Do what you can to make whatever-constitutes-force in the domain of your choosing mobile and responsive, such that it can be concentrated very quickly. The relevant moment is not always predictable in advance...
This… rather severely understates the problem. Consider the Oreos example: not only is the relevant moment not obvious in advance, it’s also not obvious in the moment itself, or even obvious in hindsight. The person has presumably walked into the supermarket dozens or hundreds of times, and not once did it ever rise to their attention that this was a “relevant moment”.
Mobility and responsiveness may suffice for some kinds of warfare, but for the more general problem of responding in “relevant moments”, I don’t think that’s usually the hard step. The hard step is figuring out where those key points are at all, whether beforehand or at the time or even in hindsight (so the insight can be used for the future).
There are enough situations where the missing strategic piece is a failure to concentrate your forces to make it a good concept to drill into people’s heads. I’m a new MS student in a biomedical engineering lab, and a big boost to my learning rate was reading and visualizing/acting out protocols before my instructor showed them to me for real. Instead of spreading out my attention to trying to learn ever more things, I prioritize being rapidly successful when I’m being taught something new. Everything works much better that way.
Also, sometimes, thinking in terms of force concentration can make it easier to perceive relevant moments, because you know what you’re searching for. It’s related to decomposing a big problem into its constituent parts, a skill that many people need to practice before it becomes natural. There’s plenty of low hanging fruit here for people who don’t already think habitually in these terms. At a certain point, you’ve likely exhausted the gains from problems whose decomposition and “relevant moments” are obvious.
I note that this and the above point are compatible/not necessarily in disagreement.
thinking in terms of force concentration can make it easier to perceive relevant moments, because you know what you’re searching for
Yeah. One of the most revelatory questions anyone ever asked me was “so, you say you’re searching for romantic partners. Where are they? Like, literally, right now, right this moment, where in the physical world are the kinds of people you think you want to date and marry? Are they at the library, the park, the bar, the skating rink—what?”
Which led me to realize that I’d been putting most of my efforts in places where those people weren’t.
This… rather severely understates the problem. Consider the Oreos example: not only is the relevant moment not obvious in advance, it’s also not obvious in the moment itself, or even obvious in hindsight. The person has presumably walked into the supermarket dozens or hundreds of times, and not once did it ever rise to their attention that this was a “relevant moment”.
Mobility and responsiveness may suffice for some kinds of warfare, but for the more general problem of responding in “relevant moments”, I don’t think that’s usually the hard step. The hard step is figuring out where those key points are at all, whether beforehand or at the time or even in hindsight (so the insight can be used for the future).
There are enough situations where the missing strategic piece is a failure to concentrate your forces to make it a good concept to drill into people’s heads. I’m a new MS student in a biomedical engineering lab, and a big boost to my learning rate was reading and visualizing/acting out protocols before my instructor showed them to me for real. Instead of spreading out my attention to trying to learn ever more things, I prioritize being rapidly successful when I’m being taught something new. Everything works much better that way.
Also, sometimes, thinking in terms of force concentration can make it easier to perceive relevant moments, because you know what you’re searching for. It’s related to decomposing a big problem into its constituent parts, a skill that many people need to practice before it becomes natural. There’s plenty of low hanging fruit here for people who don’t already think habitually in these terms. At a certain point, you’ve likely exhausted the gains from problems whose decomposition and “relevant moments” are obvious.
I note that this and the above point are compatible/not necessarily in disagreement.
Yeah. One of the most revelatory questions anyone ever asked me was “so, you say you’re searching for romantic partners. Where are they? Like, literally, right now, right this moment, where in the physical world are the kinds of people you think you want to date and marry? Are they at the library, the park, the bar, the skating rink—what?”
Which led me to realize that I’d been putting most of my efforts in places where those people weren’t.