Owning The Initiative

Owning The Initiative

People do not think about this too much.

In a game of chess, we’ve already discussed two ways of determining who has the advantage. You can count pieces to figure out who has the more powerful army or you can look at who’s controlling the position. And these are fairly straightforward and easy to determine, which is why most people default to using them. But there’s another way, a way that Grandmasters use to evaluate a position. This is typically the one that decides the game. It’s called The Initiative.

It’s determined by which player is dictating the action. That is, which player is acting and which is reacting.

If you can answer that question, then you can reliably predict with a high degree of certainty, which player is ultimately going to arise victorious.

The classic example of this is Napoleon, who always just seemed to have the initiative. He dictated where, when and how the action would unfold. As a result, despite often having vastly inferior forces, he still managed to win time and time again.

Activation energy and Maintenance energy

In business and in life, a lack of skills or experiences can often be overcome with the appropriate amount of gusto. The reason for this is, the initiative leads to momentum. Momentum is one hell of a thing. It is the cure to procrastination, to overwhelm, to overthinking. More importantly, it’s often The X Factor of success. The reason it tends to be so powerful is because it taps into a fundamental law of the universe, which is, an object in motion tends to stay in motion. But here’s the problem, and it’s the reason most of us struggle. The reverse is also true. An object at rest tends to stay at rest and if you’ve ever found yourself feeling stuck in the mud of life, like you just can’t get traction, can’t get moving forward, it’s not your fault. Getting momentum is the hardest part, because, it requires an outsized amount of what’s called activation energy. Once you’ve inserted that into the system, the energy required to sustain progress substantially decreases. This is called maintenance energy. It is the reason why it is easier to maintain your current trajectory in life than it is to change paths.

The way we can use this mental frame in the context of thinking strategically is, to understand that when we’re comparing two courses of action, often, we’ll overvalue the amount of activation energy required to get traction and undervalue the amount of maintenance energy required to sustain. For instance, getting a W2 job requires far less activation energy than starting your own business. However, the day you stop injecting maintenance energy into your job is the day you stop getting paid. So you’re going to have to pay this cost of maintenance energy into perpetuity, whereas in business, if you build it correctly, the amount of maintenance energy that you’ll personally have to inject in the machine is going to gradually decrease over time, and potentially, even get to the point of requiring zero energy from you. This is when you’re finally playing in the arena of passive income or leveraged income.