I tell my son bedtime stories every night. I listen to an audio book I think he might like, and then try to remember and summarise the story.
Recently he has been enjoying listening to stories from “33 Strategies of War” by Robert Greene. Each chapter has different anecdotes and examples from history to illustrate one strategy, such as “Know your enemy,” and “Don’t fight the last battle.”
One strategy we talked about recently was “Burn your boats.” When Cortez left Cuba with a small group of armed men, he was hoping to conquer the Aztec empire in what would become Mexico. But he didn’t trust that his men would give 100 per cent effort if they had an escape route. So after landing in dangerous territory, he deliberately destroyed the boats that had taken them there. Now his men didn’t have the option of running away and taking the boats back to Cuba. They had to fight and win, or else die trying.
A non-military example of “Burn your boats,” was Dostoevsky. When he started to feel too comfortable as a writer, he spent all of the money he had saved up. Then he had no choice but to write and sell his writing at a fast pace, because he had no other money to fall back on.
How does this strategy work for English learners, I wonder? Burn Google translate, and force yourself to work out the meaning of English by yourself?
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