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 action, a pyrric victory no one survives to see, makes everything else possible.
Without that mission, which looked like total defeat from a distance, Luke never destroys the Death Star. The rebellion never wins.
“The strategic move isn’t always clearly significant in the moment. It might look like a loss. It might require sacrifice. But it’s the prerequisite that opens the gate to the accumulation of other wins.”
Sometimes reaching the critical axis requires accepting pain that others won’t.
Amazon bled money for nearly a decade. Founded in 1994, it didn’t turn an annual profit until 2003. 10 years in the red. Wall Street analysts constantly questioned whether the company would survive. Competitors couldn’t match the strategy because their shareholders demanded quarterly profits.
However, Amazon used its red-line years to build fulfilment centres, logistics networks, and AWS infrastructure, while competitors optimised for short-term viability.
That willingness to bleed was the strategic wound Amazon inflicted on traditional retail’s business model. Now Amazon isn’t just the world’s biggest bookstore. It’s one of the biggest logistics operators, and Amazon Web Services is the backbone of the internet. Nearly 40% of the 100,000 most popular websites run on AWS.
SpaceX operates similarly. Critics cheer when their rockets explode, not understanding that rapid iteration through failure is the strategy.
Traditional aerospace can’t afford public explosions. Shareholders, governments, and reputations all demand visible success. SpaceX treats explosions as data. Each spectacular failure accelerates their learning curve beyond what cautious competitors can match. If a NASA craft fails, it’s a national disaster. If a SpaceX craft fails, it’s a Tuesday, and there will be another craft tomorrow. (More on this in Ch. 24 of my book Sovereign).
Sometimes you have to reframe what “success” looks like to identify the crucial vulnerability. The key juncture that will make all future wins easier.
Playing the long game
You can’t overhaul your entire life simultaneously. But you can identify the keystone vulnerability— one small change that makes everything else easier. Not the biggest problem. And possibly not the easiest. But the crucial one. The wound that opens the gate.
Getting fired often feels like a defeat. Sometimes it’s the cut that forces you to pursue something better that you’d never have risked while comfortable.
Learning to read as a child seems like one small skill among many you need to acquire. But it’s the gateway that makes all other learning accessible.
In order to do this, you have to set aside the traditional hubris of ‘small wins’.
Most small wins are isolated. They create psychological momentum but don’t change the nature of the problem. Checking email feels productive but makes nothing else easier.
Getting enough sleep feels tough when you have so much on your plate. But often you’ll cut through what’s on your plate much easier when you’ve had sufficient rest.
Fixing sleep isn’t an obvious tactic to perform better on a presentation, or to get to the bottom of a tough challenge. But it’s a far more effective strategy than stewing for an extra hour past midnight with your head in your hands. (Something I myself often forget).
“When you face overwhelming opposition, don’t try to match force with force. Find the vulnerable point. The one small win that makes subsequent wins possible.”
Hyena prevail through strategy, not strength.
You win the long game the same way you take down a gigantic beast. You hunt a buffalo by biting its testicles.
