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Harnessing Your Brain's Power
Decision-Making
Skills
A New Kind
of Creativity
Putting Your Brain's
Power to Work
You want your brain working unconsciously on the problem of how to improve
your position and meet your goals every hour of every day. This is what
mastering Sun Tzu's system does.
At first, you have to use Sun Tzu's system consciously. you use it in
planning and conscious linear decision-making. However, by using it consciously, the
goal is to reprogram our brains to see the world from a different
perspective. You start thinking in terms of positions, openings,
and appropriate responses. The goal is to ingrain this thinking so that
this way of seeing the world is reflexive, automatic.
Sun Tzu's system gives you a framework for building up your
perspective of your strategic position. It also teaches you how to
identify and evaluate various
types of opportunities and threats. As you integrate these methods
involved in your thinking, you practice by filing information to build up your
strategic picture.
As you get flooded with information every day, you use Sun Tzu's mental
models to filter and file that information in a special way.
First this filing is conscious work, but it becomes automatic and
effortless.
However, much Sun Tzu's work teaches specific responses to specific
situations. We call this the study of
situation response. As you read his work, you may
be able to see how a few of his lessons apply directly to your
immediate situation. Without practice, however, you will not remember the
variety of characteristics determine specific response. People
remember
only five percent of what they read. While our books provide
a fast entry point into learning Sun Tzu's system, simply reading a book doesn't train you.
It is a little bit like learning to type. At first, you have to think a
lot, look around for the letters, hunting, pecking, but over time you
program yourself so that you don’t even think thinking about the letter
you are typing, much less
the where that key is on the keyboard. At first, you only handle one
letter at a time, but as your skill develops your brain is working on
whole words at a time. Even though there are a lot of complexity in the
keyboard, you don't deal with it consciously at all.
Your skills in adaptive strategy develop in a similar way, in four
distinct stages.
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You
get a general idea of the system by
reading The Art of War or, a little easier, an adaptation. This
is like reading an article about how to type.
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You begin to study the methods in detail to understand their layout and
connections, either through more reading or courses at the Strategy
School. This is like studying the layout of the keyboard and how to
position your hands.
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You then practice using exercises like those we offer in Strategy School
or in our live training. At this stage, you start
consciously applying STARS to the decisions that you make
every day. This is the "hunt and peck" stage, when you have to think
about each letter and where it is consciously.
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Finally, the elements of STARS are ingrained in your thinking. Finding the
element you need at a given moment is a habit and a reflex. At this stage,
your unconscious mind takes over and makes the right decisions effortless.
You are using the same automatic mind that types effortlessly for you.
Only you are using it to make your life better every day.
Sun Tzu's "winning without conflict" is a way of living. It is a way
of seeing the world. It is not just bunch of clever aphorisms. It is a skill
set of reflexes and responses. Skills require training and practice.
Think of
Sun Tzu's The Art of War as a teaching a mental martial art. Do you
think you can master any martial art by simply reading a book?
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