The Ego and Mistakes

Number 36

The “Highest Stratagem of them All”

Having said all of the above, I wish to draw your attention to Number 36 of the 36 Stratagems. Literally translated, it says:

“Thirty-Six Strategems: Escape is the highest of them all.”

The meaning of the word “escape” or “running away” in this context does not denote quitting. It does not stress abandonment over everything else. The wisdom of this stratagem implies reassessment of the situation. In other words, “He who runs away, lives to fight another day.” We take it to mean that when things are not working out as they should, regardless of how much planning you have provided, the wisest course of action is to stand back, call a time-out, and look at the reason why things are not what they should be. Number 36 is the key to dealing with mistakes – and mistakes will happen. The very essence of warfare indicates a need to constantly analyze and derive useful information from the ongoing battles. Therefore, you must never rest, never become arrogant, or complacent, or egotistical, or over-confident. Threat will come as a surprise from any direction, from any source. Your best bet is to be prepared for all possibilities, and deal with obstacles that suddenly materialize. The use of Number 36 will come into play when it is time to consider changing your courses of action; when it is time to regroup, and see whether or not it would be better to maxok another line of thinking and doing, rather than squander resources on the present mode.

A secondary implication of Number 36 is to halt the rising damage and destruction. An army that stubbornly fails to fall back, and retreat from an overwhelming enemy will soon face total anniliation and attrition. If a student finds that he cannot cope with a certain class, regardless of all other tactical considerations taken to secure success, then the only way to minimize damages is to drop the course before a low grade is recorded – permanently – into the student’s academic progress, and the grade average is compromised. Number 36 states that you must drop the course before the drop-deadline, before it’s too late, and an F is recorded. In the scenario of business, Number 36 alludes to the concept of a “sunk cost.” Recall that we agreed that sunk costs are not failures in and of themselves. They are merely lessons to be learned, and the wise fighter will likewise learn from mistakes by being brave enough to retreat for the time being. A course dropped can be taken again, the next time around with more information about it, and thus a higher chance of success. Repeat after me: “Retreat is not defeat. Retreat is not defeat. Retreat is not defeat.”

Know Thy Enemy

Sun Tzu stressed that in order to win battles (and ultimately the war), we have to know the strength of both ourselves and the enemy. But who is the enemy? Sometimes, it’s easy to tell, but most of the time there are far more numbers of “hidden” enemies, than conspicious ones. We can simplify the task of enemy identification by realising that anything that hinders or prevents our realisation of success is an enemy. This includes people and events we are shielding from. It includes other demands placed on our time and energies, that deter us from focussing our resources towards the main battle situation. Think about all of these factors that influence you now. If you are running a business, the enemy will be other businesses that compete with you in your industry. It may even include businesses from other industries. Enemies in school can include people who steer you away from studying, temptations to not go to class. A traffic jam might be an enemy, if you are trying to get to school to write an exam. In fact, even the teacher could be an enemy, if his or her teaching methods are not working well for you. Take some time now and write down all the enemies you can think of, no matter how trivial they may seem. Remember, as you write, that some enemies may appear in the form of allies or comrades, but turn out to deter rather than assist you. For example, you family, although usually supportive and understanding, may try to prevent you from your polyphasic sleep schedule (q.v.) and this renders it as an enemy. Take one hour to write down your list of enemies. Now.

OK, while you were writing, you probably realised that enemies can fluctuate. In other words, depending on the circumstances, an ally could be an enemy (as in the example of your family) and vice-versa. This is quite normal. The USA decided that the USSR was its enemy for a while, but now they’re buddies. Actually, before the “cold war” started, the USA and the USSR were friends. So you see, everything changes from time to time. In the example of your teacher or professor, even though the teaching methods may not work for you, the teacher really does want to help. It’s just the method of instruction that’s the real enemy. And this brings us to the next point: Some of your enemies are not really enemies at all, but were perceived as such because of a hidden and more fundamental problem. The real enemy was the teaching method, not the teacher. Go back to your list and recheck your enemies and try to find more fundamental faults with them, rather than consider the surface issue.

