T OUGHNESS #1: M ISSION O RIENTATION

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL DEATH IN HISTORY

On this late August afternoon, it was still hot outside, but Torii Mototada felt a dull chill circulating through his body.
 
Outside, he would be stoical and steadfast, an emblem of loyalty and fierceness unto the end.
 
But no matter how strong his exterior, walking past his retainers and soldiers at Fushimi Castle, a chill void tugged at his heart.

These 2000 battle-hardened, loyal, and ferocious men under his command – all of them would shortly never see their families again.
 
His movements were slow as he walked among his defenders at Fushimi, partially to show resolve, partially because old war wounds in his legs from the disastrous Battle of Mikatagahara a decade earlier had left him semi-crippled.
 
But now, the dull pain of movement was helpful in these final days as he made the last preparations.
 
The pain kept him sharp, focused.
 
The defenders would need to hold out against the lightning fast advances of Mitsunari’s 40,000 strong army so that their side could regroup and mount a defense and counterattack.
 
***
 
THE STAKES 
 
The year is 1600. Japan’s fragile and short-lived peace has once again shattered.
 
When Torii Mototada had been born in 1539, Japan was in the middle of one of the largest and most complex multi-sided civil wars in history.
 
The central authority had been in terminal decline for over 100 years, and local warlords now fought a constant set of battles, intrigues, assassinations… the ground shifted with alliances made and broken, betrayals, near constant strife and warfare.
 
This era was coming to a close.
 
Power had gathered and consolidated until there were only two sides left in the year 1600: the Western forces under Ishida Mitsunari, and the Eastern forces under Torii Mototada’s old friend and lord Tokugawa Ieyasu.
 
On those fateful days in late August, the Western and Eastern forces were in a race against time: Tokugawa’s Eastern forces needed to capture the fortresses along Japan’s most important road network, the Nakasendo, before the Western forces could link up their considerably larger army, capture Kyoto, and isolate the Easterners.
 
This was the prelude to the final battle – and everything was at stake. Whichever side lost this conflict, the commanders from the noble families would be dishonored and executed; the common soldiers would go from being samurai to fallen ronin and vagabonds.
 
The Easterners seemed in bad shape: Mitsunari had mobilized his 40,000 strong army and was rampaging lightning-fast towards the Tokugawa positions.
 
***
 
THE LAST TESTAMENT OF TORII MOTOTADA
 
Mototada’s cavalary scouts had returned.
 
The report was confirmed: 40,000 of Mitsunari’s men were converging on the 2,000 defenders at Fushimi Castle.
 
Old Mototada had been reflecting on what instructions to leave his children for some time. Now, the moment at hand, he took up his ink brush and wrote to his eldest son Tadamasa –
 
 “It would not take much trouble to break through a part of their numbers and escape, no matter how many tens of thousands of horsemen approached for the attack or by how many columns we were surrounded... but that is not the true meaning of being a warrior, and it would be difficult to account as loyalty. Rather, I will stand off the forces of the entire country here, and, without even one one-hundredth of the men necessary to do so, will throw up a defense and die a resplendent death.  By doing so I will show that to abandon a castle that should be defended, or to value one's life so much as to avoid danger and to show the enemy one's weakness is not within the family traditions of my master Ieyasu.”
 
Lord Torii’s final testament comes out to two and a half pages when translated into modern English.
 
Did the old warrior lord pause between the passages he wrote, or did he write swiftly in one session?
 
We cannot know.

Away from the presence of his retainers and soldiers, was his heart heavy or light when he wrote those words?
 
We cannot know.
 
He lays out that the Tokugawa forces will win and Ieyasu will rule the land, with his family loyal to the Tokugawa – did he truly deeply believe this, or was there any doubt in his mind that Mitsunari’s larger forces might overrun the Easterners?
 
We cannot know.
 
In front of his soldiers, he would have been steadfast and stoic.
 
In private, reflecting in those last moments as those 40,000 troops began to lay to Fushimi Castle, did tears fall from Torii Mototada’s eyes?
 
