All warfare is based on deception. Guess what I've been reading?

Well I stayed home from work today, mostly because I would have been wasting precious air that my workmates should be using to be productive. And although I've done a whole lot of nothing, I did read this article on Loving your Work by Paul Graham which was surprising appropriate today. Paul Graham always has a bunch of nuggets to think about, but the one I'm stuck on is the line about how people who decide their profession while they're still in their teens often look back and realize that their career path was chosen by a high school student. I also read Sun Tzu's The Art Of War this morning. I didn't realize that without commentary, it's works out to be only about 35 pages. If I had known that I would have read it years ago. :) Anyway, I can see why there's so much commentary on it because there's a whole lot of room for interpretation. It pretty much says everything at least once, so you can hear what you want. Rules must always be enforced but some rules have to be broken, be unpredictable but calculated, neither a borrower nor lender be, you know... I can see why business leaders think it applies to them, and it *kinda* explains where my boss is coming from on some of his 'crazy like a fox tactics' where even your officers don't know the big picture; but again, you could turn around and quote all the trust and loyalty building bits too. I especially relate to this one:

"If soldiers are punished before they have grown attached to you, they will not prove submissive, and, unless submissive, they will be practically useless."

Yeah, that sums up where I'm at today.