Sun Tzu: know yourself and the other
An event fails a week before the room — on the day nobody checked what else is on at the same time. By the time people arrive, almost everything is already decided.
The strongest move happens earlier. Sun Tzu asks four things — what your side can do, what the other side wants, the ground and the timing, the cost of dragging on — and holds that by the day of the event it is already decided.
Take your next event and answer three things in one sentence each: who exactly you want in the room; what else is on that day (check a calendar, do not guess); which room and who unlocks it. If any answer is missing, the event does not exist yet.
The full biography is on the public version →
Qing-dynasty portrait — a traditional depiction, not from life. Palace Museum, Beijing. PD-art / PD-old-100-1923 — anonymous Qing-dynasty painting
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The same work written at length: what it claims and what its evidence is worth.
This text is freely available, so the links go straight to it rather than to a summary of it.
- Chinese Text Project — the Chinese original beside a translation
- Wikisource — the Giles translation with its notes
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