Another Brazilian Jiu Jitsu lesson: What do you do when you are in a terrible position, i.e. wrapped up, all but immobilized, and underneath an opponent who is inching his way towards forcing you to tap out? If you’ve done this for a while, then you should know at least two ways to escape, and yet most people fail to get out or wind up getting forced into submitting.
Why?
Because they’re not looking at the situation correctly. This is not the time to slowly deliberate upon the best course of action, gently pushing in one direction here, and then giving a half-hearted shove in the other. In doing so, we telegraph our intentions and make it easy for our opponents to resist our lackluster efforts.
Instead, see it like this: You are trapped in a burning building.
And the way to escape a burning building is to pick one direction and commit yourself with total intensity towards breaking through. You might come out with third-degree burns, you may never grow eyebrows again, but it beats being slowly suffocated by smoke and indecision.
They forget Clausewitz’s main lesson in On War: the key to victory lies in the concentration of force on the enemy’s weakest point. If you can see three weak points, you don’t disperse your forces among them all, you make an intelligent guess, and you commit to driving through a single breach in their defense.
And yet, how often do companies make this exact mistake? Trapped in a bind with limited resources, they attempt to decide by committee. They want to test and focus group this direction, AB test that one, and waste valuable time and money trying to know for sure which of the myriad options on the table will succeed with absolute certainty.
I’m not saying to ignore your hunches or not do all the reconnaissance you can to find out everything you can about your target. Just that at some point, you have to decide.
Problem is, once all that flailing about is eventually finished and a decision can finally be made, it may already be too late.