I started listening to Sun Tzu's "Art of War" on audiobook recently. I'd tried to get through it before, but the translations I picked up were a little too dry, or I wasn't in the right state of mind for it.
Listening to the narrator speak out Sun Tzu's strategy made me realize something - the fundamental judgment errors people make are independent of any particular field. Going on tilt in poker or attacking immediately with exhausted troops after it's taken three months to build siege engines - are these not the same thing? Overpursuit past objectives in war, and deviating from core investment strategies after a short term win or loss - certainly, this is a similar judgment flaw.
This particular audio version includes commentary written by other Chinese military strategists, and one story is how one commander and his officers were at a neighboring kingdom trying to convince them to make an alliance against the barbarians they were fighting. After a week of great treatment, the neighboring king grew more cold and distant to the commander.
Being perceptive, the commander guessed that the barbarians might have also sent envoys, and now the king was choosing which side to support. The commander captured and interrogated one of the palace attendants, who said yes, the barbarians did send envoys.
The commander's party was less than 30 men, it was him and some of his officers. The barbarian envoy had over 100 men. But, in the cover of night they snuck to the barbarian camp, lit it on fire, played war drums to make their forces look larger than they were, and shot down barbarians with bow and arrow and crossbows, and completely destroyed the enemy forces.
This speaks to the testament of a great team. Aaron Tucker suggested we put out the book in a week - and we did, and it's in the Kindle store.
The work really represents Aaron's vision as much as mine - he curated and got down to focusing on core themes and principals. The whole team has kicked ass and really made this together - Kendall Giles, Sachit Gupta, Yifei Zhang, Louis Eastman, and Curtis SerVass.
The whole situation is awe-inspirint. There's a couple little tweaks we could do, but it just speaks to the power of the digital age that we can put our a curated work in a single week of intensive team effort.
As a sidenote, I'm now clearly utterly in material breach of Simon and Schuster's publishing contract - they're now forced to ignore it and write it off (showing they're a paper tiger) or come tango with me and set American legal precedent in court.
:)
