Notes From The Tiger’s Cave

It takes discipline and for that you need to keep your vision of where you are going ever before you.

Elsewhere Johnny Wimbrey teaches that you must not let another person’s negativity define YOUR reality. Again, if you can keep your vision of what you aspire to be in your minds eye, and if you can make it plain to yourself every day by writing it down and reading it out loud, that will serve as a buckler and a sword in your fight against the prevailing negativity of the circumstances you may find yourself in.

If you haven’t seen or heard of JW before, check out the video:

As he expected, the canvas gave way, and Sen no Rikyu fell into the ditch, muddying his clothes in the process.

Yamashina came rushing out of his house as if horrified at Sen no Rikyu’s mishap, pulled him out of the ditch and led him to a bath that just happened to be full of fresh, clean, piping hot water.

After his bath, Sen no Rikyu joined Yamashina in the tea ceremony and the two of them enjoyed sharing a laugh about Sen no Rikyu’s mishap.

As Sen no Rikyu later explained to a friend, he had seen the ditch and realized Yamashina had hoped he would fall into it as a practical joke,

“But since it should always be one’s aim to conform to the wishes of one’s host, I fell into the hole knowingly and thus assured the success of the meeting. Tea is by no means mere obsequiousness, but there is no tea where the guest and the host are not in harmony with one another.” 

Source: Robert Greene, The 48 Laws of Power 

Commentary “You’ll have more fun and success by focusing on helping other people achieve their goals than you will by focusing on your own goals.”

and 

“There is an old saying from Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People): “You’ll have more fun and success when you stop trying to get what you want and start helping other people get what they want.”

The Japanese language [Nihongo] is shot through with colourful stories, amusing idioms and sage proverbs [kotowaza] that reach across the generations and make up the common stock of Japanese wisdom.

Take those high-altitude, single-minded little niche-marketing websites that apparently rake in bags of loot for their savvy webmasters - you know, the small one-page jobs with no escape for the hapless surfer or the Internet marketing “newbie” except the “Buy Now” button or the emergency shutdown switch. The hapless surfer finds himself being smashed into submission by an avalanche of persuasive prose and finds himself victim of yet another Clickbank sales strategem. Ah, but didn’t you know? There is an ancient Japanese idiom that states,

 Sanshou wa kotsubu de mo karai       

 ”Mountain pepper is small but hot.”

For many a mere mortal or other form of work-from-home-on-the-Internet “newbie”, such a small, hot, money-spinning website must seem somewhat akin to a flower that blooms on a high peak, an utterly unobtainable prize for man or beast,

 takane no hana.     

It is as well to remember that little things, persisted in day by day, can mount up, and if you pile up even specks of dust, they’ll turn into a mountain of success,

 chiri mo tsumoreba, yama to naru.  

So, when all has been said and done, when it comes to mastering the Internet, while it is prudent to tap a stone bridge before crossing it,

Ishibashi o tataite wataru,

in the end, if you don’t Grasp-The-Nettle and enter the tiger’s cave, you won’t catch the cub,

 koketsu ni irazunba, koji o ezu!