THREE ANCIENT BATTLE STRATEGIES FOR TODAY'S WORLD #174

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hello, and welcome back to Film Pro, Productivity and Success,
the podcast that helps creative people to live a more focused,
effective and happy life. My name is Carter Ferguson, and
this is episode one hundred and seventy four. Three ancient
Chinese strategies for freelance productivity. Three may keep a secret

(00:31):
if two of them are dead Benjamin Franklin unquote. In
last week's episode, I covered ten ways to gamify your
career for better productivity, and if you missed it, go
back check it out. And I'm going to continue my
trend of numbered episode titles in today's episode. As freelancers

(00:56):
and creatives, we face our own battles, maybe not quite
as free as those that were faced on the ancient battlefields,
but we have our deadlines, our distractions, and competition that
feel at many times like a war is going on,
or like we're having to fight a battle in order
to achieve things. But what have I told you that

(01:17):
a book featuring thirty six ancient Chinese war strategies could
teach us how to work smarter, stay ahead, and thrive
in our creative businesses. Today, I'm going to be looking
at three of the most powerful strategies updated for modern freelancing.
I'd like to add from a collection of proverbs known
as the thirty six Strategies, and these ancient Chinese proverbs

(01:39):
describe cunning and subtle war tactics used not only in
military contexts, but also in politics and in civil interactions.
And they're quite often misattributed to Sunzu, who wrote the
Art of War instantly, but these strategies are generally considered
to have been compelled after his lifetime. For those that
are interested in that, they cover a range of strategies
such as deception, misdirection, and opportunism. And in today's show,

(02:03):
I'm going to look at how we can draw inspiration
from these ancient insights to combat more modern business challenges
and develop a focused approach to our work. And the
first of these is and some of these are a
little bit abstract, but I'll go into them in detail.
Don't panic when you hear them. The first of these
is deceive the heavens to cross the sea stratagem one.

(02:28):
And I'm aware that that sounds like a bit of
a headache, but bear with me. It's much simpler than
you think. I'll put a breakdown of on the official
website of how the literal meaning translates from the Chinese
andess for those that are interested as well, but this
and I'll do that for each one of these. This
simply refers to the strategy of creating illusions, distractions, or

(02:52):
false impressions to hide where our own intentions are real
intentions or our actions, because by deceiving the enemy or authority,
or even general observer the members of the public, you
can carry out your plan without interference, without suspicion, and
without obstruction. A historical example of this was something that

(03:14):
was used by the Allies in World War Two, and
it was Operation Fortitude, and that was an elaborate, a huge,
elaborate deception plan that made the Germans believe that the
D Day invasion would occur at the Pas de Calais.
I'm terrible pronouncing these things instead of Normandy. They created
fake radio traffic, inflatable tanks, and even a phantom army

(03:38):
under general pattern to openly mislead German intelligence, and this
misdirection allowed the real Normandy invasion on the sixth of
June nineteen forty four to take place with tactical surprise
and with minimal interference. Today, this is used in various contexts,
including business, politics, personal relationships, everyday life, and it's used

(04:01):
to describe situations where someone cleverly disguises their true objective
behind a harmless or seemingly unrelated action. And a modern
example of this in film was Marvel Studio's careful concealment
of Toby maguire and Andrew Garfield's involvement in Spider Man

(04:23):
No Way Home twenty twenty one. That is an awesome film,
by the way, That's an excellent, excellent movie that for
me was the best film of twenty twenty one. I
know people pooh pooh Marvel movies, but I just thought
that was excellent. But despite a lot, an awful lot
of speculation and leaks, the studio on that in that
case refused to confirm their involvement, excluding the actors from trailers,

(04:46):
kept them out of the trailers, and kept them off
of promotional materials. And by keeping this secret really closely
guarded until the movie premiered, Marvel created real surprise and
excitement among the audiences, significantly enhancing the film's impact and success.
On a smaller level of something I do quite often
if i'm shooting, and in fact I did it the

