Thread by @ThyConsigliori

John Minford, #SunTzu 6: 26 "If we know the place and the day of the battle, then we can engage even after a march of hundreds of miles."

In my professional life, the thing I actually sell is appointments. The vast majority are done on the phone. In this context, punctuality is defined by my ability to take the call, at the exact moment of the appointment, or after, if my client is late.

I don't have rigid rules about how late a client may be. Sometimes I just let them not call until they do, and if not, no matter. I don't ding them for it, as I charge flat fee rates, and am always happy to reschedule, no problem. Sometimes I give five minutes before I call.

In the majority of such cases, though, I give between five and ten minutes. I try to have a fresh barb to mess with them about their tardiness, and they always know it's coming. I try to have fun. That's in service. In selling, what a different punctuality profile there is.

In face-to-face selling, I live by the rule 'anything after 15 minutes early, is late.' Arriving that much early, I wait in my car, or go to the bathroom so as to show up five minutes early in the office. I do this with - you saw this coming, right? - military precision.

In selling by telephone the profile is again different. I always promise the exact moment I'll be calling. It is critical to be ready for the call by five minutes early, but I don't make the call until about 10 seconds before the appointed moment, giving the phone time to ring.

I have a term for all of this. I call it the Simple Mathematics of Punctuality. When attempting to teach others, I am often challenged with the following foolish myth, some people are punctual, others will be late to their own funeral, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Everyone can learn to commute to work and arrive on time. If you have standard 15-minute commute, on rainy or snowy days, you have to leave another 15 minutes or so earlier. You subtract the amount of time from the arrival moment.

If you read the commentaries on today's verse, you'll begin to feel the extraordinary complexity of battlefield punctuality. Do you all march together, or do you split into parts? Who takes the high road, and who takes the low? How do you cloak your movements?

In one beloved tale, the emperor is doing the planning, and gives his general a sealed envelope with instructions, not to be opened until the army arrives at this particular point. No one, not even the general, knew what would occur then. This ensured surprise for everyone.

The emperor assessed the past battles fought and determined the likeliest location of his enemy's strongest forces. He sent his weakest men by that route. His strongest were divided in two and arrived separately at the precise moment of battle. Precision, cloaked punctuality.

I mentioned subtraction above. You add up all the possible conditions and how much time required to traverse the distance, and then subtract from the arrival time to derive the commencement moment. Contemplate, though, the mental challenge of such a seemingly simple thing.

Addition is a type of going forward. Test it for yourself. How easy is it to repeat the ABC's forward? Now, try to reverse the order, working backward from ZYX. I just struggled to be sure that X comes before W (not included) when I typed that just now!

Mentally, forward is easy, backward is difficult. Punctuality, not to say strategy, deception and cloaking one's actions and intentions, wow, it takes tremendous power of mind. And I might add, it is NOT a capability of the MSM when reporting on @POTUS.

First, you cannot do good math forward or backward if you're constantly falsifying all your data. We've discussed this before, but here's an example of a way to falsify data in polling. "What other president would you rank worse than Donald Trump?" Or even, in sequence like so...

"Who were the worst presidents in American history? How would you rate Donald Trump's presidency?" I have to repeat, their models always tip the scales by polling more Democrats than Republicans, sometimes in ridiculous proportions. You can't do good analysis with bad data.

Don't let me get started on the polling for approval ratings. Let's pretend - and pretend it is! - that the approval ratings aren't 100% false data. Assuming their accuracy, thing is, just like the weather, they change. They go up and down. When do you hear the trend analyzed?

More. Who analyzes the trend against the past cycles, and projects it forward honestly, with analytical punctuality, toward the actual date of the election? Hell, who even tries to honestly correlate approval ratings with votes, or even, oh my, electoral college votes?

No, I'm not saying you can't find some of the above list of politically punctual analysis out there, but even when you can, how often is it honest, not skewed? It's a rare beast, to be treasured if you can find it. I might mention, I've done a bit of that, personally. Bowing.

By the way, the one voice in the wilderness I believe the most, bar none, is @parscale. He's the best in the business and I would NEVER willingly bet against his punctuality analysis.

Allow me one more example of this sort of thinking before we wrap up today's lesson. The bet handicappers in Vegas, who are, in their own way, not too different from insurance company risk analysts. These professionals spend their time thinking backward from possible outcomes.

How do you apply this to more than just arriving for a meeting on time? The most important application of all is your goal setting. You must determine your deadline, and I urge, to the very minute. You must determine your minimum acceptable outcome, and I urge, to the very unit.

Deadline and minimum in hand, you must determine your method of execution, and if you're going to hit your goal, you have to know what you're doing. Assuming you do, simply work your way backward from successful goal completion, through all necessary actions, to commencement.

We can call this goal punctuality. Did you get started on time? Do you know the action steps required? Did you execute them when needed? Then you can be close to certain of hitting your goal. Backward from the future success, you planned your actions forward to it, and executed.

I believe this is the true meaning of Master Sun's counsel, today. A battle is nothing other than a success or a failure, a victory or a defeat. As such, the goal is always winning. In fact, my real question is twofold. Who don't we all know this? Why don't we all live this way?

Please hear me now. The great generals of old and you are in no fundamental way different, with this single exception. They understood this. If you do too, then you can do what they did, and more. If you don't, then follow along. I promise to teach you. Well, me and Master Sun.

136 verses completed, 286 to go.

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