Creative Boredom

In 1969, Ursula Le Guin wrote, "When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep." I realise that I've always believed implicitly in this.

What I think is that many of the young people I've met — by 'young', I mean roughly anyone born around 1984 or later — are not good at coping with boredom. They find it hard to detect when action grows unprofitable, are bad at (or disinclined toward) gathering information, and are hopeless at tactical sleeping.

I used to fall into a sleep-like reverie in meetings, a bit like that of Tolkien's Middle-Earth elves. My former boss once asked, "Are you getting enough sleep? You keep falling asleep at my meetings."

I replied, "My brain has learnt to go into sleep mode whenever it's not being stimulated and I can't do anything about it."

Which brings me to Savielly Tartakower (the original Professor X!) and his distinction between tactics and strategy. The man who once said, "It is always better to sacrifice your opponent's men," also said, "Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do. Strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do."

A Dead Sea Strategy

Over the last few months, I've been listening to 'Blue Ocean' rhetoric coming from a Red Ocean personality. Slowly though, as the data comes trickling back to me, I've learnt exactly what that entails.

It seems that the man has been poisoning the roots and sources of the ocean he already has. Not content with removing the indigenous elements of the College of Wyverns, he has been terminating young wyverns at source by allowing (and perhaps encouraging) them to fly to other nests. In the meantime, he has been desperately inviting cuckoos to the college, but not with any degree of success.

It isn't the only egregious thing. As the vast Descendant network closes ranks, they've decided that the man is becoming more of a liability and less of a trump. In the beginning, they hoped he would be an Emperor; now, they are looking at a Lightning-Struck Tower.

What has been happening is that, just like the salt in the Dead Sea, the man has been building up huge mineral resources and not allowing them to circulate freely. Good teachers are balked, confined by lesser talents, constrained by silly regulations. Fresh water has not been coming in, but has been evaporating away. Slowly, the gelid, tepid, halide fluid has killed all but some rare weeds. The end will never really come, but the sea is already lifeless.

You can float in it forever, though; having a lot of dead salty water makes for great buoyancy.

Lessons From Games

Over the last few decades, I've had both opportunity and reason to compare rugby, chess, soccer and water polo. These are more traditional games, compared to the rash of strategic boardgames and role-playing games I've also had the pleasure to examine and try out.

A few things stand out. All four of these games have a strategy best described as 'hold up the centre and infiltrate round the flanks'. They also have 'open up your opponent by shifting the thrust to the other flank'. They have 'dominate the key player by cutting off his supply and support', 'defend your links' and 'protect your home rank'. Of course, they don't all use this terminology, and the circumstances are different in each case—but the concepts are the same, and strong analogies and consequent lessons can be drawn from this.

You see, all four games are about spatial control and getting your stuff from one end to the other after mixing it up in the centre (or avoiding the mix-up in the centre). Dominance can be unit-on-unit, group-on-group, by local outnumbering at some minor sacrifice elsewhere, and so on.

I realise that I've benefited a lot from all the sports and games I've managed to get a taste of. By watching the professionals in action live and in videos, I've learnt much about strategy that has transferred from one game to another. What I'm not about to try, though, is chessboxing, that peculiar alternating chess+boxing contest which ends up either by checkmate or knockout.

Avoidance As A Leadership Strategy

Today I was reading a passage on kingship and its failings. It came to me that I had missed an essential part of the theory of leadership, and that is the message that avoidance of wrath is an integral part of the whole circus.

In the passage above, Saul attempts to avoid the wrath of God and the people, while David attempts to avoid Saul's wrath. It is all a terribly intricate pas de deux, performed by two men, the old grizzled powerful warrior and the young slightly naïve one who is trying to serve him faithfully. That naïveté is what plagues David for years thereafter, even when he himself has become the grizzled power in the land, but has to deal with the scheming puissance of Joab.

But David learns that evil lesson well. Joab does not survive David's vengeance as executed by Solomon, even though he tries hiding behind the altar of God. The whole thing is a mess. Perhaps it is best in the end to forgive, forget, avoid, and keep a sharp knife nearby for self-defence; I think it's a strategy most valuable.