Part Three – The Three Masteries – Domain (Conquest)
In June of 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte led a 600,000-strong military force called the Grande Armée in an invasion of Russia. Four months later, he began his retreat from Moscow with only ~110,000 of his men surviving. This was one of the French Emperor’s most significant failures and is considered the beginning of the end for him by historians.
Napoleon is one of history’s greatest military minds but made some errors in judgment when he decided to invade Russia that cost him greatly. His army was logistically ill-equipped and was not ready for the harshness of the Russian Climate. Furthermore, the Russian Army scorched the earth as they retreated inland preventing the Grande Armée from sustaining themselves from the land as they would in other campaigns.
There are many lessons we can learn about our individual conquests in life from this military failure, but I’ll sum up the lessons we are most interested in into this statement:
PICK YOUR BATTLES AND PREPARE YOURSELF FOR THEM ACCORDINGLY.
PICK YOUR BATTLES
Despite the great ambitions we might have for our lives, most of us have a limited amount of resources at our disposal, the most critical of which is time. We cannot wage effective warfare on multiple fronts and expect to succeed on all fronts with the constraints we have. You cannot, for instance, simultaneously be an employee, a business person, and the head of a separate organization and expect yourself to excel at all three. Your ability to outdo your competition in either of the fields of battle you participate in will be affected by how many battles you are fighting at any one time. There’s only a handful of individuals who have managed to excel at three or more of the ventures they participate in, and that has often come at the expense of their personal lives (Domain of Communion).
What’s the ONE thing you want to be great at? Do you want to be a great employee and climb up the corporate ladder in your organization? Do you want to be a great businessman? Do you want to be a great minister?
You cannot be a GREAT anything in the Domain of Conquest without making that one thing your primary focus and everything else secondary, tertiary, and so forth.
UNDERSTAND THE LAWS OF THE DOMAIN AND PUSH THEM TO THEIR LIMITS
It’s a sad fact that most people are content with being average at anything they do. Most students just want to clear their courses. Most business people just want to break even. Most employees just want to keep their jobs.
Those that excel are never content with being just “good enough”. They understand that something is not worth doing if not done right.
If you are in business: do you understand economics, the laws of marketing and sales, etc. and have you pushed those laws to the limit in your business and seen growth on account of that?
If you are an employee: have you understood what makes the best and most effective employees in your field and what skills they possess? Where do you aspire to be in three years and what must you do to reach that place?
If you are a minister: When did you last experience personal and ministerial growth? Have you settled and made camp where there once was a move of God but isn’t anymore? How current are you with the agendas of Heaven in the lives of those you minister to?
Every domain we do conquest in has principles that govern it. Napoleon Bonaparte was a great military leader, but he went to war in a domain he was not ready to do battle in and suffered great losses.
We all must “Study to show ourselves approved…” in whatever Domain of Conquest we function in.
EQUIP YOURSELF
“Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight”, the saying goes. We often tend to underestimate the difficulty of the challenges ahead of us when we head off into conquest and overestimate our preparedness. Before you start anything, do your best to learn as much as possible about it as you can; and seek the counsel of those that have gone before you.
Do the relationships you find yourself in support the type of person you aspire to be and the magnitude of the challenges you’ll face?
If you are a leader, have you equipped yourself with communication skills and developed emotional intelligence enough to make you a great leader?
Are you well-equipped to overcome the enemies you will face in your Domain of Conquest? What are the things that have conquered many that have gone before you and what will you do to not meet the same defeat?
According to the types of battles you will face in the Domain of Conquest you pick, arm yourself accordingly.
In the next part, we discuss Mastery of the enemy.
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