About a week ago I bought a book – The Art Of War by Sun Tzu. I heard of it before as a set of recommendations on fighting a war, which are often used in business as well. It consists of 13 chapters, each chapter consists of paragraphs. I’ve read three chapters so far.

Reading these three chapters, I’ve payed attention to the 5th paragraph of the Chapter II “Waging War”. In one of the English translations it says “Thus, though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays.” But I really like the translation in my book’s edition. Here it is, as I translated it from my native language to English: “Thus, there was heard about success of a haste war, though it was fought in an inartful way, and there was not seen success of a continuous war, though it was fought with cleverness”.

Though this paragraph is written about the economy of resources at the war, the idea I’ve gained from it is that imperfect, but rather quickly completed project is much more superior to the perfect, but never finished one. When I face a problem or a task, I often fall into a trap of the strong desire to solve the problem in a perfect way. So I hesitate infinitely not taking any actions. Thus, the high percentage of these problems are never solved. As this paragraph tells, it’s more likely that the success will be achieved, if you take actions without any delay and implement your intentions quickly enough, even if you’re going to make several mistakes.

January 1st, 2012