(05:06):
last time I was shooting on Yesterday's Men, which is
Yesterday's Men was a little concept thing we were put together.
My friend Dom had written and there was not a
lot of money involved in it, and we needed a
location and location that I found was just near my house,
and I thought could use my house as a unit base.
And it's only a small team, we can just go

(05:26):
and do that. And I decided to really go covert
on it. And I don't advise you all do this,
but sometimes when the Council get involved in things, money
starts to build up in something that's nothing, that a
tiny thing becomes a huge thing, becomes costly, and so
this was this is a low budget Scottish thing. We're
just trying to make happen. And we went onto the

(05:48):
street and what I did is I I put are
an amber light on the roof of my car and
so when I was I was sweeping the streets. So
the actors were saying that safe because it was glass.
It was like a back alley and I was cleaning
the whole place up. I did that in a fluorescent
jacket with an amber light that got from China from
like Temy or something like that, or Alley Express on

(06:08):
the roof of the car, so that I was hiding
in playing sight and I was just actively doing that.
We did hire a couple of guys, local guys, just
twenty QUI something like that, to come and watch each
end of this alley to stop any anyone that was
coming through. But here's the thing. Nobody came through it. It
was so quiet. But that's another thing. So I was
kind of overtly cleaning in things because that's what I
had to do anyway. But after I completed them that,

(06:30):
we shot the scene and say an hour an hour
and twenty and nobody paid us any attention at all
because they just thought it's just somebody working the street.
So that's a little thing that I've done fairly recently
that takes this on ultimately to see the heavens to
cross the sea. Teaches us though, to keep our plans
private until we're ready to act, and this will help
us to stay focused and getting stuff done instead of

(06:52):
worrying about what others think about what we're doing. That's
maybe if you've got something big and you tell someone
about it and then it gets delayed. I've got this
thing I want to do a This sounds daft because
I know I'm a professional, but I wanted to do
a week kind of amateur level doctor Who fan film.
Because I'd managed to pick up a Cyberman costume or
most of a Cyberman costume. I told loads of people

(07:13):
about it. I've still not made it. I got let down.
I did try to make it. I poured some money
into it to make it happen, and I think three
of the people that had involved let me down at
that first stage, and the whole thing just down to halt.
And I saw my friend Kenneth six months or whatever ago,
and I mentioned it to him and he goes, I
know you've been going about that for years, And just
when he said that, I was just like, I wish
I hadn't said any anyway. You can use this concept

(07:35):
deceiving the heavens to cross the sea. You can use
it use the idea by quietly working on your bigger
projects or your ideas and not sharing them too early.
Social media is a really dangerous thing, as I see
people tipping their hand. Tipping their hand, that's the right word,
way too early on stuff that really should they shouldn't
be talking about publicly at all, so be aware of

(07:57):
this and stop doing it. In fact, I directed project
that was meant to stay secret until a crowdfunder was
launched a few months later, and where the images from
it would have been released to promote the campaign. But
on my return to social media i'd taken a social
media break a few months later, I was absolutely horrified
to discover that all of the images had already been
released for no reason whatsoever other than to say, hey,

(08:19):
look what we've been up to. And when they later
launched a crowdfunder campaign, they didn't have any new content,
new images to release with it, and I think that
that really did seriously impact on the outcome of that campaign.
A play on all of this idiom is to play
your cards close to your chest, which of course is
originating from card games like poker, where players are physically

(08:41):
holding their cards near the chest to prevent others from
seeing their hand. Metaphorically, though, it means being cautious, secretive,
or guarded about our intentions, about our plans, or about
releasing information which we have control of so as not
to give away our advantage or reveal our strategy. Too early,

(09:03):
and to put this into practice. That's set aside time
each week to work on your most important project without
asking for anyone's approval or sharing anything about it until
you are ready to go live. So don't go hunting
for clout and ruin your own plans. Let your plans
be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move,

