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John Minford, Sun Tzu 1-13: "Settle on the best plan, exploit the dynamic within, develop it without."
To catch up on previous posts, do head over to @WarForAmerica21.
What does it mean to "settle on the best plan," and how do you know when you're there? To capture the real meaning, as is so often the case, wisdom found in either Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, or the Book of Changes, the I Ching. No you don't have to go purchase them, but they help!
In the Tao Te Ching there is a wonderful image. The question is asked, can you let yourself settle like mud to the bottom of a pond? The process of choosing the best plan to settle upon is virtually identical. Many of your calculations will disperse, like diluting in water.
But the important analysis will gain new form, and dropping down to lower places in your mind, you'll feel the strength, the hardness of the assessment gain strength. There is, further, a type of "snap" moment when you have already decided, almost without knowing it till after.
While there is, as I said, a type of hardening to the ideas, the term that Minford gives us, "the dynamic within," is just about perfect. Any given idea can sit there, like a still photo. Proper plans are never still like that. They move. They grow, change, move. They're dynamic.
I read the command to develop your plan without to mostly refer to execution. It can refer to the chain of command required for that execution, as the art of creating commands is that, an art. We can also read it to mean extending the inner dynamic through time.
Modern science teaches us that every cell in your body is the outer expression of the inner instructions from your DNA. How does the body do that? How does it transform information in the DNA into the you that you are? We don't need to be biologists to be able to sense the power.
I think of the inner dynamic of a great plan as if it were the plan's DNA, and the development of the plan without as the body forming and growing through childhood into the adult fulfillment, completion.
Sun Tzu didn't have modern science. But he did have the extraordinary ability of the ancient Chinese to observe nature. Think of the sun rising over cool ground, and feel the rays heating and warming the earth itself. This too is how a plan's inner dynamic is developed.
How will we win the #WarForAmerica2020? We must settle upon the best plans, exploiting the dynamic within, developing it without. Always reduce the vision, smaller and smaller. See your town, the block you live, your own home. Who will vote? Who will they vote for?
Personally, I have family members for whom I'm mulling plans - the best plan has NOT yet arrived - and picture winning each person's vote. Of our large family, there are 3 votes in particular that I don't yet know how to win. I am truly working on it though.
Another key, like the mud settling in water, is to be gentle, so very gentle with yourself. Until you have the best plan to settle on, do NOT settle on a plan. Listen carefully, so carefully to your thoughts. Like a tiger in waiting, don't flinch a muscle, not a quiver.
Patiently waiting, but with all your mental apparatus at work, you will pounce upon the prey of your plan with the same speed and poise, fluid grace in powerful motion, when you you see the right plan and settle on it.
Perhaps this is the real meaning of the "eye of the tiger." It is when the dynamic idea within is developed without, and where the plan and the action are so seamless it's hard to separate one from the other.
