Grand strategy is the art of looking beyond the present battle and calculating ahead. Focus on your ultimate goal and plot to reach it.
Interpretation
Grand strategy involves planning for the long term rather than being distracted by immediate challenges.
This quote emphasizes the importance of having a strategic vision that extends beyond current difficulties, encouraging individuals to maintain focus on their ultimate objectives. By calculating a path toward these goals, one can navigate through challenges more effectively, ensuring that each action contributes to the larger purpose.
In practice
In a speech about leadership, you may quote Greene to illustrate the need for foresight in decision-making.
In a society where the roles everyone plays are obvious, the refusal to conform to any standard will excite interest. Be both masculine and feminine, impudent and charming, subtle and outrageous. Let other people worry about being socially acceptable; those types are a dime a dozen, and you are after a power greater than they can imagine.
When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control. Even if you are saying something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open-ended, and sphinxlike.
The moment people feel they know what to expect from you, your spell on them is broken. More: You have ceded them power.
The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways.
The Nihilistic Troll might pretend to be acting in the service of some cause or leader, but don't be fooled. The cause and their supposedly strong convictions are simply a way to justify and provide cover for their abusive behavior.
Only create associations with positive affinities. Make this a rule of life and you will benefit more than from all the therapy in the world.
Peter had a genius for imitation; but he lacked true genius, which is creative and makes all from nothing.
Get to the end of yourself where you can do nothing, but where He does everything.
For even the very wise cannot see all ends.
When ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance, you don't really have to do anything, you just let them talk.
A single overstatement, wherever or however it occurs, diminishes the whole, and a carefree superlative has the power to destroy, for the reader, the object of the writer's enthusiasm.
Do you wish to be great? Then begin by being. Do you desire to construct a vast and lofty fabric? Think first about the foundations of humility. The higher your structure is to be, the deeper must be its foundation.
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