(09:27):
fall like a thunderbolt. Soon zoo the art of war unquote.
The second of today's lessons is to borrow a corpse
to revive the soul. It's stratagem fourteen. Again, it's a
bit of a mind bender by today's standards. So what
does it mean borrow a corpse to revive a soul? Well,

(09:49):
this stratagem involves reviving something obsolete, defeated, or we caned buy,
leveraging another entity's resources, its reputation, or status by repurposing
basically an existing structure or situation. That would be the
corpse part of this, and then you breathe new life
into it with your own plans, your own ambitions, and

(10:11):
your own ideas. Yeah, so that would be the soul
you're putting into it. It teaches us that instead of
starting from scratch, we can breathe life into an existing resource,
idea or a system to achieve our goals. And for freelancers,
this means leveraging what's already out there, tools, templates, frameworks,

(10:32):
proven strategies, that sort of thing to save time, energy,
and your creative bandwidth. Because I mean, if it's if
your life is ending like mine, I'm constantly having to
come up with new things and learn new things, and
I wish there was a repeatable strategy, a repeatable format
that I could use. Possibly I've got it within this

(10:53):
show that I could copy and use for myself. You
could take any old system that's falling out favor, refurbish
it as it were, and release it as new content
on socials or as a YouTube video or whatever. If
you are an influencer or a what is it we're
calling ourselves now content creator, that's it. A more recent

(11:15):
example of this might be Disney, who acquired Lucasfilm in
twenty twelve. Effectively, they borrowed the dormant Star Wars franchise
that would be the Corpse when they revived and expanded
it by producing fresh films, fresh series and merchandise, injecting
new energy and popularity into this, you know, aging franchise,

(11:36):
and that would be the new soul going into that. Said,
having seen some of these films and they really areked it,
but it's a reasonable example of what I'm talking about,
work smarter, not harder, Alan F. Morgenson unquote. In more
simple freelancing terms, it would lead us to use existing resources, ideas,

(12:00):
or systems to save time and energy. The freelancing application
here is simply don't reinvent the wheel. I think that's
what I'm trying to say. You don't have to do
that in all cases. Instead, focus on streamlining your workflow,
cutting back your workflow, making it simple by using resources
that have already been built, that have already been tested

(12:22):
and have been refined. For example, you might want to
use a project management tool like Trello or Notion, which
can help you organize your projects more effectively, more effortlessly,
so you can spend less time managing tasks and more
time doing the creative work that probably truly matters to you.
Another thing you can do is use templates for efficiency,

(12:42):
like predesigned templates for invoices, contracts, emails, and proposals. This
will all save you time and ensure professionalism, allowing you
to focus on delivering value to your clients. That is
definitely one I could speak for myself. For filmmakers, you
should have contracts that when you go to the next film,
you just need to change a few details on it

(13:03):
and it will stand for the next one. I can
say templates for efficiency would be I use Canva, and
I've got a template for creating the square logos that
go out on this podcast. And so what I do
is I create a new image I either find it
or a creator or a make it myself, whatever, and
then I put it into Canva, and I use this
the typefaces already there, and then I export it in

(13:24):
a certain way and I keep it in a specific folder.
Even the process of doing it works in this sense.
And Thirdly, proven strategies. Adopt best practices and proven methods
in your field to avoid trial and error pitfalls. For example,
if you're a writer, using content frameworks might help you
to structure your ideas faster. That would be fiback structure

(13:48):
or what's the thing, there's a page count thing which
is a very very specific structure. Yeah, yeah, I'll tell
you maybe on page one. I've got some of it
written up here page one of your script. You need
to have an opening image, and that's got to be
clear within the first ten pages, twenty five percent of
the way in to the feature. Whatever you might want
a turning point. This is all structure that's available to

(14:11):
anyone that's writing screenplays. Anyway, I've got off on with it.
I'm not even sure of unkly that we shall see.
By using what already exists and then breathing new life
into it, you'll free up your mind for more creativity.
You will not face that burnout so often. Mental energy
is a finite resource. If you can use any system

(14:31):
that allows you to use less of that creative energy,
that means you've got that mental energy to put into
stuff that matters more. If you get my drift, and
you'll still be able to deliver kind of high quality
results at the same time. I do it with risk assessments.
If I'm writing a new risk assessment again, I'll grab
a template of use for a similar piece of action,
and then I'll rework that that one for the new one.

