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Contemplate them day in and day out, and imagine how it will feel to reach them and what reaching them will look like.

We often imagine that we generally operate by some kind of plan, that we have goals we are trying to reach. But we?re usually fooling ourselves; what we have are not goals but wishes.

Focus on your greater goal, your destiny. The first step toward becoming a grand strategist?the step that will make everything else fall into place?is to begin with a clear, detailed, purposeful goal in mind, one rooted in reality.

Act upon them before they attain being, Control them before they become chaotic.

Understand: if you let narcissism act as a screen between you and other people, you will misread them and your strategies will misfire. You must be aware of this and struggle to see others dispassionately. Every individual is like an alien culture. You must get inside his or her way of thinking, not as an exercise in sensitivity but out of strategic necessity. Only by knowing your enemies can you ever hope to vanquish them.

No matter how far we progress, we remain part animal, and it is the animal in us that fires our strategies, gives them life, animates us to fight. Without the desire to fight, without a capacity for the violence war churns up, we cannot deal with danger.

So when something goes wrong, look deep into yourself?not in an emotional way, to blame yourself or indulge your feelings of guilt, but to make sure that you start your next campaign with a firmer step and greater vision.

When an action goes wrong?in business, in politics, in life?trace it back to the policy that inspired it in the first place.

The goals of the war, and the policies that drove it, were unrealistic, inappropriate, blind to other factors.

Always pay attention to the first step of the campaign. It sets the tempo, determines the enemy?s mind-set, and launches you in a direction that had better be the right one.

Hit him directly and he reacts, taking a defensive pose that may allow him to parry your next blow; but if he can?t see the point of your strike, or if it misleads him as to where the next one will come from, he is defenseless and blind.

Preventing your opponent from seeing the purpose of your actions gives you an enormous advantage.

A part of grand strategy related to severing the roots is seeing dangers as they start to sprout, then cutting them down before they get too big to handle. A grand strategist knows the value of preemptive action.

Too many wars and battles drag on because neither side knows how to strike at the other?s roots.

Caesar was a brilliant political animal, and what made him so was his grasp of the public psyche: he understood their self-interest and shaped his strategies accordingly. Being political means understanding people?seeing through their eyes.

Blinded by their obsession with stopping the spread of communism, they failed to note the far deeper influences of culture and religion on the North Vietnamese way of fighting.

Every event has a reason, a causal chain of relationships that made it happen; you have to dig deep into that reality, instead of seeing only the surfaces of things.

rational and animal, are constantly at war, making almost all of our actions awkward. We reason and plan to achieve a goal, but in the heat of action we become emotional and lose perspective. We use cleverness and strategy to grab for what we want, but we do not stop to think about whether what we want is necessary, or what the consequences of getting it will be. The extended vision that rationality brings us is often eclipsed by the reactive, emotional animal within?the stronger side of our nature. More than we are today, the ancient Greeks were close to the passage of the human race from animal to rational. To them our dual nature made us tragic, and the source of tragedy was limited vision. In classical Greek tragedies such as Oedipus Rex, the protagonist may think he knows the truth and knows enough about the world to act in it, but his vision is limited by

Somewhere along the line, however, we stopped evolving as rational creatures. Despite our progress there is always a part of us that remains animal, and that animal part can respond only to what is most immediate in our environment?it is incapable of thinking beyond the moment.

an animal depended on its senses and instincts; it could not see around the corner or to the other end of the forest. We humans, on the other hand, could map the entire forest, study the habits of dangerous animals and even nature itself, gaining deeper, wider knowledge of our environment. We could see dangers coming before they were here. This expanded vision was abstract: where an animal is locked in the present, we could see into the past and glimpse as far as our reason would take us into the future. Our sight expanded further and further into time and space, and we came to dominate the world.

surprise. Only grand strategy can yield grand results.

That context includes people outside your immediate circle whom your actions affect, the public at large, the whole world; it includes poli- tics, for every choice in modern life has political ramifications; it includes culture, the media, the way the public sees you. Your task as a grand strategist is to extend your vision in all directions?not only looking further into the future but also seeing more of the world around you, more than your enemy does.

We always tend to look at what is most immediate to us, taking the most direct route toward our goals and trying to win the war by winning as many battles as we can. We think in small, microlevel terms and react to present events?but this is petty strategy. Nothing in life happens in isolation; everything is related to everything else and has a broader context.

Grand strategists think and plan further into the future before taking action. Nor is their planning simply a matter of accumulating knowledge and information; it involves looking at the world with a dispassionate eye, thinking in terms of the campaign, planning indirect, subtle steps along the way whose purpose may only gradually become visible to others.

keep his perspective in the heat of battle. He would not get caught up in the reactive and self-destructive pattern that had destroyed so many armies and states.

His subordination of his emotions to strategic thought would give him more control during the course of the campaign.

A victory on the battlefield would not seduce the leader into an unconsidered move that might ultimately set the campaign back, nor would a defeat unnerve him.

This kind of strategy represented a qualitative advance. Think of chess, where the grand master, instead of focusing only on the move at hand and making it solely in reaction to what the other player has just done, must visualize the entire chessboard deep into the future, crafting an overall strategy, using the moves of the pawns now to set up those of the more powerful pieces later on. Thinking in terms of the campaign gave strategy a new depth. The strategist used more and more of the map.

Forgetting our objectives.?During the journey we commonly forget its goal. Almost every profession is chosen and commenced as a means to an end but continued as an end in itself. Forgetting our objectives is the most frequent of all acts of stupidity.

Other rulers actually won their battles only to grow drunk on victory and not know when to stop, stirring up implacable hatred, distrust, and the desire for revenge all around them, culminating in war on several fronts and total defeat?as

Wanting to win, he would underestimate the enemy?s strength or overestimate his own.

They strike at the roots of a problem, not at its symptoms, and

people who can?t see past their noses make things heavy.)

quality of lightness? these traits comprising what Nietzsche calls the ?Apollonian ideal.?

The prudent man might seem cold, his rationality sucking pleasure out of life.