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Eshaan Mehta
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Life Quotes
All themes
64 quotes
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Themes
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When you first rise in the morning tell yourself: I will encounter busybodies, ingrates, egomaniacs, liars, the jealous and cranks. They are all stricken with these afflictions because they don’t know the difference between good and evil.
Negative visualisation, done first thing: name the difficult people you are likely to meet before you meet them, so that none of them is a surprise. The point is not to go out braced against the world but to be the one person in the room who came prepared, and so has patience left to spend. Marcus goes on to say these people are of the same mind as him, and that he is made for cooperation with them — which is why the exercise ends in patience rather than contempt.
Anger
Dealing with people
Marcus Aurelius
Think of your many years of procrastination; how the gods have repeatedly granted you further periods of grace, of which you have taken no advantage. It is time now to realise the nature of the universe to which we belong, and of that controlling power whose offspring you are; and to understand that your time has a limit set to it. Use it, then, to advance your enlightenment; which will be gone, and never in your power again.
You know how many days you have lived. You do not know how many are left, and no further grace period is promised. Seneca made the same argument at length in On the Shortness of Life: the complaint is never that life is short, it is that so much of it is spent on nothing in particular. Read as instruction rather than reproach, this is an argument for urgency without panic — decide what you are actually trying to do, then be patient and diligent about it.
Procrastination
Mortality
Marcus Aurelius
All disturbances arise solely from the opinions within us
The central Stoic claim, in ten words: the event does not carry the distress, your judgement of it does. Someone insults you; the insult reaches you as a sound, and everything after that is something you added. The practical consequence is that composure is available in situations you cannot change at all, which is the only reason the rest of this list works.
Stress & worry
Anger
Marcus Aurelius
If something does not make a person worse in himself, neither does it make his life worse, nor does it harm him without or within
A test for whether something that has happened to you is actually damage. Money, standing and reputation can all be taken by other people; your honesty and your judgement cannot, unless you hand them over. Anything that leaves those intact has cost you less than it appeared to.
Hard times
Reputation
Marcus Aurelius
Live not as though there were a thousand years ahead of you. Fate is at your elbow; make yourself good while life and power are still yours.
Being good is not a project to be started once the rest of life is arranged, because there is no guarantee of the time that plan assumes. Time given to the people you love is the part of it that outlasts you: your words and actions carry on working in other people's lives after you have forgotten them. And where you find a behaviour contemptible, the way to show it is to not take part.
Procrastination
Mortality
Marcus Aurelius
Do little, if you want contentment of mind
Fewer things, done properly and on purpose. Most of the noise in a day comes from carrying several half-finished efforts at once, each of them interrupting the others, and the cost lands on your attention rather than on any one task. Doing less is not a lower standard — it is the condition for meeting one.
Stress & worry
Distraction
Marcus Aurelius
Do not be distressed, do not despond or give up in despair, if now and again practice falls short of precept.
Written for the days you do not live up to any of this. Failing your own standard is not grounds for abandoning the standard, and the moment you have fallen short is the moment the practice is actually being tested — anyone can hold to a principle on a good day. As Dwight Moody put it: character is what you are in the dark.
Self-doubt
Marcus Aurelius
If anyone can show me, and prove to me, that I am wrong in thought or deed, I will gladly change. I seek the truth, which never yet hurt anybody. It is only persistence in self-delusion and ignorance which does harm.
Changing your mind in public takes more nerve than holding a line, which is why so few people do it and why the ones defending the indefensible are usually the ones who have most invested in not looking. Worth turning on your own beliefs: where did each of them come from, and did you ever examine it, or simply acquire it? The same test applies outward — treat carefully any person or group that will not have its ideas questioned, because refusing the question is usually about keeping a position rather than being right.
Self-doubt
Dealing with people
Marcus Aurelius
Whatever the world may say or do, my part is to keep myself good.
This one was of most use to the people furthest from an emperor's comfort — the legions, for whom the surroundings could include a friend killed beside them and nothing to be done about it. The claim is that circumstance has no vote on your conduct: it can decide what happens, and you still decide what you do. Emotional upheaval, in that reading, is information about the state of your own will rather than about the world.
