Everything before this has been pretty mechanical. How does perception work? How does thinking work? Where do values come in? How do we establish priorities? How can we, as experiencing beings, get out of our own way — methodologically? It’s all very procedural. But there have been little hints here and there about difficulty, spiritual strain, and something a little outside of pure rationality.

Mindset, that’s a simple word that’s often used for this topline decision. There’s a choice you have to make that comes before you get into all of the thinking and the thinking about thinking. Before we decided that it was a scary word, we called it ‘faith’. Now, I’m gonna say this twice for the kids in front and the punks in the back: Faith is not belief.

“Faith is not belief.” — Deacon Rodda

And for all y’all in the middle, here’s the bonus third assertion: Faith is not belief. Belief is predicated. That means that in order to have a belief you need to have something to believe in. People believe in things, specific things. You can believe a statement. For instance, you can believe what your friend tells you. You can even generically believe in that friend. But faith requires no predicate. I’ll go so far as to say that if it is predicated that it isn’t faith.

When Chanakya identified Chandragupta as a faithful herdsmen it wasn’t because Chandragupta believed in cows. It was because Chandragupta was faithful — full of faith — full stop. When Krishna confront Arjuna at the battle front he wasn’t asking him to believe in war. Abraham is considered the father of faith in the western tradition. By all accounts, Abraham lived hundreds of years before a jot of Judeo-Christian law or doctrine would be written. What did he have faith in? God? Sure. But what is God? Abraham didn’t know. Abraham believed in the mystery itself. That’s what faith is. Believing in what he knew he could not understand is what made Abraham faithful.

“When I talk about belief, why do you always assume I'm talking about God?” — Shepherd Book

Is this still an essay on personal safety? Is this really a fitting introduction to the subject of strategy and the process of becoming a strategist? Absolutely.

Here’s what I’m telling you: What people currently refer to as ‘positivity’, ‘growth mindset’, or ‘optimism’ is — in essence — no different than what is described in the story of Abraham hemming and hawing over being asked to sacrifice his only son. Now, a lot of people point to that story as an example of how barbaric and vile the Judeo-Christian depiction of God is. Sure. People say the same thing about the story of Arjuna being instructed by Krishna to go off and kill people who are not his enemy. I’m certain that countless people over the millennia have simply described optimism without going into such bloody dramatics. Their stories were boring and are thus lost to time.

What I’m telling you is that people who say they believe in God, and also that they don’t really know what God is or isn’t — each of those people is a living example of un-predicated belief — also known as ‘faith’. But the direct idea of un-predicated belief is something really hard to base a popular religion on, because it is so abstract and intellectual. So, wiser saints than me have thrown a blanket over the mystery to give it shape and called it God. Correspondingly, anyone who tells you that they believe in god, and can tell you exactly what god is, those people have a predicated belief. They are faithless. That’s the lesson you were supposed to walk away from those old fairy tales with. Sorry, spoilers.

It takes a little a little bit of faith to really become a strategist. Yes, none of the above was a tangent. The future is unknown. And yet, to become a strategist, you have to cut yourself off from the easy, knee-jerk, coping mechanisms and convenient answers that are pretty certain and let you feel good now without taking any risks on some blind faith in a hopeful future.

Strategists take calculated risks and make painful sacrifices. Try to find anyone regarded in history as a great strategist who didn’t. Are you seeing the connection yet?

Side note, for the heady rationalists: The fatalists were wrong. It’s been proven (details below). Even if you had perfect knowledge of all the variables in the universe you couldn’t predict the future with any more efficiency than just watching it all play out. Therefor, the future is unwritten in every practical sense. And that makes it your choice whether or not the future is unwritten in every meaningful sense.

So you have a decision to make, and you don’t get to make this decision on the basis of things you can investigate, prove, or otherwise figure out: Are you going to go all in on making an effort in this life — knowing that you will never really be able to know how things will turn out? Are you willing to sacrifice little short-term wins (also known as coping mechanisms) for long-term benefit (also known and personal growth, responsibility, and sovereignty)? You thought I was going to ask you to make a declaration of faith in God, didn’t you? Well, this isn’t that kind of book. But don’t be surprised if the measure of faith that it takes to get yourself out of a pattern of victimhood and alienation feels a lot like religious conversion.

What follows is a set of declarations intended to help you understand the mindset shift necessary to becoming a strategic being. Also there’s that promised footnote on how fatalism, and materialism with it, are rapidly becoming the superstitions of yesterday.

The rest of this chapter will become available following the success of this Kickstarter campaign.

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