Chapter 7 – The Battlefield (Strategy and Goal Setting)
A Winning Attitude
The Sheep’s Clothing
Your Attitude
One of the things I want to discuss is one’s attitude in school, business and life. The Stratagem of the Pig says:
- “Pretend to be a pig, and eat a tiger.”
This stratagem calls for deception. I refer to it not in a malevolent sense, but in the regard that one must not be arrogant when dealing with other people. If your peers perceive you as intimidating, or threatening, they will retreat from you. The path to success can greatly be facilitated with the support and assistance from others. It does you no good to act overly smart and clever to the extent of drawing scorn and contempt from others for your showy attitude. In an academic scenario, the student who remains humble and asks for help will often receive it. Sometimes, others will offer assistance even without your asking, if you exhibit friendliness, honesty and sincerity. If you are having difficulty with a certain assignment, ask for advice from your classmates or your teacher. Always ask for help. There is nothing shameful or “wimpy” about being willing to learn and grow. The true warrior is one who is courageous enough to admit to himself that he is not as powerful as he may want to believe. Unless you ask for other people’s opinions, you may be fooling yourself with false confidence in the face of danger.
Discussions with a school counsellor, no matter how successful you are as a student, may give you new insight into your academic progress. When acting amongst employees or other people in your place of business, do not wear your rank like a medal, and intimidate and overly impose upon them. The general who commands an army still needs people to willingly and enthusiastically support his leadership decisions. By being a decent person to those under his command, the true strategist reveals his strength and competence only in the achievement of worthwhile goals, never in a display of arrogance and abuse of power. The key to personal rapport is to understand that everyone is only human, even cybernetically enhanced entities such as cyborgs. By pretending to be a “pig” – even when you are already an A student or a successful business executive – you will be able to “eat the tiger” of higher achievements and ultimate success.
Interdependency
The Power of Cooperation
Related to the above discussion of a need for humility, is the following strategem:
- “Kill with a borrowed knife.”
Again, I do not want to focus on the negative implications of this stratagem. “Killing” with a “borrowed knife” only means, in the context of this book, the strategic management of your human peers. Even the fully-functioning and totally organized cyborg will find that there is always space for improvement of efficiency. Asking for assistance from other people will lighten your own load, and allow you more freedom to explore other possibilities, and more time to attend to those objectives of yours which remain.
To illustrate, assume that you have several big assignments to do. In order to hand in an assignment for the following week, you must somehow get your essay typed up quickly. Unfortunately your typing skills are dismally lacking, and there is no time to take a typing course. Furthermore, assume that if you spent your time slowly grinding away at the keyboard, you will not be able to finish the other assignments that have to be done. Your only course of action? Find someone else to type the assignment for you. The other person can be in the form of a friend, or a fellow classmate, or a professional typist. However, the wisdom of this stratagem encourages interdependency and an overall conservation of resources. Although the fastest route to take is to hire the services of a typist, that may incur additional expenses and this additional burden on your limited resources should be avoided. The better route would be to ask the help of a classmate who can type much faster than you, but who may be lacking in some other skill which you can help with.
For instance, perhaps your fellow student is not clear on how to do research in the library. If you strike a deal with him, and ask him to type your assignment, while you help him find the books he needs, then you have created a relationship of interdependency (rather than dependency – in which you depend on him totally for your essay to be typed, and he may resent not getting anything in return for his time – or independency – in which you decide to grit your teeth and bear the brunt of it all, hammering away however slowly at the keyboard by yourself). Of course, I am not condoning actually doing the entire research project for him. I am only suggesting that you lend him a hand and show him how it is done, and maybe do a bit of the work for him, while he helps you get your essay finalized in time for the deadline. Another example of “killing with a borrowed knife” can be seen in the form of asking favours from other people to perform activities for you that you need not really have to do yourself. For example, when running a business, perhaps you don’t really have to meet a client yourself, and someone else can do the job just as effectively. You can delegate your assignments to other people, and lighten your own load, but always be sure to be totally sensitive and concerned about their feelings. Hopefully, you can exchange skills, so that you can help them with something that you are more competent to do, otherwise just remember the favour you asked, and return it when you have the opportunity to do so. Actions speak louder than words. Don’t just “promise” them that you will return the favour, and then forget all about it. Make a personal commitment. Never assume that people will “forget” that they did a favour for you. Have you ever “forgotten” that you went out of your way to do someone else a favour, and they didn’t return it? A sense of cooperation and interdependency will ensure that everyone gets to borrow each others “knives” from time to time, and the overall system efficiency will be elevated.
Finally, always follow up on tasks you have delegated to another person. Not only can they make mistakes, but your additional perspective can reveal new ideas that can contribute to a better result than via the efforts of one person. If you let someone else type your paper, proofread it even after they have already done so. Follow up by calling the client that you asked your employee to meet, and seeing if everything went OK. Remember that in the end, you are only one who is really responsible for the tasks you delegated, not the person from whom you asked the favour.
