Upgrading Murphy's Law
Pain is provided, pleasure is permitted
A rule of strategy and life is that pain is provided and pleasure is permitted. This means we will always find a larger quantity of difficulty than comfort, of hardship than fun. Malady comes by default. Smiles take effort.
I find this thought much more illuminating than Murphy’s Law. Murphy tell us generally that “anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” Translation: bad things happen. The thing is, good things happen too. What matters is the relationship between good and bad things, the crude proportion, the balance and weight of each, and how we prepare ourselves mentally for both.
Back to life providing pain and merely permitting pleasure. There may be someone out there who resists this gravity, but I doubt it. Entire religions and philosophies have been established upon this basic principle. It’s a firm and fertile start point to build upon. And so we should apply it to strategy and strategy-making.
Some might simply say, “we already have Murphy’s Law,” to suggest we need no more than to note that bad things happen. The fact that sometimes things go sour is to observe that sometimes there is rain. So just buy and carry an umbrella when the situation warrants it. What strategists should look to is not the occasional bad weather report, but the underlying structure of the system.
“Pain” is negative. It is the friction that Carl von Clausewitz wrote about. It is everywhere all around us. It’s the reverse-Force, in Yoda-speak, because it disconnects us from others and slows us down.
This is the universe’s default setting. Physicists call it entropy. We see it in our daily lives, the tiny gremlins that hide your keys when you need them, that misplace a file when you need it. It’s your kid vomiting on your suit en route to an interview.
“Pleasure” is positive. It takes work to overcome pain to get to pleasure. I mean “pleasure” in the broadest sense, particularly as it pertains to longer-term objectives. The Ukrainian people want their East back, Americans want inflation to go down, and the world needs to halt rising climates.
It takes patient, reason purposeful effort to make those a reality. One cannot simply sit back and expect those to happen.
That’s the essential difference. If one decided to relax and sit in a lawn chair outside and make no effort at all at life - wait long enough and lightning or cancer or hunger or some other bad occurrence would befall them.
Pain takes no effort.
Pleasure takes effort.
In life as in strategy.
Think and prepare accordingly.