Now that you have finished with your enemy list, you understand what you have to look out for. And that leads to our final point on this subject: You must try to turn enemies into allies. To illustrate, if your teacher’s methods aren’t doing you any good, perhaps you can confront the teacher and discuss your problems with him or her. Since your teacher probably isn’t “out to get you” – contrary to what some students may think! – he or she will work with you to find some way around the problem. Perhaps it’s the manner of speech your teacher uses in class, or the way the presentation or lecture comes across to you. The teacher may even suggest some extra credit for you, to compensate for your bad performance in previous tests and exams. In this case, your teacher has allied with you and given you additional opportunity to prove your worth. A bad situation has thus been rectified.

To summarize, Sun Tzu says:

“By understanding yourself and understanding your enemy, you will win all of a hundred battles you fight.”

Sacrifices as Investments

Throwing a Brick

The 36 Stratagems list one which applies to personal sacrifice:

“Throw a brick to attract jade.”

In our context, it refers to sacrificing something relatively unimportant (in the long run) to reap the rewards of something of much higher value in the end. Actually, “sacrifice” isn’t really a good way of looking at this stratagem. A better term would be “investment.”

To see it in the light of the student, the relatively unimportant social events that he misses in order to study are bricks. The A+ he gets on the exam is the valuable jade. This stratagem is easy to see in such a context, but there are other applications.

If you are trying to sell a product, as a manufacturer, the brick is the cost of advertising. The jade is the ultimate reward that supercedes all your investments in advertising. If you are a student writing a research paper, the brick is the time you spend researching in the library. The jade is a great paper and great marks. In addition, if you are trying to get an A+ on a critical class that is of absolute importance to your major, and find that you don’t have enough time to study for its exam, then you can cast the brick and stop studying for the less important classes, and put your efforts towards that critical objective. You may not do as well in the other classes you sacrificed, but you will get a high mark for that vital course, and in the long run you will successfully graduate in the major of your choice. A language course may not be as important as a maths course, for a student majoring in physics. A computer science course may only be an elective for a humanities student. Casting bricks to attract jade mean that you maxok all your resources, to the extent of perhaps “wasting” some of them (but you can never tell, because there is no way you will truly know what the exact amount of a certain resource is necessary to obtain success. Only God – and maybe your mother – will know for sure) but to secure the objective in the long run.

I must stress, however, that too many people abuse this stratagem. They think that they will neglect their electives so that they can do better in their major courses. This is wrong. They should strive to accomodate all their classes. Throwing a brick must only be done in dire circumstances. You have not done your job well as a strategic commander if you have to resort to throwing bricks all the time, and the key to being able to cope with as many things as possible is organization, as we have discussed, and intelligent management of your time and energies.

Taking Advantage of Opportunities

A House on Fire

Opportunities abound in life, and the wise cyborg will do well to take advantage of as many of them as possible. In the words of the immortal Anthony Robbins, “The meeting of preparation with opportunity generates the offspring we call luck.” Therefore, we must be prepared, in order to maximize the value of opportunity when it comes knocking our doors. The Stratagems have this to say: “While a house is on fire, take advantage of the confusion to loot it.” This stratagem, granted, has rather nefarious overtones, but we can ignore the bad side and use the good. The wisdom is the same: Secure the chance to do things, when circumstances are most favourable for their success. Let me give you a constructive example: Assume that you need to use the school’s computer system to finish an assignment for your computer science class, but there are simply too many students around and too few computers. Every time you go to the computer lab, you fail to find a vacant computer workstation, and so far you have not been able to do the assignment, and the deadline is fast approaching. What do to?

Pull the fire alarm and get everyone out.

