The art of always having a trick up your sleeve isn’t about attempting to be prepared for every specific and or possible situation…
“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win“. – SUN TZU
After I published ‘6 Methods of Thinking Like an Operative‘ I received many messages on requests to teach them specific trade “tricks” and then after publishing ‘How to Operate Like MacGyver in Real Life‘, the best (again, specific) MacGyverisms.
Learning highly specific and therefore limited on-field use skills and tactics may not always (if ever) come in handy but the ability to variably come up with a skill or tactic on the fly is always useful.
This is the art of (always) having a trick up your sleeve.
Instead of trying to implement an already known and specific method in your mind to solve a specific problem, it’s better to be able to adapt your mind to solve any problem with calculation and memory.
Again, knowledge is never a bad thing or in this case, knowing a catalog of specific skills. But it’s better to also have the ability of adapting and inventing pertinent skills.
So the key isn’t trying to be rudimentarily prepared for every possible scenario as that’s not possible, it’s about having a mindset to acutely form a tailored and precise plan fit for each situation.
Also, relying on a limited knowledge of specific “tricks” can do more harm by inevitably leaving you with no resolution or by failing by forcing the wrong methods to an incompatible problem.
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