Hard times
Reputation
Marcus Aurelius
We shrink from change; yet is there anything that can come into being without it?… Could you have a hot bath unless the firewood underwent some change?… Do you not see, then, that change in yourself is of the same order, and no less necessary to nature?
Everything you want requires something to stop being what it was. People arrive and drift out of touch, you fall in and out of love, you move, you fall ill and recover, you age. Resisting that as a category is resisting the only mechanism by which anything new happens, including in you — there is no version of progress that does not cost you the person you were.
Stress & worry
Hard times
Marcus Aurelius
Take it that you have died today, and your life’s story is ended; and henceforward regard what further time may be given you as an uncovenanted surplus, and live it out in harmony with nature.
Not a morbid exercise but an accounting trick: treat the balance as already spent, and everything from here is surplus you were not owed. Fear of death, on this view, is a product of the mind, and the mind is the one thing you can change — you cannot control the fact, only whether you spend the remaining time braced against it. What is left over is easier to spend well than what you believe you are entitled to.
Procrastination
Mortality
Marcus Aurelius
Dig within. There lies the well-spring of good: ever dig, and it will ever flow.
There is something worth having in you, and the only way to reach it is the unglamorous one. Your mind and your judgements are the part of your life fully in your hands, so looking inward for answers is not self-absorption — it is digging in the one place where digging works. It takes time, and it keeps producing as long as you keep at it.
Self-doubt
Marcus Aurelius
Remind yourself that it is not the future or what has passed that afflicts you, but always the present
What is actually in front of you is nearly always bearable. What is unbearable is the total — your life pictured whole, with every past trouble and every imagined future one assembled into a single weight that no moment ever actually asked you to carry. You cannot change what happened and cannot forecast what will; what is left is this, which is usually manageable.
Stress & worry
Hard times
Marcus Aurelius
Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.
Abraham Lincoln's version was that actions speak louder than words. Stating a position costs nothing and can be done indefinitely, which is why there is so much of it about; living by one takes considerably more and is what people are actually judged on in the end. Leading by example is slower than arguing and is the only version that changes anything.
Procrastination
Reputation
Marcus Aurelius
The business of a healthy eye is to see everything that is visible, not to demand no colour but green, for that merely marks a disordered vision.
Seeing only what you would prefer to see is not optimism, it is a fault in the instrument. Filtering out the unpleasant leaves you making decisions about a world that is not there, and the suffering that follows is avoidable and self-inflicted. Ayn Rand's line is the sharp version: you are free to evade reality, but not free to avoid the abyss you refuse to see.
Stress & worry
Self-doubt
Marcus Aurelius
Have I done an unselfish thing? Well then, I have my reward. Keep this thought ever present, and persevere.
The act was the payment. Announcing it afterwards is a second, separate transaction, and it is the one that needs the audience. That is also the answer to the charge that all this looking inward is self-absorbed: the point of curbing your own impulses is to be of more use to the people around you, and someone who understands how short and small his life is has little reason to publicise it.
Dealing with people
Reputation
Marcus Aurelius
To expect bad men never to do bad things is insensate; it is hoping for the impossible. To tolerate their offences against others, and expect none against yourself, is both irrational and arbitrary.
Most anger is the gap between what you expected and what happened, which makes expectation the cheapest place to intervene. Drive in a city expecting clear roads and courteous drivers and you will be furious daily at something entirely predictable; expect the traffic and the bad driving and the same events cost you nothing. The second sentence closes the loophole: you do not get to shrug at what these people do to others and be outraged when it reaches you.
Anger
Dealing with people
Marcus Aurelius
In the management of your principles, take example by the pugilist, not the swordsman. One puts down his blade and has to pick it up again; the other is never without his hand, and so needs only to clench it.
