Contents:
This article is about the strategic use of hope to demoralize those seeking to halt your progress toward your goals.
The existence of enemies was never exclusively bound to the battlefield or strategic fronts of warfare. People can have enemies amidst odd circumstances. In the context of this article, an enemy seeks to maliciously stifle your progression toward goals you deem beneficial to you or those around you. Enemies can present themselves in many forums; at work, in the neighborhood, online, or in business.
Notwithstanding the reasoning behind their desire to see you fail in the chosen context, an enemy is someone (or a group) who perceives attainment of your goals to be detrimental to desires / agendas of their own.
Labeling someone or something as an enemy is wholly your call to make. Keeping that list short is recommended, as you likely already know. The information presented on this page is for those who see wisdom in adopting a strictly defensive approach to dealing with enemies they’ve made when striving for their intended goals.
Below are methods to demotivate, distract, and demoralize those who deviously erect barriers to your personal progress. These methods center on birthing a sense of debilitating comfort and extinguishing a motivating flame within those motivated to see you fail. A goal of this approach is to prevent malicious thoughts from developing into effective action through passive – yet debilitating – means.
Hope That They’re Ahead
You’ve likely seen videos of athletes celebrating early, then losing the competition in its final moments. Someone’s mistimed celebration is addicting to observe. They orgasm too early; they lose focus at a most critical time. It is a relatable feeling that most try to avoid falling victim to. People tend to understand that feeling comfortable while being ahead of others in competition is a mistake to avoid.
Enticing enemies to feel the comfort of being ahead will encourage them to fall victim to that comfort’s ill effects. As your enemies run off to their lairs in anticipation of heated competition, a lingering belief that they’re ahead will eat away at their motivation to prepare and plan.
The one who feels ahead of others will focus less on making details matter in competition. They will have an out to battle mentally against at every crossroads between pain and comfort. It’ll matter when their dedication and focus are demanded by the details of competition.
Ahead they’d not be. They’d be false kings who fatten on their false thrones; enjoying unripened fruits of their labor. They’d skip to what is easy as they mistakenly perceive themselves to have already conquered what is hard.
Hope That You’re Unskilled
Finding ourselves in a capable individual’s crosshairs encourages the observation of, and submission to, humanity’s darkness. Intellect and skill empower the intent and magnify the effect of any action taken. Intelligence gone awry can find ways to cause high damage for a low cost. An individual’s ability to enact damage is capped by their intellect and skill when their intent to do so is set in stone. There is thereby no observed limit to where a burning desire can lead an individual – pending on how intelligent and skillful they are.
This understanding encourages swift, mighty responses to skillful individuals whose intent we perceive has taken a turn for the worse. Being on a quest to constantly prove one’s intelligence is to seek being a target for many to take aim at.
Maintaining a sense of ineptness is in a skillful individual’s best interest when seeking to implement their intentions. It will discourage fearful attempts by others to vehemently block such an individual’s intentions from growing into effective action.
This lesson can be implemented by good people looking to do good things. Marketing matters – in that overmarketing any idea as being good or right will surely be followed by those seeking to dispute it. The more skilled in implementing your intentions you are perceived as being, the more resistance you will feel emanating from those who seek to stifle your progress.
The wisdom in under promising and over delivering follows these same lines. Comprehension can only be judged for its quality if it is exhibited through decisive action. All preamble is moot and is bound to introduce barriers to performance. Putting effort into upholding a reputation as a competitive threat is energy you spend helping those competing against you.
Hope That They’re on the Right Course
Similar to feeling as if you’re ahead, perceiving ourselves to be doing the right thing (in terms of intent, direction, and path) provides a certain sense of ease. That feeling encourages us to grab an ice cream to cap the day. Feeling as though the current path we’re on inches us closer to our goals builds a certain confidence; anxiety of missing something is eased and there is no perceived need to pursue new directions.
Encouraging enemies to switch from their current course of action (that you’ve come to study and analyze) is a strategic misstep. Rather than introducing motivated unpredictability to grow within your subject, it is wiser to encourage them to think the path they’re on at this moment is the correct one. Whether it is or isn’t is secondary to what the feeling of thinking it is does to the individual. The belief of being on the right track in spite of evidence pointing otherwise is a blunder worth encouraging.
A noteworthy method of introducing and maintaining the hope of being on the right path is to utilize recognition and awards to your advantage. First, map points of recognition available to those you’re seeking to encourage to stay on the path they’re on. Then, actively nominate individuals you want to control to be front-runners for that recognition. Encouraging an enemy’s recognition by their peers or authorizing bodies does well to help ensure they stay on their current path.
Hope That Your Mutual Focuses Diverge
As an enemy grows hopeful of being on the right path and ahead of others, your role in the picture needs to be addressed. Vulnerability in an individual deemed an enemy of yours depends heavily on surprise and their resulting lack of preparedness for any surprising revelations from / about you.
One surprise worth building up toward is the late surprise of you to have been competitively focused on the same targets they’ve been focused on all along. An example of such a case would be unexpectedly seeing a rival actor in the waiting room prior to going in for your audition. Late elevations in pressure from a competitor’s simple presence have the capacity to affect performance.
Generally, it is in your better interest that direct competitors don’t know about you being one of their rivals in competition. There are no rules which require somebody to reveal themselves playing for any prize outside of organized competition. Those who advertise their authentic competitive focuses in employment or business without receiving anything in return are strategically ill-advised.
An enemy can’t compete against (implement vectors of attack, exploit weaknesses, spread rumors, etc.) individuals they don’t know are competing against them. Keeping any potentially damaging (to your goals) individuals’ focuses off of you as their direct competitor will reward you with the opportunity of unleashing devastating surprise.
Remain keen on maintaining the hope within your most fierce competitors that your competitive focuses differ from theirs. Allow them to expose their positions, plans, opinions without considering you as able to use that information against them. Make them feel as though you’re not a threat by refraining from advertising your competitive focuses, or strategically unveiling ones which pose no threat to those interested in preventing their fruition.