He Will Win Who Knows When to Fight

“He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.” — Sun Tzu

When I first read this, it made sense. Choose your battles, know what’s worth fighting for and what isn’t. Pretty straightforward, and something most of us already understand. But the more I thought about it, the more I recognized that I’ve always gravitated toward the fight, without ever pausing to ask if it was one worth having. Understanding a quote and actually living it turned out to be two very different things. Maybe that’s because most of us were never really taught the second half of it.

Most of us have spent a lot of our lives learning how to fight. Not literally, obviously, but how to stand up for ourselves, push through difficult things, defend what we believe in, be resilient, persevere, and not give up when things get hard. I’ve written about these things plenty of times, and I still believe in all of them. But somewhere in all that learning how to fight, I don’t think we spent nearly as much time learning when to stop.

A lot of us hold the belief that walking away means we lost. If someone misunderstands us, we feel the need to explain ourselves. If someone thinks we’re wrong, we feel the pull to prove we’re right. If something we’ve invested years into starts falling apart, we fight to save it, sometimes without ever stopping to ask whether we still want what we’re fighting for. Sometimes we even fight things we have absolutely no control over, as if pushing harder will somehow make reality change its mind.

Then there’s probably the hardest one. Sometimes we keep fighting simply because we’ve already been fighting for so long. We’ve put too much time, effort, and emotion into it. So simply walking away now would somehow make everything we put into it feel wasted.

At some point, we have to ask ourselves a different question. Not, “Can I win this?” but, “Even if I can win this, what is it costing me?” Because we can win an argument but damage a relationship. We can prove someone wrong and be no better off afterward. We can spend months trying to change someone’s opinion of us only to realize that we traded months of our own peace for an opinion that probably shouldn’t have mattered that much in the first place. Realizing that has changed how I think about fighting for things in general.

I’ve come to understand that part of growing is realizing that the things we’re willing to fight over should change as we do. Something that would have consumed us years ago might barely get a response from us today. Something we once felt the need to defend, explain, or prove might eventually become something we’re perfectly comfortable letting someone else believe. That doesn’t mean we’ve become weaker or that we’ve stopped caring. It means we’ve gotten a little better at deciding where our energy belongs, and maybe more importantly, what no longer deserves it. Walking away doesn’t always mean we’ve lost. Sometimes it simply means we’ve decided that we don’t need to participate anymore.

There are absolutely times when we need to stand our ground. There are people, principles, and relationships worth fighting for. The lesson, at least for me, is recognizing that there’s strength in standing our ground, but there’s also strength in realizing there’s no reason to keep standing on a battlefield that no longer matters.

That’s what I take from Sun Tzu’s words. Winning isn’t always defeating what’s in front of us. Sometimes winning is recognizing that the fight itself has become the thing we’re losing to. So perhaps maturity isn’t learning how to win every fight. It’s learning that not every fight deserves a winner.

#MotivationMonday