A principle you have to go and fetch is one you will not have when it is needed. The Stoics trained this the way you train anything — deliberate, unnecessary discomfort, a day without shoes, a night on a hard floor, a fast — not as penance but as rehearsal, so that the involuntary version, when it arrives, is familiar rather than frightening. The aim is to have nothing to pick up.
Hard times
Procrastination
Marcus Aurelius
Refer your action to no other end than the common good
Having established that the time is short, Marcus is unambiguous about what to do with it, and returns to it throughout: we are social and rational creatures, and the work is helping the others. It is also a usable test for a decision that looks balanced on every other axis — ask which option is of use to somebody besides you.
Dealing with people
Mortality
Marcus Aurelius
A plant which is frequently moved never grows strong.
Depth is the thing that cannot be rushed, and it is the first casualty of having everything available at once. Moving from one pursuit, one book, one plan to the next as soon as the novelty fades means never being present for the part where it starts to pay. Nothing you start will show you what it is worth until you have stayed with it longer than it was interesting.
Distraction
Impatience
Seneca
In the case of some sick people it is a matter for congratulation when they come to realise for themselves that they are sick.
Recognising a habit, an addiction or a flaw as what it is counts as progress in itself, because it is the step that makes the problem yours to do something about. Everything before it is the same condition plus a story. A lack of self-awareness is not a neutral state — it is the thing that holds the rest of it still.
Self-doubt
Seneca
You ask me to say what you should consider it’s particularly important to avoid. My answer is this: a mass crowd. When the mind is impressionable and has none too firm a hold on what is right, it must be rescued from the crowd: it is so easy for it to go over to the majority.
Seneca had gone to a midday show expecting entertainment and found slaughter, with the crowd cheering it on — and his point is about what the crowd did to him, not about what was in the arena. A crowd offers a strong sense of belonging and asks, in exchange, that you stop judging for yourself; the price is invisible while you are inside it. The group may well be right, but you have to be the one who decides that. Peter Thiel's version: the most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself. The constructive half of Seneca's advice is to spend your social time with people you can learn from or genuinely help, since teaching is also how you find out what you know.
Dealing with people
Reputation
Seneca
What difference does it make, after all, what your position in life is if you dislike it yourself?
A position other people admire and you cannot stand is not a good position; it is their good position, which you are holding. Take advice widely — it is cheap and you cannot see your own situation from outside — and then make the decision yourself, because you are the one who has to live inside the answer.
Self-doubt
Reputation
Seneca
If you want a man to keep his head when the crisis comes you must give him some training before it comes.
Composure under pressure is not a temperament, it is a rehearsal you either did or did not do. Prepare in peacetime, mentally and physically, and prepare for the versions you are not expecting as well as the one you are — a plan for the future you imagine is no help against the future that arrives. A soldier drills so that the moment requires no decisions.
Hard times
Procrastination
Seneca
A good character is the only guarantee of everlasting, carefree happiness. Even if some obstacle to this comes on the scene, its appearance is only to be compared to that of clouds which drift in front of the Sun without ever defeating its light.
The things that actually carry a life — friendship, love, integrity — are the ones that cannot be bought, which is inconvenient in a world organised around selling you the others. Character is what decides whether a setback is a failure or a lesson, and whether a rejection is the end of the road or a step along it. You can pay someone to do almost anything for you except form your character, and the wrong one will stop you before you start.
Hard times
Reputation
Seneca
Treat your inferiors in the way in which you would like to be treated by your own superiors. Only an absolute fool values a man according to his clothes, or according to his social position, which after all is only something that we wear like clothing.
Seneca's image for valuing a person by their standing is a man who inspects the saddle and never looks at the horse. The modern saddle is the curated version — the appearance, the following, the job title — and a polished one is at least as likely to be covering anxiety or fragility as to be evidence of anything. Judge people on character, and notice that how you treat the people below you is the most reliable public statement you make about your own.
Dealing with people
Reputation
Seneca
Why does no one admit his failings? Because he’s still deep in them. It’s the person who’s awakened who recounts his dream, and acknowledging one’s failings is a sign of health.
