Swimming with Asian Sharks - Business Secrets from the Pacific Rim

The Knife You Don't See Cuts the Deepest

Mr. Princeton was really good at pulling meetings together. Mr. Princeton created a mastermind, by pulling all these smart people together to help do the thinking for the business. Unfortunately, this also attracts some big sharks.

The next meeting was about cloud computing solutions. Mr. Princeton brought in a few friends who were experts in technology.  During that lunch meeting I had a chat with Mr. Brain and Mr. Cunning about what CloudComputers was doing.  CloudComputers was helping CheapElectronics deliver a cloud solution.  This solution would help the make money on bandwidth.  Mr. Cunning successfully had exited a technology company and was an expert in large scale computing. Unfortunately, he’s also a huge shark, constantly looking for an opportunity to go in and grab some meat.  He is the one shark I met in the entire trip that was true to the name.  He would bite on to anything, be it a retainer or the ability to send his friends in as directors or as contractors to bleed a start-up dry.

You just have to be on the lookout for this kind of shark because Mr. Cunning is very friendly and outgoing. He also appears to be very helpful.  But the biggest sharks are the ones who don’t know they’re sharking you, and that’s the most dangerous part. Sharks like Mr. Cunning are huge because they seem to offer a lot of abilities and to make a lot of things happen. Sure, they are able to deliver those things or they won’t be sharks for long. In reality, when it comes down to it, they are at least very upfront in a sense. You can see that they are just out for the money; and, if you can see the opponent, it’s a lot easier to deal with them than with an unseen opponent.

There’s an old saying that the knife that you don’t see cuts the deepest. In martial arts it’s the same. I’ve taken many martial arts: kickboxing, judo, jujitsu, Chinese boxing, regular boxing, fencing, Capoeira, and all of them are the same. They have the same underlying message: be aware of your surroundings, identify threats, and deal with threats with immediate and equally threatening force, if possible. They also train you to be aware of the threats you don’t see. Basically, they train this into muscle memory. Because, when an attacker comes at you, he is not going to throw just one punch; he is going to throw multiple punches, multiple jabs, multiple kicks, and the training is to get you into a mental mode where if you’re able to deflect the first blow, you automatically send out your own attack or you defend yourself against the second incoming likely attack. You don’t even see the next one coming, but your muscle memory should force you into that mode, so that you protect yourself from attacks that will come even though you don’t physically see them just yet.

Unfortunately I haven’t seen a martial art that teaches you the deeper law of how to identify friends and foes; this is something else that you have to learn over the course of your life and it’s really about reading people and situations and understanding your options.