The Art of Comparison 9: Listening
Discover an opportunity by listening.
Adjust to your situation.
Get assistance from the outside.
Influence events.
Think about opportunities in terms of methods you can control.
Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Chapter 1, Section 3: Lines 1-5
Listening is the initial and most continuous of the four methods for advancing our positions—listening, aiming, moving, and claiming. Listening starts the cycle, never stops. and it is renewed at each point.
Finding Opportunities
Discover an opportunity by listening.
We must find opportunities. Opportunities are all around us, but we cannot compare them because we don’t see them. How do we compare what we cannot see? But why don’t we see them? Because what we see are the successes that others have had. These are no longer opportunities. These positions are filled.
Opportunities are openings into which we can move. They are potential positions where nothing currently exists. So, they are invisible. They are also invisible because the most common forms of openings are unfulfilled needs. They are the needs that others around us feel. Any need that other people do not feel is not an opportunity for us. Our job is not to make them feel it. The feeling must be there first. The main point of comparison is how strongly the need is felt. Because these feelings are inside of others, we must listen for them. We compare what we hear.
To care about people’s feeling, we must first know their goals and values. Those are what people care about. Do those around us have a number of unmet desires and unreached goals? Every one of us does. This is why the world is full of opportunities, too many, which is why they must be compared.
When we listen to people, we want to learn who else shares their needs. We compare opportunities based upon how many people feel them. The more people who feel a similar need, the more valuable the opportunity becomes. To see any opportunity clearly requires seeing it from the perspectives of several different people.
Adjust to the Situation
When we aim at any opportunity and move, our situations change. We must listen to those we meet in making the move. Because all situations are local. This means we compare opportunities by how local they are, how much they touch upon our current and especially future positions and situations.
Adjust to your situation.
We listen to those we can affect and who affect us, those who are “near” us. Communications systems have changed the meaning of “near.” Not all positions exist in the physical world. We can hold many positions in virtual worlds as well. For example, positions on websites, social networks, Substacks, and with online retailers like Amazon.
One problem with virtual positions is that we get very little feedback from those who interact with them. For example, except for money, for which I am personally very grateful, I get little feedback from my many supporters. Useful feedback through conversation is more difficult to win than money in most virtual spaces.
“Noise” can drown out listening in some virtual environments. In some of them, like social networks, those who create the most noise are those who want attention to a neurotic degree. Some want to tell others what to do, what to think, and what they should be offended by. A small percentage of the population have always been self-centered troublemakers. In the real world, we have ways of controlling them. The problem is that they tend to run amok in the virtual world. Too social media platforms consider “wrong” opinions more dangerous than truly destructive, attention-seeking noise. Bad behavior creates a lot of clicks.
The best place to start is with those near our positions in the real world, those physically around us: family, friends, neighbors, those we see socially, business associates, those who provide our services, and so on. The most important of these contacts are those who can offer insight on our positions or to whom our positions already offer some value.
Assistance from Outside
Get assistance from the outside.
The original Chinese in this line can be read two ways. It says, character-by-character, [by means of] [assist] [this] [outside]. That means both “give assistance to those outside” and “get assistance from those outside.” This is far from a contradiction.
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