Know thyself is easy to quote and hard to do, mostly because the information is unflattering: self-knowledge shows you your faults and how little progress you have made on them. That is exactly why it is worth having — a vice you can name is one you can work on, and you cannot answer who you want to be or where you currently are without it. Only someone already awake can describe the dream.
Self-doubt
Seneca
As it is with a play, so it is with life — what matters is not how long the acting lasts, but how good it is. It is not important at what point you stop. Stop wherever you will — only make sure that you round it off with a good ending.
A play is not judged on its running time, and the curtain can come down at any point in either case. The useful question, if you find yourself on autopilot or somewhere you did not intend to be: is this worth watching, and is the lead performing well?
Mortality
Seneca
Illness has actually given many people a new lease of life; the experience of being near to death has been their preservation. You will die not because you are sick but because you are alive. That end still awaits you when you have been cured.
People who come close to dying often start living differently, and it is not the illness that does it — it is being made to look directly at how fragile and unscheduled the whole arrangement is. Steve Jobs said the same thing after his diagnosis: your time is limited, so don't waste it. The unpleasant implication is the useful one: the reckoning was available the whole time, and most people wait to be forced into it.
Hard times
Mortality
Seneca
These are conditions of existence which we cannot change. What we can do is adopt a noble spirit, such a spirit as befits a good man, so that we may bear up bravely under all that fortune sends us and bring our wills in tune with nature’s.
Some of what happens is simply the terms of being alive, and arguing with the terms is work that returns nothing. What is left is the spirit you meet them in — and Seneca's image for the alternative is a soldier who follows his commander grumbling, who marches anyway and gets nothing for it but the grumbling. Decide in advance how you intend to take what you cannot prevent.
Stress & worry
Hard times
Seneca
The wise will start each day with the thought, “Fortune gives us nothing which we can really own.” Nothing, whether public or private, is stable.
Seneca's morning exercise is an inventory of what is on loan, which is everything. What took years to build can be gone in seconds; he lists towns in Syria and Macedonia swallowed by a single earthquake to make the point that scale is no protection. Holding your circumstances loosely is not pessimism — it is what stops a reversal taking your composure along with the thing itself.
Stress & worry
Hard times
Seneca
Mortal have you been born, to mortals you have given birth. Reckon on everything, expect everything.
Memento mori, and not only your own: we live in the middle of things that were all built to end. Reckoning on everything in the morning is what makes the difficulties, when they come, arrive as something already considered rather than as an ambush — and it has the side effect of putting the day's actual priorities in order.
Stress & worry
Mortality
Seneca
I must die. But must I die bawling? I must be put in chains — but moaning and groaning too?
Epictetus takes the most extreme case available — a man condemned, with nothing left to decide — and shows there is still something left to decide. The sentence is external and settled; the manner is his. He was writing from experience of having very little: born a slave, freed later, lame for life, and clear that while he owned almost nothing he did own his opinions, his aversions and his desires. Your body can be shackled and your will still not be.
Stress & worry
Hard times
Epictetus
Physical hardships are not intolerable by nature. The Spartans, for instance, gladly submit to being whipped because they are taught that it is done for good reason.
What makes a hardship unbearable is not its severity but its senselessness. Spartan boys took a beating willingly because they understood what it was for; people put up with jobs they dislike for a reason they have priced and accepted. The test is therefore not how hard a thing is but whether it is rational — and since that answer differs from person to person, it is worth actually asking what you are getting for what you are enduring.
Hard times
Epictetus
Nothing important comes into being overnight; even grapes or figs need time to ripen.
Said to a man who wanted to know how to stop his brother being angry with him: the brother's mind is not going to turn around today. Want a fig and you must let the tree flower, then set fruit, then ripen it — there is no step you can skip by wanting it more. The same applies to your own goals and to how long it takes to become any good at anything.
Impatience
Epictetus
Man is disturbed not by things, but by the views he takes of them.
