Machiavelli
Fortune and the half left to you
Half is luck; the other half has a deadline
The Prince, chapter 25
How much is fate and how much is mine? He gives a ratio, and then says exactly when the half that is yours can be spent.
What actually happened?
Chapter 25 puts a number on it: fortune is the arbiter of one half of our actions, but she leaves the other half, or nearly so, to be governed by us. Then the image everyone remembers. Fortune is a violent river that carries everything before it when it floods; yet in quiet weather men can raise dykes and embankments, so that when the water rises again it runs off in a channel. His conclusion is not resignation. It is that the half you govern has to be finished before the flood.
The window for preparing is the calm
Dykes cannot be built during the flood. Inside a crisis the room for choice is tiny, and nearly every move that helps had to be completed while nothing was happening. What an organisation survives is decided by what it spent when spending looked unnecessary.
Cash buffer, a second supplier, a backup for the one person who knows the system. All look like waste until the day they are the only things working.
The cautious man loses when the times turn
His counter-intuitive point: a method succeeds because it happens to suit the moment. When the moment changes and the method does not, it fails. People almost never change their nature, so the caution that made a man is what finishes him when boldness is wanted.
Whoever took the market by pushing hard in the expansion keeps pushing in the contraction. Whoever survived the contraction by holding back misses the next expansion.
Concede the half that is not yours
Charge the whole result to yourself and you will be arrogant in good years and shattered in bad ones. Granting half to fortune concentrates attention on the half that moves, including the uncomfortable version of the question, asked after a win rather than after a loss.
A quarter beats plan. Ask what the number would have been if the whole market had been flat. A team that cannot answer will run luck as method.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: everything is going well, and you are weighing whether to spend on something that has not happened.
Ask first: if it did happen, would there still be time to do this preparation then?
Where it goes wrong: booking the whole of a good year to your own account; or running the method that worked in the last phase into a phase that has already changed.
Lines to keep
Fortune is the arbiter of half our actions; she leaves us the rest.
In quiet weather men can raise their dykes and embankments.
The cautious man, when it is time to act boldly, is ruined.
Same situation, other people are asking
Everything's fine. What should I be getting ready for?To make this quarter I would squeeze the people carrying me.It is working. Should I go loud about it now?This is the highest I have ever been. Do I push for more?Things are going well and it scares me · all 11 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.