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gain time to turn inward, rethink your ideas, separate the true believers from the hangers-on. Time becomes your ally. By doing nothing outwardly, you gain inner strength, which will translate into tremendous power later, when it is time to act.
Space I can recover. Time, never. —Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821)
If you are always advancing, always attacking, always responding to people emotionally, you have no time to gain perspective. Your strategies will be weak and mechanical, based on things that happened in the past or to someone else. Like a monkey, you will imitate instead of create.
Key phrase - monkey
Around the world every mythology has a hero who retreats, even to Hades itself in the case of Odysseus, to find himself.
Keyidea
When you fight someone more powerful than you are, you lose more than your possessions and position; you lose your ability to think straight, to keep yourself separate and distinct.
Key idea
Most people respond to aggression by in some way getting involved with it. It is almost impossible to hold back. By disengaging completely and retreating, you show great power and restraint.
Your enemies are desperate for you to react; retreat infuriates and provokes them into further attack. So keep retreating, exchanging space for time.
Key idea
short of murder—not even the most powerful aggressors can take time away from you unless you let them.
When enemies attack you in overwhelming force, instead of retreating you may sometimes decide to engage them directly. You are inviting martyrdom, perhaps even hoping for it, but martyrdom, too, is a strategy,
Taqa
Retreat must never be an end in itself; at some point you have to turn around and fight. If you don’t, retreat is more accurately called surrender: the enemy wins. Combat is in the long run unavoidable.
Key concept
This means thinking in terms of a campaign, not individual battles. It also means knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the other side, so that you can calibrate your strikes to its vulnerabilities.
This idea of a campaign is key and possibly the crux of some research
Call this - setting the board.
see if chess strategy appluez
Controlling the temptation to react to events as they happen, you determine each of your actions according to your ultimate goals. You think in terms not of individual battles but of a campaign.
suffering is the fruit of passion,
ignorance the fruit of dark inertia.
Men who are lucid go upward; men of passion stay in between; men of dark inertia, caught in vile ways, sink low.
the two sides of our character, rational and animal, are constantly at war, making almost all of our actions awkward. We reason and plan to achieve a goal, but in the heat of action we become emotional and lose perspective.
The first step toward becoming a grand strategist—the step that will make everything else fall into place—is to begin with a clear, detailed, purposeful goal in mind, one rooted in reality.
Having clear objectives was crucial to Napoleon. He visualized his goals in intense detail—at the beginning of a campaign, he could see its last battle clearly in his mind. Examining a map with his aides, he would point to the exact spot where it would end—a
He would also visualize the campaign’s aftermath: the signing of the treaty, its conditions, how the defeated Russian czar or Austrian emperor would look, and exactly how the achievement of this particular goal would position Napoleon for his next campaign.
Clear long-term objectives give direction to all of your actions, large and small. Important decisions become easier to make.
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.
Tactic
You can take a step in this direction by always trying to look at the world through the eyes of other people—including, most definitely, your enemy—before
you must figure out your grand strategy with a mind to gaining support from other people—to creating and strengthening a base.
Politics
To work out a grand strategy against an enemy, you have to know what motivates him or is the source of his power.
Politics
Tactic
plan ahead but also to plan subtly—to take the indirect route. Preventing your opponent from seeing the purpose of your actions gives you an enormous advantage. So make your first move merely a setup, designed to extract a response from your opponent that opens him up to what comes next.
Tactic
Always pay attention to the first step of the campaign. It sets the tempo, determines the enemy’s mind-set, and launches you in a direction that had better be the right one.
When an action goes wrong—in business, in politics, in life—trace it back to the policy that inspired it in the first place. The goal was misguided.
We unintentionally offend and alienate people, then blame them, not our inability to understand them, for the damage done.
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.
Tactic
Tai Kung, Six Secret Teachings (circa fourth century B.C.)
Future reading?
RALPH D. SAWYER, THE TAO OF SPYCRAFT, 1998
Future readi g?
THE ART OF POLITICAL WARFARE, JOHN J. PITNEY, JR., 2000
LIVES OF MASTER SWORDSMEN, MAKOTO SUGAWARA, 1988
Reading
he could choke him in a friendly embrace.
Great pbrase
the best way to find the leader’s weaknesses is not through spies but through the close embrace. Behind a friendly, even subservient front, you can observe your enemies, get them to open up and reveal themselves. Get inside their skin; think as they think. Once you discover their vulnerability—an uncontrollable temper, a weakness for the opposite sex, a gnawing insecurity—you have the material to destroy them.
Tactic
spies are unreliable; they filter information through their own preconceptions and prejudices, and since their trade places them precisely between one side and the other and forces them to be independent operators, they are notoriously hard to control and can turn against you.
Insoght about gossip
They honed their skills through personal observation of people. Only with that foundation could the use of spies extend their powers of vision.
being able to show ourselves is a relief. We secretly want people to know us, even including our dark side. Even while we consciously struggle to control this hidden yearning, unconsciously we are always sending out signals that reveal a part of what is going on inside—slips of the tongue, tones of voice, styles of dress, nervous twitches, sudden irrational actions, a look in the eye that contradicts our words, the things we say after a drink.
There are, of course, limits to how much intelligence gathering you can achieve by firsthand observation. A network of spies will extend your vision, particularly as you learn to interpret the information they bring you. An informal network is the best—a group of allies recruited over time to be your eyes and ears. Try to make friends with people at or near the source of information on your rival; one well-placed friend will yield far more than will a handful of paid spies.
Always look for internal spies, people in the enemy camp who are dissatisfied and have an ax to grind. Turn them to your purposes and they will give you better information than any infiltrator you sneak in from outside. Hire people the enemy has fired—they will tell you how the enemy thinks.
WARRIORS: WARFARE AND THE NATIVE AMERICAN INDIAN, NORMAN BANCROFT-HUNT, 1995
Reading?
Even as you work to know your enemies, you must make yourself as formless and difficult to read as possible. Since people really only have appearances to go on, they can be readily deceived. Act unpredictably now and then. Throw them some golden nugget of your inner self—something fabricated
Tactic
First, you prepare yourself before any action, scanning your enemy for weaknesses. Then you find a way to get your opponents to underestimate you, to lower their guard. When you strike unexpectedly, they will freeze up. When you hit again, it is from the side and out of nowhere. It is the unanticipated blow that makes the biggest impact.
Tactic
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 punch that puts you to sleep is not so much the hard punch as the punch that you don’t see coming.
if you are facing an enemy that has divided leadership or internal cracks, a sudden and swift attack will make the cracks larger and cause internal collapse.
