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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.