations where you have too much at stake to waste time or resources—if you cannot afford to lose, you won’t. Cut your ties to the past; enter unknown territory where you must depend on your wits and energy to see you through. Place yourself on “death ground,” where your back is against the wall and you have to fight like hell
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People who involve themselves completely in the immediate problem are intimidating; because they are focusing so intensely,
you must locate the root of your problem.
you may see this fallback as a blessing—but in fact it is a curse.
if he felt he had grown too comfortable and complacent, he would go to a casino and gamble away all his money. Poverty and debt were for him a kind of symbolic death, throwing him back on the possible nothingness of his life.
As a warrior in life, you must turn this dynamic around: make the thought of death something not to escape but to embrace. Your days are numbered. Will you pass them half awake and halfhearted or will you live with a sense of urgency?
when that sense of urgency goes, we really do not know how to get it back.
“death ground”—a
we are creatures who are intimately tied to our environment—we respond viscerally to our circumstances and to the people around us. If our situation is easy and relaxed, if people are friendly and warm, our natural tension unwinds. We may even grow bored and tired; our environment is failing to challenge us, although we may not realize it. But put yourself in a high-stakes situation—a psychological death ground—and the dynamic changes. Your body responds to danger with a surge of energy; your mind focuses. Urgency is forced on you; you are compelled to waste no more time.
The trick is to use this effect deliberately from time to time, to practice it on yourself as a kind of wake-up call.
Stake everything on a single throw.
Act before you are ready.
Under pressure your creativity will flourish. Do this often and you will develop your ability to think and act fast.
Enter new waters.
Make it “you against the world.”
A fighting spirit needs a little edge, some anger and hatred to fuel it. So do not sit back and wait for people to get aggressive; irritate and infuriate them deliberately. Feeling cornered by a multitude of people who dislike you, you will fight like hell.
Keep yourself restless and unsatisfied.
When we are tired, it is often because we are bored. When no real challenge faces us, a mental and physical lethargy sets in.
Make risk a constant practice; never let yourself settle down.
Life has more meaning in the face of death. The risks you keep taking, the challenges you keep overcoming, are like symbolic deaths that sharpen your appreciation of life.
Authority: When you will survive if you fight quickly and perish if you do not, this is called [death] ground…. Put them in a spot where they have no place to go, and they will die before fleeing. If they are to die there, what can they not do? Warriors exert their full strength. When warriors are in great danger, then they have no fear. When there is nowhere to go, they are firm, when they are deeply involved, they stick to it. If they have no choice, they will fight. —The Art of War, Sun-tzu (fourth century B.C.)
You must avoid any conflict with people in this position. Maybe they are living in terrible conditions or, for whatever reason, are suicidal; in any case they are desperate, and desperate people will risk everything in a fight. This gives them a huge advantage. Already defeated by circumstances, they have nothing to lose. You do. Leave them alone.
attacking enemies when their morale is low gives you the advantage.
Always try to lower the other side’s sense of urgency.
The primary goal in war is to build speed and mobility into the very structure of your army. That means having a single authority on top, avoiding the hesitancy and confusion of divided leadership. It means giving soldiers a sense of the overall goal to be accomplished and the latitude to take action to meet that goal; instead of reacting like automatons, they are able to respond to events in the field. Finally, it means motivating soldiers, creating an overall esprit de corps that gives them irresistible momentum. With forces organized in this manner, a general can adapt to circumstances
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before formulating a strategy or taking action, understand the structure of your group.
The problem in leading any group is that people inevitably have their own agendas. If you are too authoritarian, they will resent you and rebel in silent ways. If you are too easygoing, they will revert to their natural selfishness and you will lose control. You have to create a chain of command in which people do not feel constrained by your influence yet follow your lead. Put the right people in place—people who will enact the spirit of your ideas without being automatons. Make your commands clear and inspiring, focusing attention on the team, not the leader. Create a sense of participation,
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The truth is that everything starts from the top.
If your orders are vague and halfhearted, by the time they reach the field they will be meaningless.
Unless you adapt your leadership style to the weaknesses of the people in your group, you will almost certainly end up with a break in the chain of command.
operate through a kind of remote control. Hire deputies who share your vision but can think on their own, acting as you would in their place.
divided leadership is a recipe for disaster, the cause of the greatest military defeats in history.
They aim to please others, to promote themselves, rather than to see things dispassionately. Where an individual can be bold and creative, a group is often afraid of risk.
A critical step in creating an efficient chain of command is assembling a skilled team that shares your goals and values.
The single greatest risk to your chain of command comes from the political animals in the group.
No good can ever come of divided leadership. If you are ever offered a position in which you will have to share command, turn it down, for the enterprise will fail and you will be held responsible. Better to take a lower position and let the other person have the job.
The critical elements in war are speed and adaptability—the ability to move and make decisions faster than the enemy. But speed and adaptability are hard to achieve today. We have more information than ever before at our fingertips, making interpretation and decision making more difficult. We have more people to manage, those people are more widely spread, and we face more uncertainty. Learn from Napoleon, warfare’s greatest master: speed and adaptability come from flexible organization. Break your forces into independent groups that can operate and make decisions on their own. Make your
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the future belongs to groups that are fluid, fast, and nonlinear.
Smaller teams are faster, more creative, more adaptable; their officers and soldiers are more engaged, more motivated.
In the end, fluidity will bring you far more power and control than petty domination.
The key to the Auftragstaktik is an overall group philosophy. This can be built around the cause you are fighting for or a belief in the evil of the enemy you face.
You must bring the group together around this belief. Then, through training and creative exercises, you must deepen its hold on them, infuse it into their blood.
In unifying your own hordes, find exercises to increase your troops’ knowledge of and trust in each other. This will develop implicit communication skills between them and their intuitive sense of what to do next.
Coddling your soldiers and acting as if everyone were equal will ruin discipline and promote the creation of factions. Victory will forge stronger bonds than superficial friendliness, and victory comes from discipline, training, and ruthlessly high standards.
do not struggle with your soldiers’ idiosyncrasies, but rather turn them into a virtue, a way to increase your potential force. Be creative with the group’s structure, keeping your mind as fluid and adaptable as the army you lead.
the rule of decentralization is flexible: some people respond better to rigid authority.