Strategy and competition
The I Ching
When to move, when to wait
The I Ching (Zhou to Warring States · China) — When to move, when to wait.
What actually happened?
Sixty-four hexagrams at six lines each comes to three hundred and eighty-four short texts, and almost none of them says do this. They say, from where you are standing, do this. The same hexagram issues six different instructions depending on which line you occupy, and the two most famous lines of the first hexagram point in opposite directions. Read straight through, the book is one long argument that the right move is a function of position, and that no position lasts.
Being able and being due are two different times
The bottom line and the fifth are both the dragon; what differs is position, not power. Rushing to prove yourself in a new place spends your own force and carries all of the risk, and the same act two lines later is ordinary.
New to a team, change nothing in the first month. Not because it should not be changed, but because that is when it costs the most to change.
There is one line above the summit
Most people take the flying dragon for the end of the hexagram. It is not. The trouble at a peak is not the height but the adding that continues after you have reached it, and what a long good run never trains is retreat, loss and letting go.
Someone who has only ever added is clumsy the first time subtraction is the correct move.
The hexagram after Peace is Standstill
The wall falls back into the moat is written into the top line of Peace, not into Standstill. The turn begins at the last position of the good stretch. Read the other direction, being fully jammed is the condition under which change finally becomes possible.
The best year is the year to work out how this ends. Equally, stop forcing a change while it still half works and push when it genuinely seizes.
How do I use it today?
Take the thing you are in the middle of and answer one question before any other: which line am I on. If it is the bottom one, spend the month gathering rather than proving. If it is near the top, name what you have never practised.
Deep read
Read alongside
Further
Lines to keep
The hidden dragon does not act.
The overreaching dragon repents.
At the limit it changes; changed it passes through, and so lasts.
Now is not the normal state. It is one line of one hexagram.