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Clear long-term objectives give direction to all of your actions, large and small. Important decisions become easier to make.
On the other hand, if your goals lack a certain dimension and grandeur, it can be hard to stay motivated.
Do not be afraid to be bold. In the large sense, you are working out for yourself what Alexander experienced as his destiny and what Friedrich Nietzsche called your “life’s task”—the thing toward which your natural leanings and aptitudes, talents and desires, seem to point you. Assigning yourself a life task will inspire and guide you.
Your task as a grand strategist is to force yourself to widen your view, to take in more of the world around you, to see things for what they are and for how they may play out in the future, not for how you wish them to be.
The closer you get to objectivity, the better your strategies and the easier the path to your goals.
The fable shows that it is no good waiting until danger comes to be ready.
Your own cultural preconceptions are a major hindrance to seeing the world objectively. Looking through other people’s eyes is not a question of political correctness or of some soft, hazy sensitivity; it makes your strategies more effective.
In the same way as a man who has not fully mastered a foreign language sometimes fails to express himself correctly, so statesmen often issue orders that defeat the purpose they are meant to serve.
The solution, of course, is to plan ahead but also to plan subtly—to take the indirect route.
War is never merely about victory on the battlefield or the simple conquest of land; it is about the pursuit of a policy that cannot be realized in any other way than through force.
failure in war is a failure of policy. The goals of the war, and the policies that drove it, were unrealistic, inappropriate, blind to other factors.
So when something goes wrong, look deep into yourself—not in an emotional way, to blame yourself or indulge your feelings of guilt, but to make sure that you start your next campaign with a firmer step and greater vision.
Second, the detachment necessary to grand strategy can bring you to a point where you find it hard to act. Understanding the world too well, you see too many options and become as indecisive as Hamlet.
Knowing how to control your emotions means not repressing them completely but using them to their best effect.
Beware of projecting your own emotions and mental habits onto them; try to think as they think.
Bait.—“Everyone has his price”—this is not true. But there surely exists for everyone a bait he cannot help taking.
Macnaghten had the information but refused to see it. Instead he projected onto the Afghans the values of an Englishman, which he mistakenly assumed were universal.
We unintentionally offend and alienate people, then blame them, not our inability to understand them, for the damage done.
Understand: if you let narcissism act as a screen between you and other people, you will misread them and your strategies will misfire. You must be aware of this and struggle to see others dispassionately. Every individual is like an alien culture. You must get inside his or her way of thinking, not as an exercise in sensitivity but out of strategic necessity. Only by knowing your enemies can you ever hope to vanquish them.
Granting that people generally acquire fixed habits early in life, a man’s end may therefore be foreseen by midlife: “Someone who is still disliked at forty years of age will end by being so.”
The greatest power you could have in life would come neither from limitless resources nor even consummate skill in strategy. It would come from clear knowledge of those around you—the ability to read people like a book.
The first step in the process is to get over the idea that people are impenetrable mysteries and that only some trick will let you peek into their souls. If they seem mysterious, it is because almost all of us learn to disguise our true feelings and intentions from an early age.
To the extent that you can drop your self-interest and see people for who they are, divorced from your desires, you will become more sensitive to their signals.
You will be amazed at how much you can pick up about people if you can shut off your incessant interior monologue, empty your thoughts, and anchor yourself in the moment.
The oily character who is ingratiatingly effusive with flattery may be hiding hostility and ill will;
they may be trying to convince themselves that they’re not what they’re afraid they are—the opposite trait lurks below the surface.
He achieved this by adapting the ancient Chinese strategy of slow-slow-quick-quick.
But most often people are merely in a hurry, acting and reacting frantically to events, all of which makes them prone to error and wasting time in the long run.
Now more than ever, we find ourselves dealing with people who are defensive and cautious, who begin any action from a static position. The reason is simple: the pace of modern life is increasingly growing faster, full of distractions, annoyances, and interruptions. The natural response for many is to retreat inward, to erect psychological walls against the harsh realities of modern life. People hate the feeling of being rushed and are terrified of making a mistake. They unconsciously try to slow things down—by taking longer to make decisions, being noncommittal, defensive, and cautious.
This strategy works wonders on those who are particularly hesitant and afraid of making any kind of mistake.
Velocity creates a sense of vitality.
You must be slow in deliberation and swift in execution. —Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821)
First, recognize the struggle for control in all aspects of life, and never be taken in by those who claim they are not interested in control. Such types are often the most manipulative of all. Second, you must master the art of moving the other side like pieces on a chessboard, with purpose and direction. This art was cultivated by the most creative generals and military strategists throughout the ages.
Many people tend to play unconscious games of domination or get caught up in trying to control someone else’s every move. In trying to manage and determine too much, they exhaust themselves, make mistakes, push people away, and in the end lose control of the situation. If you understand and master the art, you will instantly become more creative in your approach to influencing and controlling the other side.
Given the same amount of intelligence, timidity will do a thousand times more damage in war than audacity. CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ, 1780–1831
Everything in this world conspires to put you on the defensive.
Before anything, you need to liberate yourself from this feeling. By acting boldly, before others are ready, by moving to seize the initiative, you create your own circumstances rather than simply waiting for what life brings you.
Boldness will be at a disadvantage only in an encounter with deliberate caution, which may be considered bold in its own right,
Deliberately shake up the pace of the slow waltz by doing something seemingly irrational.
Injecting novelty and mobility is often enough to unbalance the minds of your rigid and defensive opponents.
Douglass had noticed that slaveholders often “prefer to whip those who are most easily whipped.” Now he had learned the lesson for himself: never again would he be submissive. Such weakness only encouraged the tyrants to go further. He would rather risk death, returning blow for blow with his fists or his wits.
For the rest of his life, he adopted this fighting stance: by being unafraid of the consequences, Douglass gained a degree of control of his situation both physically and psychologically.
The other side has endless possibilities for using your fear to help control you, keep you on the defensive. Those who are tyrants and domineering types can smell your anxiety, and it makes them even more tyrannical. Before anything else you must lose your fear—of death, of the consequences of a bold maneuver, of other people’s opinion of you. That single moment will suddenly open up vistas of possibilities. And in the end whichever side has more possibilities for positive action has greater control.
Instead move within their system of control, applying Erickson’s Utilization Technique. Be sympathetic to their plight, but make it seem that whatever they do, they are actually cooperating with your own desires. That will put them off balance; if they rebel now, they are playing into your hands.
There is no escape from the control dynamic. Those who say they are doing so are playing the most insidious control game of all.
Often what separates a mediocre general from a superior one is not their strategies or maneuvers but their vision—they simply look at the same problem from a different angle. Freed from the stranglehold of convention, the superior general naturally hits on the right strategy.
War is a visceral, emotional affair, an arena of physical danger, and it takes great effort to rise above this level and ask different questions: What makes the enemy army move? What gives it impetus and endurance? Who guides its actions? What is the underlying source of its strength?
To find a group’s center of gravity, you must understand its structure and the culture within which it operates. If your enemies are individuals, you must fathom their psychology, what makes them tick, the structure of their thinking and priorities.
Your enemy’s center of gravity can be something abstract, like a quality, concept, or aptitude on which he depends: his reputation, his capacity to deceive, his unpredictability. But such strengths become critical vulnerabilities if you can make them unattractive or unusable.
To find an enemy’s center of gravity, you have to erase your own tendency to think in conventional terms or to assume that the other side’s center is the same as your own.
