One thing I don’t want to see is a bunch of people being scared. When I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, I did it to help people who may want the help of understanding a strategy that could help them through the scariest circumstances. After all, that is my experience, I’ve seen all the scary stuff any person should ever have to see in a lifetime, and I still have a lot of lifetime to live. But I’ve never woken up afraid of anything in my life, even under paralyzing circumstances. And with things being the way they are in the world, it’s a good time to share some of the knowledge with other people who may be so inclined to provide leadership for themselves toward the aim of making a better life. So increasingly, now that the Biden administration is doing its thing and the global forces against us have shown their intentions, I want those who have a mind for it to rest at ease and think clearly about the matters at hand. It is essential to understand the true nature of power and how to defeat overwhelming forces because those are the problems of our current time, and I offer in my book a guide on how to get there. But I’m not just selling the information in a book; I’m happy to tell and teach anybody who wants to learn. The book puts it all in one place, but I offer openly much of what is in the book because I want to see people win at life, especially when it comes to the MAGA movement and the threat of China and the United Nations in general. Sure, they are big organizations with many resources behind them. Still, as I point out in the video above, they are easy to bring down, just as most large organizations are for all the reasons discussed in this article.
The big falsehood that many of us have been taught, and China affirms it during each Olympic season, is that large groups of people who show they can do exactly what they are told are the most critical element of strategy. China enjoys showing the world at military displays and Olympic events how they can get thousands of people to coordinate perfectly in complicated ways with mass obedience. Big companies like to teach how “compliant” their workforce is to company memos and compliance audits where instructions are followed to the letter and never strayed from. Too much of the world and the long span of human history, compliance to orders is the primary concern and measure success. That is, after all, the fear of most military affairs. “Sir, I was just following orders.” Soldiers are not expected to think; they are expected to comply. In our schools, we are to follow a teacher’s instructions to do what we are told. So it should never be a surprise to anybody that when America was attacked by global forces, throughout the last several decades, especially in the previous couple of years, we would be assaulted through our natural compliance to instructions provided to us by centralized authorities.
In many cases, we have been taught this method of value assessing our entire lives. The dog whistle is something most of us hear when a Covid health official tells us to wear a saliva-covered mask in public and not to take hydroxychloroquine to fight off a bioweapon virus produced in a lab in China to take over the economies of the world under the flag of communism. We comply because we were taught to, even if we think the concept is stupid. Most people in the world do. Likely much of China believes its authority figures are fools, but they follow their instructions because of the way they have been taught to think about their roles in the schemes of things.
Yet leadership is not in following instructions because the centralized authority issuing the instructions might get it wrong. In so doing, it will put the lives of hundreds, thousands, and millions of people at risk in their error. I often tell the story of how I worked at five large companies before I ever turned 30 and could never cut a break by any of them staying open. In spite of any hard work I did, they all managed to close due to bad leadership, bad because they were too centralized in their approach to problem-solving. I watched many brilliant people destroy great companies. They put all their strategic efforts into the wrong priorities, believing that organizations were great because people followed directions. Well, at a certain point, I gained the ability to be a leader myself, and my method has always been to teach people how to think so that if a centralized authority gets a strategy wrong, then the people closest to the problem can make a correction and solve the problem right then and there. I often like to use the football metaphor of calling an audible at the line of scrimmage. The game plan might be acceptable until you see that the other team has adapted to what you’re doing and you need to make a change. If a plan isn’t working, players need to change a play to adapt to what works.
In The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, I point out that one of the great strengths of the American way of doing things is our ability to think outside the box, to “shoot from the hip” when needed to approach problems less formalized. It’s OK to have a plan and a strategy, but decentralizing the problem-solving process is the key to success in any culture, whether it be a company or a country. Leadership is all about thinking on your feet rather than coming up with a game plan then forcing everyone to stick to it, even if it proves to be the wrong plan. And that is the dirty little secret that China doesn’t want anybody to know about them. The United Nations, too, are all too rigid, and even if they were to happen to read this, I have people from China who read here every day, likely censors, they could not correct course because their culture is not flexible enough. What they value in a good society are all the wrong things. They can only hide that fault if they can eliminate all their competition from revealing it to the world under pressure.
This is why I said, especially to some compelling people in Washington D.C. when I first published my book, that The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business could bring down China without destroying the assets and people of the country. China will lose whenever forced to play the gunfighter game, “shooting from the hip,” decentralizing authority in organizations and governments. All the socialists that are running the United Nations are in the same condition. They are compliance-driven, and any centralized authority issuing orders, such as the CDC has now made itself known for, will make mistakes. When they do, they are too slow to adapt to a victory position. So in that way, prominent centralized authorities will always lead to failure, which is why history tells the stories of communism that they do. Big companies go out of business for the same reasons. But success comes not from relying on centralized processes but in teaching people to think as individuals toward a common cause but to make decisions about strategy at the point where the problems present themselves. Not in the office of some far removed bureaucrat who doesn’t understand all the conditions involved. And knowing that and the threats in front of us now, perhaps they will look less scary if viewed in this way. It’s not about compliance; it’s about resolution and performance 100% of the time. Those who don’t understand these types of things will eventually always lose.
Rich Hoffman
The Gunfighter's Guide: 