This article is part of a project explaining the deeper meaning of Sun Tzu’s classic work on strategy. See this article for the first lines of The Art of War.)
The ideas discussed at the end of the first section Chapter 5 of The Art of War. This chapter is about the methods using force and momentum. The beginning of this section covered ideas related to the scalability of practical strategic methods and their relationship to earlier chapters. These lines discuss a pair of important complementary opposites. They often refer to chapters later in the book.
Direct and Surprising
The first line here introduces the basic ingredients in creating momentum. This analysis divides our strategic methods into two major types. Both are acceptable and necessary despite being opposites.
(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 English translation.)
<Unusual> <straight> <correct> <also;>
You must correctly use both surprise and direct action.
I often find the parallels between ancient languages and modern ones amusing. In this context, <straight> means “normal” and “expected.” Sun Tzu doesn’t object to what is “normal.” He objects to a move being “expected.” If any of our moves are exactly what is expected, we only make those moves when we have made them more surprising. This refers to romantic strategy as well as other forms of competition.
The two types of moves we can make are <unusual>, that is, surprising, and <straight>, which means both a direct response and the expected one. The problem with most of us is that we too often make direct responses rather than surprising ones, but both types of moves are necessary. In the next section of this chapter, Sun Tzu will explain more details about the roles of each.
At this point, the book has explained a few of the direct methods, but many more come later, especially in Chapter 11, which explains the most common nine strategic situations and Sun Tzu’s methods for addressing them. Most of Sun Tzu’s discussion of surprise is in this chapter. The next place it is explained is Chapter 11 because it is part of some of our standard responses to common situations.
Relative Location
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