Actually, I’m just kidding. That was a horrible example (but a funny one, I think, sort of, maybe. OK, it wasn’t. Happy now?) but serves to illustrate my point. You have to find a situation in which you can achieve your objectives. Pulling the fire alarm wouldn’t do anyway, because the computer system might be turned off in such an emergency, and above all you might get expelled from school for such an inconsiderate prank. A better solution would be to wait until everyone’s gone home, and there are more terminals free for you to use. This doesn’t work all of the time, of course. Students may refuse to go home until they have finished their assignments (which may be well past the deadline, if your school is anything like mine!). A more substantial mode of action would be to do the assignment before all these people decided to hog the machines. Again, you have to find a situation that avoids the problem of congestion. A maxok variant of this solution would be actually go up to the computer science teacher and ask him or her for the assignment before it is even handed out. This is true “maximum maxok” (if there can even be such a thing). It isn’t “cheating” because you aren’t infringing upon the rights of another student. In fact, you are doing the masses of people a favour, by finishing your assignment early so that you won’t have to compete with them for yet another space in the computer lab, and you have essentially increased the number of available computer units by one.

There is a concept called the “tragedy of the commons.” The story associated with that idea goes something like this: In a certain village, all the farmers depend on the same field for planting crops. The area of the field is of a size that can exactly accomodate each farmer’s crops provided everyone kept their planting to a certain limit. This was to allow the field an opportunity to regenerate the nutrients in its soil, and accomodate the next batch of crops for the village. However, as far as each individual farmer was concerned, it was to his best interests to plant a few more crops than he was technically allowed. His rationale was that the relatively few extra crops he planted would hardly make a difference. Yet when a large number of farmers do likewise, we find that the field has been depleted of its nutrients, and cannot support any more crops. The village thus suffers from the seemingly minor actions of a few selfish individuals. This aggregate effect of small differences is somewhat akin to synergy, though in a negative context. Taken in light of what we have discussed above, the argument may be that if everyone pre-empted the situation and did their computer projects sooner than expected, the cumulative effect would be a situation of chaotic frenzy in which everyone was competing with everyone else for the computer lab, and we would be back at square one. On the contrary, I hardly think it realistic to believe that there will be that many people who read this book, and do as recommended. The world would not be in such disrepair with so many people underachieving, if the majority of humanity were so action-oriented and initiative-taking. Therefore, it is only the relatively few outstanding students who will make the effort to pre-empt the deadline rush. On the other hand, if indeed everyone took advanced action instead of waiting until the last minute, there would still be ample time and space for everyone to do the assignment, since there is plenty of time before the deadline. However, if the latter should ever happen, it would be very much a reason to celebrate the changing of the times, and would surely motivate the teachers to devise a new system to accomodate the phenomenon.

Finally, remember what Mr. Robbins stressed: Preparation. You must be competent and ready to do the assignment, even if you have the chance to do it. If you don’t know your material, you won’t be able to do the work. That may require some further reading into your textbooks, more than what had been assigned, and that’s to be expected, since you are tackling the problem well beforehand. Throwing bricks again, while the house is burning.

Let me leave you with one more example. Assume that you have to do a report on a certain book that your teacher has assigned. Assume that you got the assignment hand-out in class, and the due-date is not for another three months. Further assume that apart from yourself, nobody else seems to be especially concerned that anyone do the assignment right now. What course of action do you take? The answer is that you should go to the library, get the book, and do the assignment as soon as possible.

The reason? Again, limited resources, just like the computer lab example. If you don’t get the book now, how will you find it when everyone wants to borrow it, and when the bookstore is sold out when people are desperate enough to buy them to do the assignment. Again, you are not injuring anyone, and in fact doing a good deed by relieving other students of the additional demand you put on the book if they have to compete with you to obtain a copy. The “burning house” is an empty library, or an empty computer lab. By “looting” it when the situation is most favourable – when nobody is competing with you for the resources – you have secured your assets and enabled you to do the work. Furthermore, you have finished the assignment long before other students start to panic, and you have thus more time to concentrate on the final exams that may be slated around the book report deadline.

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