This article is part of a project explaining the deeper meaning of Sun Tzu’s classic on strategy. The lines of English and Chinese are from my award-winning translation, The Art of War and The Ancient Chinese Revealed. In this series, we are going through the entire book. Start here for the book’s opening lines.
The six lines discussed in this article form the end of the second Section of Chapter 5. The chapter is about Momentum, and these lines define Sun Tzu’s concept. This is momentum from the perspective of how it affects our minds. Why do we see some people and organizations as gaining momentum and others as losing it?
Sun Tzu taught that competition is a comparison. Our goal is to get others to choose us, our organizations, our products, and so on, instead of the other guy’s. Those chosen in a comparison are those that get rewarded. Those choices are often made on the basis of strategic momentum.
Influence
(In the quotations from The Art of War and the Ancient Chinese Revealed below, we summarize each Chinese character as a single English word shown in < > brackets. The Chinese is followed by a sentence from my award-winning English translation.)
<Battle> <influence,>
You fight with momentum.
The “battle” is better translated as a “contest” or “comparison.” I translate “influence” as “momentum” because the chapter, as a whole, makes clear that this is what Sun Tzu meant. This is psychological momentum that gets passed from us to those watching as it is passed between the balls above when they are swinging into each other.
Most of our choices are influenced by our sense of where the momentum is and where it is going. We all know momentum when we see it in real life. If we could make bets from moment to moment while watching a sports contest, we would bet upon the team that currently has momentum. But momentum shifts. We would change our bet when momentum shifted again.
Momentum is a dynamic condition. It is constantly changing and shifting. Some competitions are relatively quick, like sports games, where we can see the shifts back and forth, moment to moment. But most of life’s comparisons take place over much more time. We feel the relative momentum among competitors more subtlely. In our personal life, our careers, and our organizations, the shifts in momentum happen in relative slow motion.
Sun Tzu’s Momentum depends on two types of moves, direct action and surprise. We use direct action or proven processes first, to set people’s expectations. Then we use surprise to upset those expectations, get others to notice us, and to disrupt opponents’ plans.
<No> <pass> <unusual> <straight,>
There are only a few types of surprises and direct actions.
Sun Tzu has already said in the first Section of this chapter that surprise is endless, not limited to a few types. This line means that we cannot let the shift between surprises and standard action pass by unnoticed. The fact that we cannot ignore this change is what gives momentum its power.
This is a good place to talk about the differences between Sun Tzu’s psychological momentum and momentum in physics. Newton’s momentum is calculated by multiplying the mass of something times its velocity moving in a straight line. It takes energy to turn this direction of movement from a straight line and, when a turn is made, momentum is lost.
In psychological momentum, it is the turn itself that creates the force. A surprise is a change from what is expected. This turn is what gets our attention. Why? Because it takes energy to make a change. This is the energy of creativity and initiative. This is what we all see and appreciate. A turn isn’t needed if direct action is making good progress. It is needed when progress is not going the way we want.
The Transformation
This seems like a good place to take a turn in this article.
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