When you think of the hyena, you probably imagine a scavenger. The giant rat of the savannah. Movies like The Lion King probably have an outsized role in that perception.
But what if I told you that hyenas are actually formidable hunters? And that the spotted ones hunt up to 90% of their food? And one of the things they hunt most often is buffalo?
Let’s be clear here. Hyenas aren’t lions. They’re nowhere near as strong, or as fast. They’re not particularly large either.
Buffalo, on the other hand, are massive. They each weigh over a thousand pounds, with horns that can gore a lion. Hyenas weigh maybe a tenth of that. They can’t overpower a buffalo through brute force. So they don’t try.
Hyenas hunt buffalo by biting their testicles.
They go for the vulnerable point using quick, sharp teeth. They nip and escape, they wait, and they chase.
One precise bite won’t kill the buffalo immediately, but it changes everything. The wound slows it down. Blood loss weakens it. What seemed like a bad bet turns into a successful strategy.
It’s painful, it’s ugly, but it works.
Most people optimise for visible progress or easy completion. Strategic thinkers instead ask: “What single action would change the difficulty curve of everything that follows?”
The easy analogue here is the financial adage that “your first $X is the hardest”. Your first $10k is the massive hurdle that makes reaching $100k easier. Your first $100k is the big hurdle on the way to $1m, because of the way in which wins compound.
The right kind of victory
Some crucial wins are only obvious once you manage to strike at the weak point.
One of my favourite Star Wars movies is Rogue One. People seem to love it now, in the advent of the Disney series Andor, but at the time the opinion wasn’t as universal.
[Skip a paragraph to avoid spoiling a +10 year old film]
In Rogue One, the entire team dies while stealing the Death Star plans. Tactically, the mission is a disaster. Everyone dies. But they transmit the plans to the Rebel fleet, which enables everything that follows. This one act made the entire rebel victory possible.
Sometimes the win that matters most looks the least impressive in the moment.
Maybe people don’t celebrate you for getting the first $10k, but you learn all the hard lessons needed to get to $100k. Maybe people won’t celebrate you for writing the first chapter, but you learn all the hard lessons needed to finish the book.
