Be the Irresistible Force
You may have heard of the Irresistible Force Paradox.
It asks the difficult question, “What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?
The roots of this conundrum go back to ancient Greece when the Laelaps, the hound who never failed to catch his quarry, went after the Teumessian fox, a fox who could not be caught. The hunt raged on for so long that Zeus eventually had to weigh in and turn them into the constellations Canis Major and Canis Minor.
In Chinese, the word for contradiction— máodùn, is taken from the words for Shield and Spear because the legend says that a weapons maker once made a shield that he claimed could not be penetrated by any spear, and a spear that could defeat any shield.
Sun Tzu may have been thinking of this when he said “Invincibility lies in the defense, but the possibility of victory in the attack.”
Unless you’re Captain America, you don’t win a fight with a shield.
You don’t win by defending.
It is the job of the shield to not be pierced.
But, it is not the job of the spear to pierce the shield. The spear can win by going over, under, or around.
The power of the irresistible force lies in its persistence.
Be the fucking spear.
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This briefs well (And you know what comes after that ;)) ...... Sometimes error management (defense) is the better part of valor. You can win by defending, if your opponent exhausts themselves- Fabian Defense, 1970's Pittsburg Steelers, Ali's Rope a Dope.
The shield has to win every day, but the spear has to win only once.