Hey, hey, hey! Welcome, everyone! Thanks for joining us! I’m so glad you’re all here listening. I really am. This week we’re going to talk about one of the most famous passages in the entire Art of War. We’re going to talk about knowing thyself and knowing others. So let’s go!
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In Chapter 3.6 of Sunzi’s Art of War, we read:
Therefore, it is said. If you understand others and understand yourself, then you will not be in danger of breaking even in 100 battles. If you don’t understand others, but you understand yourself for every victory won, there will be a price paid, a burden to bear. If you don’t understand others and you don’t understand yourself. Than every battle will surely end in defeat.
Chapter 3 ends with one of the most famous passages in the entire Art of War. It’s also one that’s often misunderstood. In it, Sunzi notes the importance of knowledge, or lack thereof, in three combat scenarios or outcomes. So let’s work backwards.
Guaranteed Defeat
The last and least desirable of Sunzi’s three outcomes is the guaranteed defeat that comes from not knowing or understanding ourselves or others. The language Sunzi uses here is not specifically military related. He doesn’t say if you don’t know or understand yourself and your enemy you will surely be defeated. It doesn’t use the term di2 敵, which I discussed in Episode 13, “Three Secret Strategies for Overcoming Our Inner Enemies.” No, he uses the much broader term bi3 彼, which is a third person pronoun, meaning that, them, they, or those.
Whether in combat or in the corporation, the principles the same. If we don’t know or understand ourselves and we don’t or understand others, whether they’re enemies, competitors, our families, our friends, our coworkers, or our partners. Then sooner or later, we’re guaranteed to lose. Defeat is inevitable.
The character that Sunzi uses for defeat is really interesting. The character is bai4 敗 and it’s composed of a cowry shell 貝 beside a hand holding a tool 攵. The oldest form of this character from the Oracle bone inscriptions depicts two hands coming from opposite directions and two cowry shells. Defeat or failure, then, is when we pay the price but don’t get the goods. We put in the work, and we fight for what we want, but we don’t get the value of it – like working without ever getting paid or investing and never seeing a return on our investment.
As Australian social entrepreneur, speaker, coach and consultant Evan Sutter has observed: “When you don’t know yourself who you are and what you want, you just become a product of your environment. A leaf that gets blown each and every way until it just lands in a big pile of mud and gets stuck.”
Whenever we feel stuck in our lives, whenever we feel like we’re losing, it’s usually a sign that we need to engage in some self-reflection. And get to know ourselves and get to know those around us a little better. Remember back in Episode 4, when I discussed Sunzi’s, five essential leadership attributes for generals? The very first one was wisdom, which is closely related to knowledge, and in Chinese knowledge is the arrow. It can defend and provide.
The Price of Ignorance
When we don’t understand ourselves and we don’t understand those around us, we’re guaranteed to lose. When we at least understand ourselves but not others, we’ll win some and we’ll lose some. But for every victory we win, we will pay a price. The term Sunzi uses here is fu4 負, which means to carry a load or burden and thus to be burdened. The etymology of fu4 is related to bai4 敗 to be defeated. It contains the same cowry shell 貝, which was of the earliest form of money in ancient China. It also has a person hunched over ⺈ above that cowry shell.
Thus, the sense is that we do gain the prize or value that we’re working for, but it weighs on us. It weighs us down. It’s going to cost us something – something dear. We feel burdened by the price we had to pay to get what we wanted. See, knowing ourselves is only half the equation – half the battle. Have you ever known someone so driven by their personal mission that they were oblivious to the impact their methods were having on those around them? Sometimes it’s not worth the price we pay to get what we think we want or what we actually want. Sometimes our approach or methods are too costly and leave a trail of tears or wake of destruction behind us, like I discussed in Episode 9: “What’s it Going to Cost Me?”
The Shuowen jiezi 説文解字, China’s earliest etymological dictionary, states that the character fu4 means to be indebted instead of rewarded (受貸不償). Have you ever felt that way? Have you ever lost something in pursuit of whatever you thought you were making “sacrifices” for? May be lost a friend, a relationship, or an opportunity in the pursuit of something that we thought we wanted? Have you ever had “buyers remorse” or been pressured into doing something you thought would solve your problems and give you what you wanted, only to realize afterward that the party wasn’t worth the price of admission? Or maybe the purchase that seemed so important that we wanted so desperately wasn’t worth the high interest rate on the back end? I know I have.
