Always underestimate your enemy
The reason people do this is to keep from bravery, to summon up the balls to fight. If you can pretend that your enemy doesn’t have the skills to give you a good fight then you don’t need to be so afraid of them. It’s a way that fearful people try to psyche themselves into a warrior’s mindset. You take a cartoonishly simple view of your opposition so that there is no way you can feel intimidated by them. Think of the trash-talking that you used to have before boxing matches. The side-effect is that your enemy probably knows the ways in which he is outmatched and has been focusing on ways to compensate. If you are dealing with handful of people you might get lucky and find that they are all morons, but very rarely do you find a group of 20 or more that does not have at least one competent strategist among them.
Forget that sports is your guide to war
This is where you learn strategy, how to coordinate and to lead and to plan before you enter onto the field of battle. War is just an elevated sport. This means that no country or community with jocks is without soldiers. Nobody is helpless and unable to fight back if they have ever played sports, they already know the rudiments of battle and handling themselves under pressure.
Put too much confidence in in equipment
Competition is mostly about how much attention you pay to strategy, how well you can compensate for your flaws and exploit those of the opposition. All games are games of calculation and deviousness. The man who is intensely familiar with his enemy, who is deeply interested in his character, always has the upper hand over the man who merely has a lot of gear with which to play and to practice. The well equipped man has forgotten that anything, including your assets can be used against you if your enemy knows how. The number of ways to defeat anybody is usually roughly equivalent to the ways they could possibly win. Every “advantage” is really the flip side of a hole in the defense.
Forget the power of emotion
Rage can make you forget pain and completely eliminate hesitation from your tendencies. It can, in some people, provide focus and determination to achieve a certain result. Fear and shock can addle even the most competent man. Genuine surprise is not something from which you recover easily. None of these things can be consistently planned for on a field of battle, which is why all competition is unpredictable. If you plan right you can control emotions in many situations, but not all. Not even “most”. Human beings are inconsistent by nature. This means that just as every man is a coward, every man is a ferocious fighter, he just has to be handled right for the desired qualities to come out.
For get that practice speed is not real-world speed
The real-world clock is something you can’t practice for, not in any arena. Sure, you can time yourself but that’s not the same. The real world clock comes with a pressure that the practice clock does not. You can be in shape, have your gun clean, but when the guys on the other side are firing real bullets and have a vested, personal interest in doing you harm, it’s very different. In the real world the clock is not your friend, has no mercy to it, does not cut you any kind of slack. The allotted time runs out and there is no one to beg for mercy. There are no “do-overs”. You get the one shot and if it doesn’t turn out then that shot is just gone. It’s not enough to know, to understand, it’s about knowing and understanding at the right time, quickly enough to do something with the knowledge.
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