Responding to Opportunity

The key to certain victory and the method of adapting to changing circumstances in deploying troops both lie in grasping opportunity. If one is not wise, who can see the opportunity and act immediately? The path to seeing opportunity prioritizes nothing above striking where it is unexpected. Therefore, once a fierce beast leaves dangerous terrain, even a child holding a halberd can chase it; once a poisonous bee or scorpion releases its sting, even a strong man will panic and lose color. This is because disaster appears where the opponent did not anticipate it, and change occurs faster than the opponent can think. Modern Application:The previous chapter, “Taking Advantage of Conditions,” dealt with the matching of action methods to static conditions; this chapter extracts the temporal dimension from “conditions” and points to a narrower and more lethal judgment: in confrontation, advantage comes not only from “I am stronger than you,” but also from “before you have reacted, the thing has already happened.” The modern meaning of “the forms of responding to change lie......