This reminds me of what I thought was a Sun Tzu quote, but I cannot find it anymore. It went something like this :
A good general does not look for a path to Victory, but ensures that all paths lead to Victory.
In a chaotic battlefield (life), one way to make it so that ‘all paths lead to Victory’ is to improve your orient speed. But the nugget of wisdom I got from the apparently-not-a-Sun-Tzu-quote is that you need to have enough elbow room in your plans across all dimensions so that you’re not going to lose everything you care about just because you fail to orient fast enough. Or in other words : you need to cultivate Slack.
If you are slow to orient when needed, that means you need to give yourself an enormous amount of slack to avoid a loss condition. But if you are too quick to orient when there is a perceived need, put too much emphasis or take too much pride in your ability to pivot, then you risk being too ‘trigger happy’ with your pivots, and becoming incapable of doubling down when that’s what the situation calls for. This post made me think of the latter failure mode.
Conversely, if you’ve got too much slack, this will erode your orient speed, as the need decrease—which manifests as akrasia, institutional inertia, etc.
This reminds me of what I thought was a Sun Tzu quote, but I cannot find it anymore. It went something like this :
In a chaotic battlefield (life), one way to make it so that ‘all paths lead to Victory’ is to improve your orient speed. But the nugget of wisdom I got from the apparently-not-a-Sun-Tzu-quote is that you need to have enough elbow room in your plans across all dimensions so that you’re not going to lose everything you care about just because you fail to orient fast enough. Or in other words : you need to cultivate Slack.
If you are slow to orient when needed, that means you need to give yourself an enormous amount of slack to avoid a loss condition. But if you are too quick to orient when there is a perceived need, put too much emphasis or take too much pride in your ability to pivot, then you risk being too ‘trigger happy’ with your pivots, and becoming incapable of doubling down when that’s what the situation calls for. This post made me think of the latter failure mode.
Conversely, if you’ve got too much slack, this will erode your orient speed, as the need decrease—which manifests as akrasia, institutional inertia, etc.
The quote seems to be from Vorkosigan Saga.
per Tvtropes.