Socrates, convicted and awaiting execution, was offered an escape by his friend Crito and turned it down — his body was in prison and his judgement was entirely his own. Epictetus uses that to separate what is done to you from what you make of it: only what is inside your control can be good or bad, everything else is indifferent. It applies at the trivial end too. It is not the hold music or the traffic that is annoying you; those are events, and the annoyance was added.
Stress & worry
Anger
Epictetus
The Weaver does not make the wool, he makes the best use of whatever wool he’s given… Work with the material you are given.
Epictetus's other image for this is a card player: the hand is not yours to choose and is not worth an opinion, and how you play it is entirely yours and worth all of your attention. It is how he squares being unbothered with not being careless — indifference is for the deal, diligence is for the play. You can hire the most reliable car, pick the quietest hour and drive faultlessly, and still be stopped by an accident ahead of you; ranting at it does not clear the road.
Stress & worry
Hard times
Epictetus
A boxer derives the greatest advantage from his sparring partner.
The difficult person and the stronger opponent are the only things that will develop you, which makes them assets rather than obstacles. A swordsman's skill is not in the sword; the sharpest blade is worth nothing to someone too cautious to use it. Epictetus's question at the end of that argument is the uncomfortable one — if you never take the match you might lose, in what sense have you competed at all?
Hard times
Conflict
Epictetus
What’s gone and what’s past help should be past grief
Paulina says it having just condemned Leontes for the jealousy that killed his queen — so it is not a line about letting people off, and she is the last person who would. It is about where grief stops being of use: once a thing is beyond help, the grieving is no longer part of dealing with it. The Stoic version is the same instruction with the metaphysics attached.
Stress & worry
Hard times
William Shakespeare
The robbed that smiles steals something from the thief
Whoever wronged you wanted something more than the thing they took — the reaction, the satisfaction of having landed it. Refuse that and the theft is smaller than they intended, and you come out of it holding something they were expecting to take with them.
Anger
Hard times
William Shakespeare
Reputation is an idle and most false imposition, oft got without merit and lost without deserving. You have lost no reputation at all unless you repute yourself such a loser
Reputation is awarded and withdrawn by people who are not watching closely, which is why it can be won without merit and lost without cause. Treating it as the measure of yourself hands your self-assessment to an audience with no particular interest in getting it right. What you did and what you think are the parts that are actually yours. It is worth knowing who says this in the play — Iago, to a man he has just ruined — which is a reminder that a true sentence can be a manipulation in the mouth it is in.
Reputation
William Shakespeare
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me
A deposed king in a cell, doing the arithmetic on a life he spent as though it were unlimited. The line is memorable because the exchange rate is exact: the time you do not use does not sit waiting, it spends you instead. Read as a warning it is the same instruction as Marcus on procrastination, delivered by someone out of time to act on it.
Procrastination
Mortality
William Shakespeare
Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none
A mother's parting advice to a son leaving home, and a workable social policy: goodwill is cheap and worth extending widely, trust is expensive and worth rationing, and harming people is off the table regardless of which of the two they have earned. The three clauses are doing different jobs — generosity, judgement, and a floor under both.
Dealing with people
William Shakespeare
Wisely and slow, they stumble that run fast
Friar Laurence's answer to a boy who wants to be married this afternoon — and he then does it anyway, which is the decision the rest of the play is the consequence of. Advice given and not taken by the person giving it, which is the most common kind. Doing one thing carefully beats doing several at speed, and the play is four days long for exactly this reason.
Distraction
Impatience
William Shakespeare
That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.
Epictetus's version is an argument rather than a slogan: what would Hercules have been without the lion, the boar and the bulls? A man of great strength asleep in perfect comfort, with nothing to show it was there. Trouble is the material the capacity is made from, which is why Epictetus wanted his students to meet an annoyance with something closer to interest than to dread — it is the only occasion on which any of this can be tested.
Hard times
Friedrich Nietzsche
You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.
Epictetus made the point with two lumps of coal, one burning and one out: leave them together and one of two things happens, and it is not going to be neither. Either you become like the people you are around or they become like you, so the only real question is which way the influence is running. If you cannot raise a crowd, the honest conclusion is that it is time to leave it.