We cannot know.
 
It doesn’t matter.
 
The 2,000 defenders held out for 10 days against the Western forces.
 
When the walls were finally breached by the overwhelming force, the defenders fought in wave after wave of combat, ending the lives of as many of the overwhelming number of assailants as they could.
 
On 8 September 1600, with a mere dozen men still living, with Fushimi Castle bathed in flames, Torii Mototada committed seppuku – ritual suicide – rather than be captured.
 
He was 62 years old.
 
The onslaught of the 40,000 Ishida soldiers had been delayed 10 days by Torii’s stand at Fushimi Castle.
 
Six weeks later, Tokugawa Ieyasu’s outnumbered forces defeated Ishida Mitsunari at the Battle of Sekihagara, finally unifying Japan.
 
***
 
TOUGHNESS #1: MISSION ORIENTATION
 
We turn our attentions now to Toughness . 

We will discuss how to train and build physical and mental toughness, as well as explore how you can cultivate, tame, and harness your emotions to serve your causes.
 
Certainly, those soldiers fighting to their death under Torii Mototada at Fushimi Castle were tough. Outnumbered 20-to-1, they sold their lives dearly for their cause. The used their guns and bows until they ran out of ammunition, and then their swords and daggers until nothing remained.
 
But before we turn a magnifying glass on toughness and valor, we must zoom far out, far above, we must move from the tactics of any individual campaign to a much broader sense of things.
 
In other words – we must look at, what’s the point of toughness?
 
***
 
The American strength training expert, Mark Rippetoe, has been known to quip –
 
“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people and more useful in general.”
 
This is true – of course this is true – this is somewhat obvious in its truth if one is unbiased –  but what does it mean to be “more useful” ?
 
Yes, if you’re physically stronger, you can lift things off the ground more easily. Okay. You can open a stuck jar of tomato sauce.  Great. In the rare event of a natural disaster, you can move piles of rubble faster and more easily.
 
Is that it? Is that all? It’s often very hard work  to become tougher; it takes training and a fair amount of agony. Is it worth it? Why train?
 
This is where Mission Orientation  comes in.
 
***
 
GREATNESS AS THE OFFSPRING OF TOUGHNESS AND MISSION ORIENTATION
 
There is perhaps a single all-time most clear and striking example of how toughness and mission orientation interact.

Mike Tyson.

Tyson had a bad upbringing – to put it mildly. He was bullied, he was picked on, he was robbed of his lunch money. He took solace in his pigeons, that he raised in a coop on his roof.
 
Even as he grew into his powerful frame, he never fought back. He was meek – until the day that an older bully took one of his pigeons and killed it in front of him, throwing the dead bird at the young Mike.
 
Tyson flipped out and started hitting him – his first time inflicting violence on another person.
 
He got mixed in with crime… his early “mentors” were slightly older street kids, gang kids, robbing houses, pickpocketing people, doing a whole lot of no good.
 
For this, he eventually got sent to a correctional school in upstate New York. That’s when his life turned around – when he got introduced to boxing.
 
He wound up meeting the legendary Cus D’Amato.
 
Cus saw in the 12-year-old Tyson the ability to become the youngest heavyweight champion of all-time – he saw the potential greatness in Tyson.
 
After Tyson was discharged from correctional school, his mother gave permission for Cus and his girlfriend to take the young Mike in and raise him up themselves.
 
If you read Tyson’s story in his autobiography, Undisputed Truth , you can see how D’Amato helped Tyson train and get focused. The young Tyson had the potential to be a great athlete and had developed immense pain tolerance and fierceness from his tough background, but D’Amato took him to mental, physical, and emotional levels of toughness and focus never before visited.

This, combined with elite technical training, led Mike Tyson to rapidly rise to prominence.
 
When Cus D’Amato died on 4 November 1985, Mike’s record was 11 wins and 0 losses – with all 11 wins coming by knockout.
 
