Hannibal and Me: What History's Greatest Military Strategist Can Teach Us About Success and Failu re

Later in life, you may have to reappraise your dream and adjust it in a more mature and complex life context, perhaps even drop it altogether if it no longer works. But at the beginning of the journey, it helps to start with something.

If Fabius is acceptance, Scipio is the freedom to start anew, to aim higher, or at least elsewhere, to reinvent oneself.

Don’t agonize about success or failure. Just do what you must do as well as you possibly can. In the process you may eventually transcend triumph and disaster. That is how to meet those two impostors.

At the same time, Hannibal was careful never to get too close and familiar with his soldiers, for he understood that as leader he had to project a certain mystique.

As you get older, it becomes ever easier to think of reasons not to try something, not to think a thought, not to dream a dream, not to keep simple things simple. That is called experience. It is an awareness of the complexity of the world.

He knew exactly what he wanted; he had a clear vision of his goal. In fact, it was more than a goal, it was a hero quest, a life dream that became the focus for all his efforts, talents, plans, and preparations.

Roman generals had command for only one year at a time and relied on harsh discipline to keep armies of citizens obedient. Hannibal, by contrast, would have to command indefinitely and had an army not of citizens but of volunteers.

There are two aspects to a Fabian character that make it resilient and that you might remember if ever disaster should strike you: The first is the ability to accept reality for what it is. The second is the ability to stop resisting reality and instead to flow with it until circumstances begin to change.

The dreamers rely on their own imagination to decide on the next step. By contrast, the wanderers find all sorts of unexpected things on their seemingly unfocused search, discoveries that we cumulatively call experience. In time, the wanderers have the opportunity to know themselves, both their strengths and their weaknesses, whereas the dreamers must trust themselves. Knowledge is harder to break than trust.

“The greater a man’s success, the less it must be trusted to endure,”9 Hannibal said to Scipio the first time they met, on an African plain at a place called Zama, the day before they were to do battle against each other. Scipio, though a decade younger, nodded. He understood completely, although he might have added that failure is to be distrusted just as much. As they knew, there is no escape from the two impostors. The question is what we become when they arrive.

ALL PEOPLE, beginning in their twenties and continuing until the end of their lives, tell themselves stories about their own journeys to make sense of life.

Personal alliances and political shrewdness need not be a sword that you choose instead of magnanimity, but they should be a shield to carry in case you need it.

Fix the attention of your opponents on a point of your own choosing.

Success requires good strategy, and good strategy is about setting the appropriate ends and not losing sight of them, then choosing the tactics that will lead to those ends and none other.

Hannibal’s most subtle lessons to us today teach us how to think simultaneously large and small so that we can align life tactics with life strategy.

Hannibal was warning me to examine the successes that I had achieved up until then and might achieve next, and to ask whether they were leading me, as his had led him, down a treacherous path toward failure.

As Eleanor Roosevelt once said: “Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.”

They see reality as it is, discriminating between what is fake and what is genuine. They treat life’s difficulties as problems demanding solutions, not as grievances to be depressed or angry about.

Most of us, while young, will define what success means and what failure looks like based on the values and example of our parents.

With no desire for success, no anxiety about failure, indifferent to results, he burns up his actions in the fire of wisdom. Surrendering all thoughts of outcome, unperturbed, self-reliant, he does nothing at all, even when fully engaged in actions. There is nothing that he expects, nothing that he fears.

was warning me to examine the successes that I had achieved up until then and might achieve next, and to ask whether they were leading me, as his had led him, down a treacherous path toward failure.

If Fabius is acceptance, Scipio is the freedom to start anew, to aim higher, or at least elsewhere, to reinvent oneself.

triumph and disaster, success and failure, are not necessarily what they seem.

was the tension between tactics and strategy, between means and ends. He won his battles but not the war or the peace. Hannibal’s most subtle lessons to us today teach us how to think simultaneously large and small so that we can align life tactics with life strategy.

“The greater a man’s success, the less it must be trusted to endure,”9 Hannibal said to Scipio the first time they met, on an African plain at a place called Zama, the day before they were to do battle against each other. Scipio, though a decade younger, nodded. He understood completely, although he might have added that failure is to be distrusted just as much. As they knew, there is no escape from the two impostors. The question is what we become when they arrive.