Whenever we pursue what we think we want, either without full clarity of self-knowledge or the knowledge or an understanding of how our methods are going to affect those around us, we run the risk of losing things. We might get the girl or guy and lose friendships, or we might get the career and lose friendships. We might get all the money but lose the “peace of mind.” This is the price of ignorance.
Know Thyself and Understand Others
The first and best scenario is to know and understand both ourselves and others, which according to Sunzi would make us unbreakable even in a hundred battles! It is important to note that Sunzi does not promise that we will win every battle, but rather that win, lose or draw, the outcome of a hundred battles will not break us! The character Sunzi uses here is dai4 殆, which means danger, threat, or a bad end. The character is comprised of a broken bone 歹 beside a mouth speaking 台. This conveys the sense of being warned of danger as well as the pain of crying out when in danger.
When I was 11 years old, I was in a freak playground accident and broke my leg – both bones clear through. I was running one direction and someone else was running another direction and we came around this wall and collided and I went flying off and my foot planted on this stack of school books and just twisted around – snap – and I blacked out. When I came to, my knee was pointing one way and my toes were pointing the other – and cried out in pain! The break went down from my tibia and fibula into my ankle and shattered my ankle! The doctor said that I probably wouldn’t walk again. I refused to accept that. I refused to let my broken leg break my life. Break me. I was in a cast – that was October, it was the Tuesday before Halloween – and I was in a cast for months. First, I was in a big awkward hip cast and I was laid up. and eventually 8 weeks later I got into a walking cast and then a boot.
Several months later, I finally got out of it and my birthday – International Star Wars Day (May the 4th), yes, the force is strong in my family, thank you very much – on my birthday, I managed to walk without crutches, without a boot, without a cast. I managed to walk from my bedroom to the kitchen for the first time. My leg was so atrophied after the break that I could literally reach my hand around my leg and touch my fingers together! I limped for many years as a result of this break. My right leg is shorter than my left leg by about 1/2 an inch, and so I limped for many years, all through middle school. But eventually I had what would be considered a complete recovery – I could run, I could jump, I could play. I played volleyball in college, I played tennis in high school, and it didn’t hold me back! But if I had let that initial statement, that initial prognosis from the doctors that my broken leg would prevent me from ever walking again, if I had let it break me, my life would have been completely different!
So, the ideal outcome that Sunzi wants to create through knowledge of self and others is to become unbreakable. He doesn’t want war to break us and at the same time, the same principle applies in our lives. We don’t have to let the battles of our lives break us either! Have you ever seen someone go through something terrible and come out stronger on the other side? Conversely, have you ever seen something horrible happen and just devastate someone to the point that they never recovered? What’s the difference? What determines whether hard times are a devastation or a motivation? What decides whether they define us or refine us?
In Episode 17: “Three Principles for Achieving the Ultimate (Personal) Victory in Life,” I told the story of a friend of mine who was hit by a semi-truck on his motorcycle and lost his leg from the knee down. I talked about how he did not let this experience define him or devastate him, which he could have. He could have become bitter and just quit, but he didn’t! So how do we become unbreakable?
Socrates (ca. 470-399 BCE) said: “To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” So, what do we need to know about ourselves in order to become unbreakable? We need to know what drives our behaviors, why we do what we do!
As author, poet, and the Ambassador of Literacy to South Africa, Adiela Akoo said: “In order to grow, we need to know ourselves, to understand what triggers certain behaviors, we need to identify the root cause.”
Have you ever done something and asked yourself why did I do that? What was I thinking? Sounds all too familiar to me. Where do our behaviors come from? What drives them? Whether we realize it or not, our behaviors are driven by our emotions or anti-emotions, such as logic or reason. We do things because we’re looking for some outcome in our lives. Our behaviors then reinforce our beliefs. We’re looking for some outcome in our lives.
See, most people are just trying to get what they want with the tools that they have. I believe that. Most people just don’t get what they want because they don’t have the tools, the awareness, and the insights to get there. I’ve mentioned several times that when we get clear on our “Big Deal,” on what we really want in our lives, out of our lives, and for our lives that we might have that vision, but we may lack the beliefs to support it.
