Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life: How to Unlock Your Full Potential for Success and Achievement

THE STRATEGY OF NAPOLEON
The French general Napoleon dominated the continent of Europe
for almost 20 years. He led his armies to victory in dozens of bat-
tles, and lost only three battles in his entire career. He lost almost
600,000 men when he invaded Russia, failing to anticipate the
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cold of the Russian winter. Greatly weakened from the Russian
campaign, he subsequently lost the battle of Leipzig, which led to
his being exiled to the island of Elba. And finally, he lost at the
battle of Waterloo due to a series of miscommunications with his
field generals.
It is often forgotten that he won many other battles, small and
large, and is considered to be one of the three greatest military ge-
niuses of history. (Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan were the
other two.) Napoleon had developed a quality that helped him to
achieve victory, which you also can develop. It is called 
extrapolatory
thinking.
This is the ability to think and plan several moves ahead in
whatever you are doing. This way of thinking involves your consid-
ering every possible event that could occur, and then making provi-
sions for them, well in advance.
Napoleon personally felt that his thoroughness and depth of
preparation, carefully considering every detail, were his key to vic-
tory. This quality was demonstrated by his phenomenal ability to ar-
rive onto the field of a potential battle and then to think through
every single possible twist and turn of the battle to its logical con-
clusion—before the first shot was fired.
Once he had completed his preparations, he could take his posi-
tion at his command center to direct the battle. No matter what
news he received from any part of the battlefield, he was always
ready with an immediate response. Many people thought that his
quickness of response under fire was because he was a brilliant
thinker, which he was, but that was not the secret of his success. His
secret was that he had thought through every possible eventuality,
in advance.
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