Like many fathers, Hamilcar saw the meaning of his own life largely in his sons.

At the same time, Hannibal was careful never to get too close and familiar with his soldiers, for he understood that as leader he had to project a certain mystique.

he had a clear vision of his goal. In fact, it was more than a goal, it was a hero quest, a life dream that became the focus for all his efforts, talents, plans, and preparations.

Having such a quest is often a natural next step in our development after we form a tentative identity by emulating, searching for, or rebelling against our parents.

Instead, he had been wandering through life, accumulating experience and self-knowledge, until he was ready when opportunity knocked.

It forced me, while waiting for a dream to emerge, to form values.

You might call the first trajectory one of towering peaks, the other one of gently rising hills. As it happens, towering peaks can be deadly.

“No part of earth reaches the sky; no height is insuperable to men.”3

Beauty came mixed with terror.

early triumph was an impostor, and he was duped by its disguise, losing his discipline, focus, and even character to the trappings of fame until his life unraveled.

Winning is not the same as success, but sometimes you have to win in order to be successful, or at least in order to avoid failing.

style of winning in which he used the very strength of his opponents to overcome them. He made his enemies defeat themselves.

1. Fix the attention of your opponents on a point of your own choosing. As seducers use suggestion to plant amorous or erotic ideas, which then take on a life of their own in their victims’ imaginations,

chose a place, a point, or a part of his own army that the Roman commanders fixated on. Merely by choosing what his opponents paid attention to, he already seized the initiative. His opponents became predictable, they stopped paying attention to other things, and their blind spots became vulnerabilities.

2. Make your own weaknesses irrelevant. Hannibal’s foot soldiers were always his weakness—not because they were bad but because they were outnumbered. But Hannibal had better and sometimes more numerous cavalry than the Romans did—that was his strength.

enlisted nature as an ally,

3. Throw your opponents off balance by surprising them. Hannibal planned his surprises in parts of the battlefield to which his enemies no longer paid attention, in the blind spots that he had created.

4. The greater your opponents’ momentum, the more easily they will defeat themselves. All the preceding stratagems served this overarching insight. The Roman force and thrust were strongest at Cannae, and Cannae was their most devastating defeat. The more momentum they brought to bear, the more they, rather than Hannibal, were off balance.

swooped in from another direction to make the Romans lose their balance.

the more you can maintain a calm and empty mind, the better you can reach out to sense the intention of your opponent.”14

using the opponent’s own energy, or ki, to overcome him.

motion that responds to and channels the movements of the opponent.

Was Hannibal winning the right battles? Did his victories advance his goals? Or were his triumphs impostors? Should he have done something other than take his army over the Alps to invade Italy? Now that he was here, what should he do next?

asymmetry between defense and offense and the importance of understanding the enemy’s center of gravity—

tactics was “the science of military movement in the presence of the enemy” whereas strategy was “the science of military movements beyond the range of cannon-shot of either side.”

“the object of war, as of all creative activity, was the employment of the available means for the predetermined end.”4

Know what you’re getting into when you go to war. Figure out what you want, and then make sure that you fight the kind of war that will bring that about.

Success requires good strategy, and good strategy is about setting the appropriate ends and not losing sight of them, then choosing the tactics that will lead to those ends and none other.

we are diligent in execution but lazy in conception,

We are eager to start succeeding at something, without pondering what we should try to succeed at.

This, to me, is the application of strategy in life: not a coldhearted way of looking at relationships or career or rivals or conflicts but a constant and thoughtful assessment of what the goal is and what is merely a means to reach it.

Can you then doubt that inactivity is the way to defeat an enemy? —Quintus Fabius Maximus

It is better that a wise enemy should fear you than that foolish friends should praise.”

auctoritas, the clout and credibility of an elder statesman,

The first is the ability to accept reality for what it is. The second is the ability to stop resisting reality and instead to flow with it until circumstances begin to change.

