If you know what you’re doing, striking someone with a fist or a boot can do an equivalent amount of damage and achieve the same desired result as a bullet fired from the most advanced weapon. All that matters is that you direct your energy fully and without hesitation, not at some idealized list of optimal targets, but at whichever ones present themselves in the moment.
It’s not about being the biggest and strongest on the block. If you know what you’re doing—that’s the key. It’s about applying your knowledge and training. This has been a central theme of the book: when it comes to real-life violence, the natural physical advantages of those who are bigger, stronger, and faster can always be mitigated by those who have the right knowledge and aren’t afraid to use it.
Of course, I’d rather be healthy and strong than the alternative. I’d rather have a size, strength, and speed advantage—it would be disingenuous and foolish to say those aren’t assets in the realm of violence. They can help you absorb non-specific trauma—in other words, “take a punch.” They can help you in a life-or-death fight when your enemy screws up and strikes you but fails to injure you. They might also serve as a deterrent to an attacker and a source of confidence to their holder. But the advantages stop there, because no one, no matter how big, strong, fast, or tough they are, can take injury as we define it (or as the criminal sociopath defines it). No one can take a gouged eye, a crushed throat, or a broken leg.
When football players like Joe Theismann get their leg bent backward until the bones snap, we see elite athletes suffering game-ending, and maybe career-ending, injuries. If bigger-stronger-faster conferred immunity to physical harm, football players would have it. But they don’t. They break just like the rest of us.
Does being bigger, stronger, and faster help you inflict injury? Sure, but again only up to a point. If you lack the knowledge to identify available targets and the training to inflict serious, immediate harm, those physical advantages are a wash. A violent predator with a goal can handle more, bigger bruises to non-critical regions of his body from someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing because he knows his opportunity to make the decisive blow will make itself known soon enough.
Fortunately, the same rule applies when the shoe is on the other foot. If your attacker has a size, speed, and strength advantage, there’s still nothing he can do to protect himself from you, if you know what you’re doing and you can do it better and faster than him. He might be able to “take a punch,” but you’re not going to punch him. You’re going to gouge out his eye, crush his throat, and snap the connective tissue in his knee. You’re going to do the things to him that nobody can take and they are going to work because he breaks just like you, just like me, just like a professional football player, just like anyone else.
When it comes to trauma to the human body, all men and women really are created equal. Maybe the most remarkable thing about targets is that everyone has them, and that they render everyone equally vulnerable.
My own story is the epitome of this universal truth that our human body is a great equalizer. An infection and a burst eardrum nearly killed me and ultimately ended my SEAL career. At that point in my life, I was the epitome of bigger, faster, and stronger. I was in my early twenties, and I was arrogant. I thought I was invincible. But when that wave of water incapacitated me in a matter of seconds, I was truly humbled. It changed the way I looked at violence forever.
Just think about the implications of our biology in the world of asocial violence. Our universal vulnerability means that the most comforting traditional notions we have about violence aren’t true: that we can reliably protect ourselves by being big and strong, or by being armed; that we can easily identify threats on sight; that if we’re not big and strong, there’s little point to learning about the tool of violence at all, because we’re doomed to failure from the outset. Accepting what I’m telling you here means throwing those notions out the window. It means that anyone can inflict serious harm on anyone else, and that the real edge goes to the person with the willingness and the training to get the job done.
Independent of any physical, intellectual, or practical advantage, the reality of asocial violence is that your chances of survival at the beginning of a confrontation, before the first injury, are just about fifty-fifty. A coin flip. It doesn’t matter who you are, these odds apply to everyone—even myself.
I’ve been training for violence my entire adult life. I’m very good at what I do. I understand exactly how to use the tool of violence. If I am threatened and stripped of my ability to escape or de-escalate, I won’t hesitate. I will be the first to attack. Yet, I walk around every day with no more than a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right. Because if I’m facing another person with an active brain, that person could think and move against me. If I haven’t disconnected the will of his brain from the movement of his body via injury, I am perpetually at risk. I am not immune from the principles I am trying to teach you. They work just as well on me as they do on violent criminals—which is precisely what makes them so valuable and so important to learn.
These odds that I’m describing apply at the outset of a violent confrontation. It’s what happens once the confrontation starts—whether we choose to act or react, whether we can stay in Cause Mode and effectively consign our opponent to Effect Mode—that can shift the odds in our favor as the encounter develops. If you’re truly prepared to do what it takes to protect yourself, most of your attacker’s neutralizing advantages begin to disappear.
One of my clients is a neurosurgeon.* We’ll call him Peter. Late at night, Peter was called in to an inner-city hospital to treat a young child—an eight-year-old boy who needed immediate brain surgery to survive. Walking from his car, Peter was randomly attacked by two men. The first guy had a knife. Peter saw the knife and was able to slam his ulna (pinky side of the forearm) into the first attacker’s radial nerve (that runs from the palm-side of the thumb to the elbow). The criminal’s hand opened and he dropped the knife. Peter then threw his ulna into the guy’s neck, which whipped the man’s head forward and gave him a concussion as he fell to the ground. At that point, the other assailant ran off.
Hospital security officers arrived to detain the first attacker, who was completely knocked out, and Peter ran inside to perform the surgery. After saving the young boy’s life in the emergency room, Peter washed up and wrote me a note. He told me, interestingly, that it wasn’t his superior knowledge of anatomy as a trained physician that made the difference, it was that he didn’t have to think about what to do as he was being attacked, because he was trained in targets and the tool of violence.
He saw a clear path to survival—the knowledge of which began to tip the odds in Peter’s favor before he even made his first move. When he took the initiative and went on the attack, the odds tilted more. They tilted even further when he disarmed the attacker. And once he incapacitated the man, the odds were entirely on his side, which the assailant’s partner recognized.
But here’s the key point: until Peter identified the available targets and effectively inflicted the incapacitating injuries, the odds were even and the outcome was uncertain. Peter couldn’t afford to let up until the scales tipped decisively in his favor. This was a very similar reality to the ones that Bonnie, restrained by her attacker, and Shawn, with a gun to his temple, were able to surmount. At the outset of the fights of their lives, before any injury had been inflicted, their odds were effectively fifty-fifty. Then, once they made their moves, it was their assailants who would have loved those even odds, because—like Peter’s attackers—it was all downhill for them from that point forward.
If your number one threat is always your opponent’s active brain, that means that your own brain is your number one weapon. It doesn’t matter if the other guy has a knife or a gun. It doesn’t matter if he already has his hands on you. Those are all tools and tactics that require an active brain; a brain that’s able to make decisions. And the goal of any violent encounter is fundamentally the same: use your brain to shut down your opponent’s brain. Bonnie, Shawn, and Peter all neutralized those tools and tactics because they shut down the enemy’s command center, and because they used their own quick thinking to figure out the best way to do so. In the next chapter, then, we’ll talk more about using your most effective weapon—your brain—on offense.