SECRET 29
Admire Your Enemies
[Moriarty] is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order.
—“THE FINAL PROBLEM”
Professor Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes’s criminal nemesis, is almost as famous as the master detective, even though he appears only in a few of the later stories. What makes Moriarty such a great villain is that he is every bit the equal of Holmes and perhaps even surpasses him at times. Their rivalry is so compelling because the two are reverse-mirror images of the other, anticipating moves and countermoves like a pair of master chess players.
We face rivals at nearly every stage in our lives. In school, we compete against other athletes for a position on the basketball or football team or for the lead in the school play along with dozens of other hopefuls. Later on we compete against countless other teenagers across the country during the college admissions process. When we enter the business world, we find ourselves pitted against our official competitors at other companies. Sometimes our own coworkers can become enemies of a sort if there’s a big promotion up for grabs. The same battle lines can be drawn in our personal lives, whether it’s a PTA meeting or local neighborhood development organization.
Whatever the situation, rivals can stir up our emotions and cause us to act irrationally. If we find ourselves getting beaten badly in a competition or treated unfairly or cruelly, we can begin to feel sorry for ourselves or plot our revenge. Neither strategy is productive. Instead, we need to take a lesson from Holmes, even if it seems counterintuitive, and analyze our enemies objectively, even admiringly. It’s the only way we’ll eventually beat them.
Read the quote at the beginning of this chapter again. There is Holmes, actually gushing about the most evil villain he had ever faced. And yet his description is also 100 percent accurate and honest. Rather than try to find ways to denigrate Moriarty and boost his own ego, Holmes is clear-eyed about his opponent’s talents; he doesn’t try to make himself feel better by denigrating the other man’s accomplishments. Why? Because Holmes realizes that to win, he has to know his enemy inside and out. That means setting aside his own insecurities and admitting, yeah, the guy’s good—real good. If Holmes is going to beat him, he’ll have to step up his own game.
More than two thousand years ago, the Chinese master strategist Sun Tzu wrote in the now-classic The Art of War, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
It’s fun to slag on our enemies and make jokes about them, but it doesn’t get us any closer to conquering them. If you’re facing a formidable challenger, don’t focus on their grating voice or that self-satisfied smirk that drives you up the wall. Analyze their actual skills and talents. What makes them so dangerous, so hard to beat? What are their greatest talents, their specialties? If you were their friend, how would you describe them to someone else? Make a list. You may find that they’re not as powerful as you thought they were. On the other hand, conducting an assessment like this may make you realize they’re even more powerful than you first suspected. Either way, the outcome is positive—if someone invited you to participate in a boxing match, wouldn’t you want to know the nature of your opponent before you accepted? Focusing on your enemy in a clear, rational way gives you knowledge you didn’t have before—and that’s the first step in developing a successful strategy to engage him or her on the battlefield.