D’Amato’s death was hard on Tyson and all the people that loved Cus, but Tyson still had the goal in mind of being the youngest heavyweight champion of all time, as well as the relationships and the infrastructure in terms of agent, trainer, training protocols, and so on that were set up when Cus was alive.
 
On 22 November 1986, Mike Tyson went into his first championship match for the WBC heavyweight title with a 27-0 record… with an unreal 27 wins by knockout.
 
He won.
 
Youngest heavyweight champ ever.
 
In March 1987, he won the WBA championship, and in August he added the IBF heavyweight title – thus becoming the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world.
 
And then he started to fall apart.
 
The decline didn’t show immediately, but without any goal or mission any more, his training slowed down… his fitness slowed down… he spent money wildly and purposelessly, even buying mansions that he’d only stay a few days at in his whole life.

One of the most famous boxing fights of all time – probably the most famous upset of all time – is when a nobody named Buster Douglas KO’d Mike in February 1990 in Tokyo.
 
From there, you probably know some of the story – all the criminal charges, the prolific drug use, the bankruptcy, the money problems, the fight where he bites Holyfield’s ear…
 
In his autobiography, Tyson wrote about how it happened after taking the championship –
 
“I really wanted to enjoy being the champion. It was the first time we had ever set a goal and gone through all the blood, sweat, and tears to accomplish it. Now I could be mentioned in the same breath as Joe Louis and Ali. I wanted to bask in that, but I felt guilty and empty. Cus wasn’t there to give me direction. For the first time in years, I didn’t have a goal or a desire to do anything. “
 
Tyson built elite levels of self-discipline, physical toughness, mental toughness, and animated his spirit with a rugged aggressiveness in pursuit of a key mission  – the result was greatness.
 
In the absence of a mission, all that built-up toughness led to erratic and eventually self-destructive results.
 
***
 
NECESSITY OF MISSION ORIENTATION 
 
Before we get into the rest of understanding Toughness, we need to triple-underline a statement –
 
For toughness to turn into greatness, you need to orient your actions around a mission.
 
Torii Mototada took the suicide assignment of defending Fushimi Castle in order that the Eastern Forces could regroup and end the civil war.
 
Mike Tyson is perhaps the ultimate case study in what happens if you develop maximum toughness with and without mission orientation – because when he had mission orientation, he went on to become one of the most spectacular and inspiring athletes of all time, and – now forgotten – was actually on his way to being a major force for good with Public Service Announcements and charity work before he fell off into the dark side of missionlessness.
 
***
 
NO NECESSITY FOR ULTRA-GRAND MISSION
 
Talking about a grand mission in life is beyond the scope of this chapter, but here is the key thing – it’s not necessary to begin training in Mission Orientation.
 
Rather, any worthy small or medium-sized goal can be the opportunity to both build and express toughness.
 
A lot of people who don’t succeed blame it on the fact that they don’t care about what they’re currently doing. “Yeah, I’m lazy here, but once I start my own company…”
 
– this never works. You become how you act. How you act trains and becomes automatic about your future behavior.
 
To that end, this is a mentality – you want to consider why  you are doing everything you’re doing, and what the mission behind it is. Then you ensure your actions harmonize with the mission. You build up your toughness, your steadfastness, your emotional control, your technical skills in the service of the mission at hand.
 
And again, it does not have to be grand and glorious. There is a reason that all effective militaries spend so much time having young soldiers learn to make their bed and have a clean and crisp uniform – the habits of routinely and consistently doing the right thing transfer over to all areas of life.
 
***
 
AUFTRAGSTAKTIK VS BEFEHLSTAKTIK
 
Our first foray into Toughness has largely been about a mental shift – shifting your thinking from doing actions in order to considering the mission at hand.
 
To that end, if you want to go deeper on the topic, let’s look at two German words – Auftragstaktik vs Befehlstaktik.
 
The “taktik” you see in there translates almost exactly to the English word “tactic” – taking an action of some sort.
 
But the compound words don’t perfectly translate; rather, they have to be described and studied to be understood.
 