See, we’re we are emotional beings and emotion drives our behaviors. Have you ever noticed when you feel really great that you do more things – more confident things – and you do them more confidently? And, have you ever noticed the opposite? When you’re just feeling depressed and it’s hard to get anything done and get anything done effectively? And yet, if we can just switch, if we can manage to do something, we can actually by doing something change how we feel. So the lines of influence go both ways.
This is the foundation of emotional intelligence, but there’s more to it than that. Because where do our emotions come from? Our emotions are biochemical, physiological responses within our body. But what creates them? We usually think that emotions come from external stimuli, but that’s not entirely true. External things that happen to us trigger emotions internally, but the emotions that are triggered are shaped and informed by our thinking. So, how we feel about things is determined by what we think about things. See, our emotions both come from and shape our thoughts, our thinking – the thoughts we accept, embrace, entertain, and allow to stay in our minds over and over again until they become engrained pathways – neuro pathways. But where do our thoughts come from? Our thoughts are formed, informed and reformed by our beliefs – by those things, we choose to accept as truth about ourselves, each other, and the world.
In Episode 3: “Sunzi’s Five Strategic Success Factors,” I introduced the idea that I learned from life coach Brooke Castillo that our results in life are largely determined by our behaviors, which are driven by our emotions, which are created from our thoughts, which are shaped by our beliefs.
Something I learned from Tony Robbins is that the reverse is also true. A new action can change our physiology, our emotional state, and raise our energy levels, which changes the way we feel, which changes the way we think about things which can shift our beliefs about ourselves, each other, and the world around us! See, we create inherent accept and embrace our own belief systems consciously, subconsciously, unknowingly, unwittingly in some cases, from our society, culture, religion, family, friends, social media, wherever it all comes from for us personally, and then once we’ve accepted it and created it, we experience those beliefs! They become our reality!
In the words of Stephen R. Covey (1932-2012): “We see the world, not as it is, but as we are – or rather as we are conditioned to see it.”
So much of the pain we experience in our lives is not caused by what happens to us – I’m not talking about physical pain like my broken leg – I’m talking about emotional pain. So much of the emotional pain we experience in our lives is not caused by what happens to us. It’s caused by what we believe about what happens to us in our lives – what we say about it, the stories we tell about it, and the narratives that we create and retell over and over again in our minds until they become our identity!
In other words, we create so much of our own emotional pain! We are just experiencing the pain of our own belief systems! It’s our own belief systems that cause us so much of our emotional pain in life! So how do we get to know ourselves? How do we begin to identify those beliefs so that we can determine whether or not they serve us or whether they’re holding us back? Because beliefs can be changed. We get to choose what we’re going to believe and are those beliefs empowering us or stifling us?
See, as author Nikki Rowe has taught: “You learn who you are by unlearning who they taught you to be.”
A couple of years ago I wrote a series of blog posts on this for my translation of the Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching) 道德經, the ancient Chinese Classic on the Way and the Power of Virtue, which teaches that we need to un-limit ourselves to return home to a limitless state, un-shape ourselves to return home to our infinite potential, and un-condition ourselves to return home to a state of childlike innocence.
So, if we want to really know ourselves we need to dig into our beliefs and in order to that, we need to let go of our blame, shame, and judgment and look at ourselves with curiosity instead of condemnation, as I learned from my friend Abigail G. Manning in our first Warrior Mindset interview.
Knowing ourselves, really understanding ourselves, our feelings, our thoughts and our beliefs that shape and drive our behaviors is only one quarter of the battle – but it is so worth it. For most of my life, I did not understand myself and I was constantly asking myself: Why do you do that? Why did you do this? Why? What were you thinking? And I could never answer the question because what followed quickly after that was: What is wrong with you? and that condemnation led me to believe that I was fundamentally flawed, and just broken, and messed up, and it literally blocked me from being able to dig into my issues.
I didn’t know back then that my beliefs were choices. I just inherited some, I accepted things that some people had said, not even realizing that I was creating my own prison cell brick by brick of belittling belief and limiting lie!