(14:53):
I mean, unfortunately, in my game everything has to be
seen by scene. There's no specific form, but the formatting
of how I present it can be the same or
with this podcast to say, I use the same intro
and outro, I use the same titles, I use the
same music's music within it. I use it a habit
putting in quotes, and as I said earlier, I use

(15:15):
Canva to create the images for it. I don't sit
and rewrite the same thing again and again and again,
at least try not to so. In short, stop wasting
time reinventing the wheel. Orrow what works, and focus then
on what truly matters. And if you can't think of anything,
try it out. With social media as an example, update
and repost. Take your best performing post from before, update

(15:39):
the information on it, and share it again, maybe to
a different a different social for example. Maybe you can
put a new perspective on it, or just redesign it
a little bit. You can also perhaps repurpose it into
new formats. So turn an old blog post into an
infographic carousel, a video, a reel. I could potentially take
an old episode of this and make a TikTok video

(16:01):
of it, you know, maybe cut it down at sixty seconds,
take the best parts of it, and if I could
establish this is on my mind, that sort of thing.
If I could establish something that works and it doesn't
take me too long to do, I might might even
do that. But I could potentially take a script or
part of a script, rewrite it into sixty second TikTok
reel or Instagram reel or whatever, and put it out

(16:22):
there again. And lastly, you could create a series of
breakdown long format posts into smaller, bite sized social media snippets.
For example, don't let your own content gather dust, repurpose it,
reimagine it, and give it new life to keep at
your audience, whatever audience you have engaged. As I mentioned before,

(16:43):
there are thirty six of these strategies, but the final
one I want to spot like today is to look
a burning house. That's strategy of five. In short, this
one encourages us to turn chaos into opportunity by acting decisively.
Soon Zoo said something similar, which is perhaps more edible
for today's headspace. He said, in the midst of chaos,

(17:05):
there is always opportunity. This metaphorical burning house represents the
state of turmoil, crisis, or vulnerability, and in practical terms,
it means taking advantage of opportunities that arise, often from
another's misfortune. From general instability or another's lack of preparedness.
And it means identifying opportunities when disruption is going on

(17:28):
or when chaos is happening, and using those opportunities, using
those things you recognize to your advantage. Ethically, I would
add as well, and I'm very much aware that this
sort of thing has a negative connotation. It implies opportunism
or lack of moral integrity. And I'm not suggesting that
you go out looking for people and need to take

(17:50):
advantage of them to start ambulance chasing. But we can
still take advantage of chaos and turn it into something positive.
An example of this when we be Robert Rodriguez, who
made El Mariactual with a budget of something like had
it written down seven thousand dollars. I think it was
basically a non existent budget, but he cast non professional actors,

(18:13):
he used cheap equipment, and he made a film which
has a kind of raw charm. It caught Hollywood's attention,
and that launched his career. You know. Basically, it proves
that limitations can fuel innovation, and of course chaos can
feel overwhelming, like an industry changing, which is happening right
now is TV specifically it seems to be moving more

(18:37):
in the direction of online Are the economy slowing down
or a messy client project. And there's loads and loads
of people and examples, I'm sure you can think of
some of them yourself, of people that took advantage when
COVID happened, came out with a lot of money. And
there's certainly some moral questions I've got there on that one.
But what was I saying? Yeah, So, basically, chaos brings

(18:58):
chances to grow his opportunities to try new ideas and
to work with new people. And if you can stay calm,
you can stay flexible, and you can think strategically, you
can turn these moments into opportunities when they arise. The
wise adapt themselves to circumstances as water molds itself to