Dealing with people
Jim Rohn
Deceive the heavens to cross the sea
Operation Mincemeat is the clean example: a body dressed as a Royal Marines officer, carrying papers that pointed at Greece and Sardinia and dismissed Sicily as a feint, washed ashore where the Germans would find it. They believed it, and the defences went to the wrong coast. The principle is that what you show has to be ordinary enough to be believed, not impressive enough to be examined — which is also why walking through an office carrying a folder gets you stopped less often than walking through empty-handed. Keep the intention out of view, especially from people with no vision for it.
Conflict
The Thirty-Six Stratagems
Besiege Wèi to rescue Zhào
Scipio beat Hannibal not by meeting him in the field but by taking apart his base in Spain and threatening Carthage itself, until Hannibal had to come to him. Against someone stronger, do not attack where they are strong; find what they cannot afford to lose and they will fight you on your ground instead of theirs. It is why organised crime threatens families and why toy adverts are aimed at children who have no money — the target of the pressure and the holder of the decision need not be the same person.
Conflict
The Thirty-Six Stratagems
Kill with a borrowed knife
Hannibal held Italy for seventeen years partly by turning Rome's own allies against it and partly by using Roman confidence as the mechanism of Roman defeats. Use somebody else's strength where spending your own would cost more than the result is worth: an ally's reputation to open a door, a specialist's judgement where yours is thin, a partner with money or influence you do not have. The uglier version is the boss who sends henchmen and keeps his own hands clean, which is the same structure without the ethics.
Dealing with people
Conflict
The Thirty-Six Stratagems
Face the weary in a condition of ease
Choosing when and where a contest happens is worth more than any advantage inside it. Rest while the other side travels, split their attention across fronts, make them come to you over ground that suits you. It takes patience and good information, and it has an ordinary business form: waiting to act until you can see what a competitor has committed to or how customers actually respond.
Impatience
Conflict
The Thirty-Six Stratagems
Loot a burning house
Japan invaded China in 1931, the year after the Central Plains War had turned the country on itself, and won quickly against an opponent that was busy elsewhere. A rival dealing with its own disorder is a rival with nothing spare, and the window closes when the disorder does. The same reasoning is why impersonation scams and investment frauds spike during a crisis: the people being targeted are stressed, distracted and easier to reach than usual.
Conflict
The Thirty-Six Stratagems
Make a sound in the east, then strike in the west
At Lodi in 1796 Napoleon mounted a token crossing of the Po to hold Austrian attention while the bulk of his force crossed upriver unopposed, came round behind and hit the rear guard. Attention is a finite resource and it can be spent for someone: point it somewhere loud and the place you actually care about is defended by whatever is left over.
Conflict
The Thirty-Six Stratagems
Create something from nothing
Both sides in the Second World War ran whole units on this: inflatable tanks, wooden artillery, straw aircraft, dummy airfields built by hand-picked artists so convincingly that bombs and ammunition were spent on them. Belief about your strength does the work that strength would have done, and in a contest where morale decides things, the effect is out of proportion to the cost. It is also the whole mechanism of the advance-fee fraud, where the promised fortune never existed at all.
Conflict
The Thirty-Six Stratagems
Pretend to take one path while sneaking down another
Liu Bang sent men to openly rebuild the gallery roads he had destroyed years earlier — a job so obviously slow that Xiang Yu read it as proof he had years — and moved his army on Guanzhong through a small town while the repairs continued. An approach that is visible and evidently unhurried is more reassuring than no approach at all. Make sure the decoy is seen; that is its only job.
Conflict
The Thirty-Six Stratagems
Watch the fires burning across the river
Byzantium and Sasanian Persia fought each other to a standstill between 602 and 628 and both came out of it broke; the Arab conquests that followed took territory from one and ended the other. Entering last, against people who have spent themselves on each other, is a structural advantage no amount of effort buys. The discipline is in staying out while it is tempting to join, and then not hesitating.