See, once we can recognize and understand what’s going on inside of us and see the beautiful MESS (Mental, Emotional, Spiritual, and Social) beliefs, thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that is ours, then we can begin to manage our MESS, as I discussed in Episode 2: “Look in the MIRROR: You are in Charge!” These three actions form the acronym RUM: Recognize, Understand, and Manage – which always reminds of Captain Jack Sparrow: “Why is the RUM always gone?” Because you spend most of the movies not understanding how you really feel Jack … 🙂
Once we can recognize, understand, and manage our own MESS and how it is shaping our results and outcomes in our lives, then we can make choices, different choices. We can choose to believe something better and more empowering. I remember the first time, as I started down my own journey of getting to know myself, I remember the first time that something clicked and I was like ‘Bing! Wow, I get myself, I understand why I do these things! I understand where this is all coming from! For the first time in my life I understand myself!’ And with that understanding came some self-forgiveness, some self-acceptance and some clarity. I knew how to begin moving forward and change some things in my life. It wasn’t perfect. It was very messy, but I had a heading. I had some clarity. I had some new tools, and things began to shift, and once we can begin to do that for ourselves as leaders, we can then help and empower those around us to do likewise and we will become UNBREAKABLE!
See, I grew up believing in that futility farce. And that limiting and incapable lie that I talked about in Episode 6, “Sunzi’s Six Traps of (Self-)Deception and How to Avoid Them,” and so everything was devastating to me. Every little setback, because I also had this performance-based worth, and so failure or setback meant worthlessness – and so everything broke me! My comfort zone just kept getting smaller and smaller, and the amount of risk I was willing to take because I had it so entangled in my own identity and my own self-worth kept getting smaller and smaller! Because I didn’t want to be worthless! I literally experienced the pain of the belief that I was worthless! Until I realized that I could make a different choice – and that’s when I started to become unbreakable (an ongoing an process).
I want to invite all of you to step back and think about that for a moment. Think about everything that is going on in your lives right now. Think about all the things you must manage, all the elements of your personal MESS. Think about the personal challenges you face. Think about the pain-points and the struggles that I know you have.
Now think about what it would look like for you if you were unbreakable. If nothing could phase you or stop you from having what you want in your life, out of your life, and for your life. What does that person look like? How does that version of you feel? How does that version of you respond to difficulties and challenges? What does that person think and do? What does that iteration of you believe about yourself, about those around you, and the world you live in? What does it mean to be unbreakable to you? How does that prospect feel? Really visualize this.
See yourself 5-10 years from now, having mastered this. You are now unbreakable! How does it feel? How is it different from where you are now? What are the things that get under your skin now that don’t then? Get to know that version of yourself and begin to choose to live from that place and that perspective. That’s who we really are – we just haven’t caught up with that person yet. It’s time to recover that version of ourselves from all the limiting labels and lies! All of the confining and constraining conditioning imposed upon us by culture and circumstance, and all the ways our debilitating doubts and festering fears and belittling beliefs have misshaped us!
It’s time to uncover the truth of who we are – powerful beings with profound purposes on this planet! Awesome, amazing, and absolutely essential gems – treasures with great gifts to give the world! It’s time to discover our destinies! It’s time to start becoming unbreakable! When the storms of life rage and swirl all around us, we may bend, we may sway, but we will not break! We may bow down for a moment, breathless, voiceless, the wind knocked out of us, and may be brought to our knees – but we will rise again! We may taste the salt of our shed tears and the iron of our spent blood, but we will not break! We may fail and we may fall over and over and over, but we will rise again and again and again! We won’t stop coming for what we want! We won’t stop trying! We won’t stop giving! We won’t stop serving! We won’t stop bringing our offerings to the world! We may lose, we may suffer painful defeat, but we will return! We will come back stronger, faster, smarter, and reinforced! We may fracture, but we will not break! We will seal our cracks with the cement of grit, disciplined determination – the grit of blood, sweat, and tears! We may feel the squeeze, we may feel the pressure, the stress and the strain, but that will only transform our doubts into diamonds and our fears into ferocious fight!
It’s time to recover our own inner voice of wisdom, uncover the plans and purposes of our lives that we have let get buried under the dirt and detritus of disappointment and distraction! It’s time to discover our destiny!
So, spend some time getting to know yourself. You are worth getting to know! You are awesome! You are amazing, and you are absolutely essential in this world! Spend some time getting to know that person and you’re going to do amazing things! Everyone you encounter will be glad that you spent the time to get to know yourself! There are people waiting up ahead for you to show up with the knowledge of who you are, because as we get to know ourselves as we give ourselves permission to just be who we are, and then we give ourselves permission to grow and to who we can become, we give everyone else around us permission to do the same! It is time to become unbreakable!
Warrior: The Art of War for Life - A Podcast on Winning 
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