(19:19):
the picture Chinese proverb unquote. Perhaps the most famous example
of this would be Awesome Wells in the War of
the Worlds in nineteen thirty eight, so Orson Wells capitalized
on the chaos caused by his You'll Be Well Aware
of Its infamous is radio drama of War of the Worlds.
The broadcast, which was presented as a series of realistic

(19:43):
news bulletins about alien invasion caused total panic amongst the listeners,
who believed what they were listening to was real. And
while that chaos did spark public outrage, the stunt catapulted
Wells into the national spotlight and earndom fame, an opportunity
in Hollywood which he took advantage of and he later
directed Citizen Kane often considered I think it's definitely up there,

(20:08):
very much up there, one of the greatest movies of
all time. In simpler freelance in terms, though you can
use slow periods, client delays or industry changes have opportunities
to level up your skills. You can create passive income
streams or develop new services. There's a simple takeaway from this.

(20:29):
Next time you face downtime or disruption, folks, ask yourself,
what skill or project can I work on during this period.
I can't remember if I did launch this during COVID
or I launched it just before, but I took absolute
advantage of COVID. I put out shows every single week.
I think it was for a year. I think I
got at the high point of the show was listened

(20:50):
to by seven hundred listeners per week, which I was
well happy with. I mean, if you were doing a
show to an audience at the theater and seven hundred
people were paying for tickets, it'll be fantastic. So I'm
a little bit lower than that. Now. That's partly because
I changed some things around. But yeah, I took advantage
of COVID when it happened and I put this show together.
I also started just at the start of it, just

(21:11):
at the right time, I was able to generate some
money from a business that's not in the business and
that is still running. And really that's what makes my
life complicated, to be honest, is I do have other
irons in the fire that are out with the film business.
This show would be one of them. It's a podcast,
it's done for free. But I have others that actually
bring in some money as well. So look for opportunities

(21:34):
like this and grab them when they come. Okay, use
what you have, do what you can. Start where you
are Arthur ash unquote. So let's recap on today's lessons.
The first is they sive the heavens to cross the sea.

(21:57):
The sive the heavens to cross the sea, or if
you prefer play your cards close to your chest. The
next was borrow a corpse to revive the soul, or
more simply put, work smarter, not harder. Find something that's
the key, isn't it? So I can often win. Find
something that used to work, that's falling away, and revitalize it.

(22:22):
Maybe there's money to be made there, maybe there's fame
and fortune for you. Work smarter, not harder, folks. And
the final one was looked a burning house. So in
the midst of chaos, remember always there is also opportunity.
I'm never assured if I'm giving too much away with
these sorts of episodes, but I do hope you've found

(22:44):
something useful in what I've been talking about today. I
really appreciate you giving your time to me today, though,
and I hope you'll join me again next week for
a new episode, which is called Why Firing Bad Clients.
Let me just check that it come on now, hold
on one seven four you. I think the one is
called why Firing Bad Clients Is Good for Business. That's

(23:04):
an interesting one, I'm sure, I'm sure it's worth tuning
in for. Do check it out. In the meantime, let
me end today with some words from Confucius, who say
success depends upon previous preparation, and without such preparation, there
is sure to be failure. Now take control of your
own destiny, keep on shooting, find something in that chaos

(23:28):
that's out there, and take advantage of it. And join
me next time on Film Pro Productivity and success. The
music that you can hear right now as Adventures by
a Whumitsu and you can view the full transcript of
this episode only on the official website that's Filmproproductivity dot com,

(23:51):
where you can also look back and listen to every
single show. You can follow my personal account on Twitter
and instant no no in fact or cut Twitter. It's
got follow my personal account only on at Fight Underscore
Director on Instagram, and you can follow the show on
Facebook at film Pro Productivity. That's what I'm pointing for,
So thanks, folks, keep on keep on rocking. Catch you

(24:13):
next time.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}THREE ANCIENT BATTLE STRATEGIES FOR TODAY'S WORLD #174