Thread by @ThyConsigliori

John Minford, Sun Tzu 1-14: "Follow the advantage, and master opportunity: this is the dynamic."

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I don't know if John Minford has seen All The President's Men, with the famous command "follow the money." But I do know he is a student of Latin, and absolutely must know the term "cui bono" which means, who benefits? Or follow the benefit.

When we use the cui bono method, what we are looking for is motivation. Famously at law, to win our prosecution we need three things: motivation, opportunity, and ability. Asking what was the benefit, and who got it, is a way of analyzing what occurred to at least build a theory.

Funny thing, the part of the mind that remembers, or even theorizes about the past, is precisely, neurologically, the same part of the brain that envisions and theorizes about the future. Every battle plan is a theory, only proven at victory, or disproven at defeat.

So where follow the money, or the benefit of any form opens up the past for us, follow the advantage is the key to the future.

Are you familiar with the Japanese art of Sumo wrestling? Two great mountains of men stand there, hardly twitching, staring at each other.

There is a term for what they're doing, as they stare, sometimes for countless minutes, even hours: "Suki." It means to observe for weakness, or in the Sumo context, the slightest imbalance of weight distribution or even twitch that may allow one wrestler an advantage.

Another way to understand Suki, is as the search for an opening. Allow me one more example. You're driving in the right lane, and see that it ends soon. You have to merge left, but the left lane is completely jammed up already.

If you simply keep driving calmly forward, just observe who starts and stops faster and slower. An opening will show up and you gently enter in. Or, if there are no current opening - very rare! - come to a halt as far forward as you can, and wait for the opening. It will come.

This is the essence of what opportunity itself actually is. Yes, you must have a vision, a desired future victory in mind, but then, you have to follow advantages you can see, exactly like looking for an opening when changing lanes. Oh, I have to take one more example!

People who wish to dominate conversations learn to pause mid-sentence and rapidly move forward, leaving no room for you to intrude, from one sentence to the next. Want in? Learn to stutter and do a first try, a second, a third, during their mid-sentence breathing pauses.

You don't want to just interrupt and over speak, you will create great resentment, and be an ass yourself. No. Simply learn, in the small openings that always arise, your intent to speak, soon, you know, soon enough. Enter into the opening.

One you assert your will to speak, repeatedly, the openings will grow in size. You are essentially opening up the opening wider and wider until your moment arrives in which you take charge and begin to express yourself. Sweet joy indeed. He was never going to stop talking. Whew.

So also with the mountainous Sumo wrestler. The moment the imbalance is seen in his enemy, that vast mass of flesh and muscle strikes with lightening speed to take advantage of the opening. This is termed "Kirit Suki."

This is when opening and action are instantaneous. Advantage, or opportunity seen, is action executed. Want to see it again? Last example, I promise!, a swordsman removing his sword from its sheath, beheading his enemy and returning the sword in a single fluid motion. Kirit Suki.

Minford, following his own advice, enters into the opening now. This is what is meant, he tells us, by the term "dynamic." Even a complete non-speaker or reader of Chinese like me, studying Sun Tzu, blunders into the original term, "Shi" that Minford is translating here.

We'll have plenty of opportunities to explore it. Let's stick with Minford. This sizzling connection between opening and action is the moment when victory or defeat is determined. When theory becomes execution, the theory was right or wrong.

So also with execution. Assuming the theory was right, then execution is either done well or poorly. The thing is, the best execution against a flawed theory, has little or no chance of victory. Execution alone can never be the answer.

This is the dynamic. Right theory, and right execution, victory in 100 battles. Fail to follow the dynamic tie between opening and action, defeat in 100 battles.

I'll end with a personal point.

Over the decades I studied Sun Tzu, before I found Minford, I struggled mightily not only for clarity, but for clean definitions. I don't know I ever had the conscious thought. But I somehow knew that Sun Tzu was more than clear, he defined things perfectly.

It was only with the extraordinary gift that Minford gives us that I began to see the definitions themselves, such as what he's given us in this verse. This is the dynamic. Get it, and you are a qualified Sun Tzu master of opportunity.

Ah.

And thank you kind professor.