Doing and not doing.
In approximately the 5th century BC, Sun Tzu wrote ‘The Art of War’, and one of the gems that’s still relevant today is his famous line:
“Every battle is won before it is fought.”
The most common use of this quote is to highlight the need for planning and preparation, however there’s another application of this wisdom which might be even more helpful to take into consideration.
Your mental preparedness. How battle ready is your mind?
I mostly work with business owners and leaders, and the very best have a way of calculating risk both in terms of the upsides and downsides of success and failure of an initiative, and also in weighing up the pluses and minuses of doing or not doing. By creating four quadrants with the upsides of doing and also not doing, and the downsides of doing and not doing, they mentally prepare for every eventual outcome.
Many people tend to ignore that the cost of doing one thing is not doing another. For example, if energy and resources are deployed on new markets, then might the existing ones be undervalued, or worse made vulnerable to competitors?
It feels that people don’t like to say: “No we won’t do that now” for fear of appearing negative, and yet, to quote Sun Tzu again:
“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win”
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