The origins of the “Auftragstaktik” style of orders comes largely from the Prussian/German Army Chief Helmuth von Moltke, who along with Otto von Bismarck led the Unification of Germany in the mid-1800’s.
 
Moltke is, in my opinion, one of the greatest Generals in history – his reputation suffers from that great paradox that generals who win engagements without much bloodshed, who do not overreach, and who stop once they get what’s suitable for their country are often not remembered as much as more belligerent characters who overreach and have more grand scenes. Were I able to select any General from history to lead an army, I’d take Moltke over Napoleon or Alexander without blinking.
 
Let’s learn a little from his 1869 Operations document, “Instructions for Large Unit Commanders”, emphasis added by me –
 
“In general, one does well to order no more than is absolutely necessary and to avoid planning beyond the situations one can foresee.  These change very rapidly in war. Seldom will orders that anticipate far in advance and in detail succeed completely to execution. This shakes the confidence of the subordinate commander and it gives the units a feeling of uncertainty when things develop differently than what the high command's order had presumed.
 
“Moreover, it must be pointed out that if one orders much, then the important thing that needs to be carried out unconditionally will be carried out only incidentally or not at all  because it is obscured by the mass of secondary things and those which are valid only under the circumstances.
 
“The higher the authority, the shorter and more general will the orders be. The next lower command adds what further precision appears necessary. The detail of the execution is left to the verbal order, to the command. Each thereby retains freedom of action and decision within his authority. "
 
Imagine that – anti-micromanaging… as far back as 1869!
 
This work developed into the German style that’s often called Auftragstaktik – Wikipedia has it defined as “tactics focused on accomplishing the task/mission” as opposed to Befehlstaktik , “tactics focused on executing a set of orders.”
 
***
 
MISSION ORIENTATION: A NECESSARY FOR GOOD OUTCOMES
 
Mission Orientation is a way of thinking – instead of thinking merely about actions to take, you constantly think about what your intent  is, and what the intent and goals are of the organization and people you work with.
 
For some readers out there, this will sound incredibly obvious. “Yes, of course that’s true.”
 
For others, though, many aspects of their behavior and how they spend the time is just autopilot or beliefs inherited from society that aren’t serving one well.
 
Regardless if you already think this way, it’s very possible to train at getting better in clarifying the outcome you want and why you’re doing any individual thing you’re doing, both clarifying that for yourself and to be able to communicate it with others.
 
Former Marine Recon Officer Nathan Fick wrote about learning this in “ One Bullet Away ” –
 
“Before every operation, the leader wrote and delivered a formal order. Sometimes the orders stretched into dozens of pages, accounting for every detail of navigation, communication, resupply, and actions upon running into the enemy. We bitched and complained about the onerous process of writing orders. Would we have time for this in combat? Of course not, and that was the point. We wrote so many orders in SMEAC format that its components became ingrained. In December, when I was given a tactical problem and one minute to identify key considerations, I may have come up with five. By March, I saw thirty. In May, fifty. Our assessment process sped up, and with it our actions.”
 
And how does this relate to toughness?
 
“Instruction at TBS [Marine Basic School] goes far beyond rote memorization, growing into some amalgamation of chess, history, boxing, and game theory. We studied the fog and friction of war, how the simplest things become difficult. During our written test on the subject, the instructors cranked Metallica at full volume, hurled tennis balls at our heads, and sprayed our faces with water pistols. The lesson was focus: ignore the distractions and do your job.”
 
Mission orientation.
 
Toughness will led you persevere longer, be disrupted less, hold yourself together when you feel like hell, and push through blocks and barriers – but to what end?
 
That’s the question that Mission Orientation answers.
 
It’s both a way of thinking about the world, and a skill that can be practiced – the simplest version is merely clarifying every action you take – asking what the ideal outcome of it is.

In absence of Mission Orientation, all the fortitude and toughness in the world is dissipatated randomly, wastefully.

With this comes coolness and being collected under the greatest of pressures – knowing the intent and outcome lets you tap into all your mental resources to drive hard towards one’s goal.