Planning

In The Art of War, planning is the discipline of calculation done before the fight: “Now the general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought,” while the loser “makes but few” — “many calculations lead to victory, and few calculations to defeat.” Crucially, this is not abstract dogma. Sun Tzu rejects “bookish theoric”; plans must adapt to the enemy’s actual moves, which shades planning into Game Theory. The book illustrates this with Wellington at Waterloo, who refused to fix his plans because they depended on Bonaparte’s: “as my plans will depend upon his, how can you expect me to tell you what mine are?” A countervailing note adds that for great strategists from Caesar to Napoleon, the value of time — being slightly ahead of the opponent — often outweighed “the nicest calculations.”

The same theme surfaces in How To Be a Capitalist Without Any Capital as a horizon-collapsing maxim for execution: “Dream in Decades → Think in Years → Work in Weeks → Live in Days” — long-range planning translated down into daily action.

Where this appears

• The Art of War — “many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought”; planning as enemy-contingent calculation (the Wellington/Waterloo example), tagged as a core concept
• How To Be a Capitalist Without Any Capital — “Dream in Decades → Think in Years → Work in Weeks → Live in Days,” tagged #Planning