Assume Battle Poise

In a boxing match, it’s bad to get hit. You’d rather not! Getting hit is painful and decreases your chances of winning the fight, not to mention potentially leaves you with lasting injuries. It would make sense to say “I’d like to minimize my chances of getting hit,” but if you actually choose actions that minimize your chances of getting hit every second of the match, you will definitely lose.

Why? Because throwing a punch of your own means taking at least some posture, energy and attention away from your own defense. Every time you open up your guard a little, you increase your odds of taking one on the chin. So in order to tuly minimize your chances of getting hit, you’d have to never throw a punch. But if you never throw a punch, you’ll obviously lose the fight.

There’s a term called “Pareto-optimal.” Named after economist Vilfredo Pareto, it refers to a situation where you’ve reached the best equilibrium between multiple conflicting options such that no change in any direction would reflect a better trade-off. In other words, while you might in a vacuum prefer to have both $100 and 100 cups of coffee, when forced to choose between the two there is some combination of dollars and cups where you would neither trade one more dollar for one more cup of coffee, nor would you prefer one fewer cup of coffee to get one dollar back. That point, whatever it is for you personlly, is your “Pareto-optimal” ratio of dollars/coffee.

In a fight, you’re not really trying to minimize your chances of getting hit, but you’re also not trying to maximize your chances of hitting the other guy, either. You’re trying to find the Pareto-optimal balance between the two, such that no decrease in your chances of getting hit nor increase in your chances of hitting the other guy will make it more likely that you win the fight overall. What that optimal balance is can shift from fight to fight and even moment to moment within a fight, but that’s the line you’re trying to toe. That’s what will win.

Think of every major challenge in your life like that – like a fight against an opponent. There is always a “safest” course of action, relatively speaking. Rarely is that the course of action that is most likely to overcome the challenge. Moment to moment you may feel safer, but you’re losing the fight with every second that passes while you’re up against the ropes.

You can’t adopt a fully defensive posture. You must acknowledge that you’re opening yourself up to a few blows to the head in order to increase your odds of winning overall. You must acknowledge that this means, over time, you will get punched. Hits will land, and they will hurt. You will suffer losses and setbacks.

There is no road to victory that maximizes safety.