SHOCK, DENIAL, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance: these are the stages that make up the human “grief cycle”

Anger and bargaining are active responses to disaster and demand energy, and eventually our energy runs out. So it is far easier to get permanently stuck in the next stage, depression, which is a passive response and can therefore last indefinitely.

“Attaining one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the pinnacle of excellence,”

“Subjugating the enemy’s army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence.”

This Taoist notion of wu wei, nondoing, is often mistaken for passivity, which it is not. Instead, nondoing is really a very active way of letting inevitable things happen without wasting energy resisting them, instead bringing one’s own position into harmony with this flow of nature.

achieved a great success, triumph is a shock just as destabilizing as disaster.

effects of success may be the strange sense of captivity

Success appears to imprison the imagination of many people who achieved

It was a state of hyperalertness but not tension; a mixture of confidence and relaxation.

The Fabian part of you lets you survive and persist. The Scipionic part of you lets you imagine new realities and reinvent yourself.

“painfully acquired self-discipline, which teaches you to cast out fear and frees you for the fullest experience of the adventure of life.”

“the greater a man’s success, the less it must be trusted to endure.”3

such a crisis is not a failure but a necessary transition that all people need to make.

THE WAY YOU SUCCEED in your midlife transition, as Jung saw it, begins with dropping the persona of your youth.

BY DISCARDING THIS PERSONA in midlife, you as a more mature person have an opportunity, through inner crisis and upheaval, to build a new identity that is more authentic and natural.

WHAT MAKES INDIVIDUATION so difficult—a “crisis”—is that, psychologically and metaphorically, you must let the young hero in your persona “die.”

Limen is the Latin word for threshold, and transitions, journeys, and death have in common that they are states of psychological suspension.

Young heroes might occasionally define success as destruction.

But as the same person during his midlife transition becomes aware of his own destructibility, he redefines success as creation, which suggests a metaphorical immortality.19

WHEN THE JOURNEY goes well and the midlife transition is a success, the best years of life are often yet to come.

“The very frequent neurotic disturbances of adult years all have one thing in common: they want to carry the psychology of the youthful phase over the threshold of the so-called years of discretion.”

he habitually overlooked the lowly and sordid aspects of human nature.

A young man who does not fight and conquer has missed the best part of his youth,”

I want to fulfill my human potential, perhaps even transcend myself.

What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization.”

They see reality as it is, discriminating between what is fake and what is genuine. They treat life’s difficulties as problems demanding solutions, not as grievances to be depressed or angry about.

Masshalten, a modesty and restraint from the vulgar consumerism and materialism that he thought was gripping affluent West German society.

They are not perfect, they cannot be role models in every way. They are likely to have suffered their disasters, defeats, and failures in life.

letting opponents throw their own weight around and in the process defeat themselves.

we need not fear enemies who are stronger as long as we retain control over ourselves.

Victories are merely tools and never the goal.

2. Never confuse means with ends, tactics with strategy.

To regain her freedom she had to relearn her inexperience.

Resilience begins with accepting the setback, as Fabius accepted Hannibal’s invasion or as Roosevelt accepted her husband’s infidelity. And accepting often means “doing nothing,”

This is not passivity. It merely means letting go, until you see that the situation has changed and renewed action makes sense.

never pretended that nothing stood between them, but they also did not allow anything to keep them apart.

“Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.”

Personal alliances and political shrewdness need not be a sword that you choose instead of magnanimity, but they should be a shield to carry in case you need it.

They tried to make others happier, not just themselves, and they looked past façades to find authenticity in their lives.

What prevents this success? Pretentiousness, envy, and bitterness, among other negative emotions.

What is that internal duel? In essence, it is the daily and individual struggle we must all wage between our good states of mind—clear thinking, compassion, tolerance, courage, humility, and so forth—and our bad emotions, such as anger, hatred, greed, vanity, envy, arrogance, fear.

“lets go of all results, whether good or bad, and is focused on the action alone.”

You must be “content with whatever happens, unattached to pleasure or pain, success or failure.”

“Meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same,”

Krishna reminds us to remember our purpose in life and to have equanimity in trying to fulfill it.

Don’t agonize about success or failure. Just do what you must do as well as you possibly can. In the process you may eventually transcend triumph and disaster. That is how to meet those two impostors.