Impatience
Conflict
The Thirty-Six Stratagems
Hide a knife behind a smile
Brutus was inside Caesar's circle and led the conspiracy that killed him — and the access is what made it work at all. Kept here as a warning rather than a recommendation: trust is the most efficient attack surface there is, and the people best placed to use it are the ones you have stopped watching. Brutus at least acted for the Republic rather than for himself, which is more than most who use this can say.
Dealing with people
Conflict
The Thirty-Six Stratagems
Sacrifice the plum tree to preserve the peach tree
Convoy PQ 17 sailed its standard route in 1942 although decoded German traffic showed it would be found, because changing course would have revealed that Enigma was broken. Twenty-four of thirty-five ships were lost and the secret held, and the secret went on to account for most of the U-boat fleet. Some losses are the price of the thing that matters, and taking one deliberately can also be read by the other side as weakness — which is its own advantage. The requirement is knowing which tree is the peach.
Impatience
Conflict
The Thirty-Six Stratagems
Take the opportunity to pilfer a goat
Wellington was eating lunch at Salamanca after weeks of exhausting manoeuvre when he saw through his telescope that the French left had over-extended, threw down the chicken leg — “By God, that will do!” — and attacked a flank that collapsed in an hour. No plan survives contact, as Moltke had it, so the useful capability is not the plan but the readiness to abandon it for something better that has just appeared. Stay alert, and take the small opening as well as the large one.
Conflict
The Thirty-Six Stratagems
Stomp the grass to scare the snake
US units in Vietnam dropped dummy paratroopers — plastic frames, plaster heads, uniform cloth — and the Viet Cong who attacked them gave away their own positions doing it. Do something odd, loud or simply unexpected and watch what moves: even with no particular outcome in mind, the response tells you where people are and what they were planning.
Conflict
The Thirty-Six Stratagems
Borrow a corpse to resurrect the soul
Naura Hayden's Astro-Logical Love sold under five thousand copies; republished with barely a change to the contents and a new title, How to Satisfy a Woman Every Time, it sold over two and a half million. Plate armour died with the arrival of firearms and came back as kevlar. Something that failed is not necessarily a bad idea — it may have been the wrong name, the wrong moment or the wrong frame — and abandoned plans are worth re-reading when the conditions have moved.
Conflict
The Thirty-Six Stratagems
Lure the tiger out of the mountains
At Hastings the Saxon shield wall on the hill held against archers, then spearmen, then cavalry. What broke it was a Norman retreat and a rumour that William was dead: the Saxons left the high ground to chase, William rode through his own falling-back troops shouting that he lived, and the counter-attack took England. Never fight anyone on the ground that favours them. Give them a reason to leave it.
Conflict
The Thirty-Six Stratagems
In order to capture, one must let loose
At Mohi the Mongols left the encircled Hungarians an apparent gap to escape through, knowing that men who are running are easier to kill than men with no option but to fight. Total encirclement produces a last stand; the appearance of a way out replaces the will to fight with the wish to leave. Worth recognising from the other side of it — when you are cornered and an exit suddenly presents itself, ask who left it open.
Dealing with people
Conflict
The Thirty-Six Stratagems
Tossing out a brick to get a jade gem
The lesser-known poet Chang Jian, wanting to learn from Zhao Gu, went ahead of him to a temple he knew Zhao Gu would visit and wrote the first two lines of a four-line poem on the wall. Zhao Gu finished it. A small offering, placed where the person you want something from cannot help responding, returns more than it cost — and the bait has to be something they want rather than something you are keen to be rid of.
Dealing with people
Conflict
The Thirty-Six Stratagems
Defeat the enemy by capturing their chief
Pizarro ignored the Inca army camped outside Cajamarca in 1532 and went straight for Atahualpa, and an army that vastly outnumbered him broke and fled on the news that its ruler was taken. Organisations held together by one person can be ended at that person. The exception is the one worth remembering: where the tie is loyalty rather than money or fear, taking the head produces people with a reason for revenge rather than people looking for the exit.
Dealing with people
Conflict
The Thirty-Six Stratagems