Today, strategy is over-glorified. We hire strategists, praise “strategic minds,” and fetishize pattern recognition. But this signals a fundamental loss of the plot. We have confused the blueprint for the building. In love—real love—goals arise not from ambition but from affection. The singer sings “Shriramachandra Preetyarthe”—to please Lord Ram—not because they planned to, but because love compelled them. The strategy of how to sing, what time to sing, which raga to use—these may exist, but they are downstream. They are derivatives. The source is love.
🪷 The Ripening of Focus: A Closing Meditation
You focus not to strategize, but to become awareness.
Focus is a laser—sharp, narrow, penetrating.
Awareness is a floodlight—wide, still, embracing.
You dig deep not for the sake of depth, but so the tower may rise—automatically.
You practice low notes, not to impress, but so the high notes may fly—automatically.
You remember Him not to escape the world, but so everything else is forgotten—automatically.
You immerse in utility—mobile, internet, AI—only to discover their futility—automatically.
You become calm, still, unshaken—not to withdraw, but to understand a world in motion—automatically.
Strategy requires this floodlight.
But the floodlight cannot be aimed.
It must be embodied. And to embody it, you must become Arjuna.
A perfect strategist like Krishna is rare—divine, selfless, beyond calculation.
But when you become a selfless Arjuna, Krishna arrives—automatically.
When the student is ready, the teacher appears.
When the baby is ready, the same muscles that protected her push her out.
When the fruit is ripe, it falls effortlessly.
So when focus ripens, strategy manifests—without effort, without planning.
It is not made. It is revealed.
That is why we honor focus.
That is why we revere Arjuna.
That is why we marvel at Barcelona.
The Derivative Delusion
We live in an age obsessed with strategy. From Fortune 500 boardrooms to Formula 1 pit lanes, from startup accelerators to spiritual retreats, everyone seeks the perfect strategy—that magical configuration of moves that will guarantee success. But what if strategy itself is the problem? What if our very obsession with strategic thinking is what keeps us from the excellence we seek?
This exploration began with a simple but devastating analogy: Strategy is a financial derivative. Like a put or call option, its value isn’t intrinsic but derived from an underlying asset—the team, the talent, the core capability. And like all derivatives, strategy can both multiply value and destroy it catastrophically when disconnected from fundamentals.
Consider Formula 1. The “underlying asset” is straightforward: a skilled driver, a powerful car, an efficient pit crew. The strategy—when to pit, which tires to use, how to respond to opponents—is the derivative layer. A brilliant strategy can make a midfield car punch above its weight. A poor one can turn the fastest car into an also-ran.
But here’s where it gets complex: the value of your strategic derivative depends not just on you but on the entire field. You must consider your opponent’s strategy, their strategist’s historical patterns, their anticipation of your moves, and your anticipation of their anticipation. This infinite regress of second-guessing creates what game theorists call recursive complexity—a hall of mirrors where each reflection distorts reality further.
Two Paths Diverge: The Strategist and the Purist
Faced with this complexity, two archetypal responses emerge:
The Adaptive Strategist
This is the chess grandmaster who studies every opponent, memorizes their patterns, and crafts specific counters. In F1, it’s the team that runs hundreds of simulations, war-gaming every scenario. They live in the world of “if-then” statements, constantly adjusting their approach based on external variables.
The adaptive strategist embodies Yang—active, reactive, ever-changing. Their excellence comes from superior pattern recognition and faster response loops. They dance with chaos, finding opportunity in complexity.
The Purist
Then there’s FC Barcelona under Pep Guardiola. Their strategy was so simple it seemed naive: “pass, pass, pass more and… pass more.” They rarely adjusted for opponents. They simply played their game—tiki-taka—with such perfection that opponents had to adjust to them.
But calling this “no strategy” misunderstands profoundly. This is perhaps the most sophisticated strategy of all: the dominance strategy. It’s a system so complete, so self-contained, that it makes the opponent irrelevant.
This wasn’t built overnight. It grew from:
- La Masia: An academy that selected and nurtured players with specific qualities—technical skill, spatial intelligence, and a particular swa-bhava (intrinsic nature)
- The System: A philosophy where every player knew exactly where teammates would be, creating a moving constellation of passing options
- The Pressing Trigger: Losing the ball activated an immediate response—win it back within six seconds
For Barcelona, goals weren’t hunted; they emerged. They were the inevitable consequence of a system that achieved total control through total expression of its nature.
The Bhagavad Gita’s Timeless Algorithm
This distinction between adaptive strategy and purist expression maps perfectly onto the Gita’s central teaching: Karmanye vadhikaraste ma phaleshu kadachana—”You have a right to action alone, never to its fruits.”
The adaptive strategist fixates on fruits—on outcomes, victories, metrics. Every action is calculated for its expected return. But this very calculation corrupts the action. It’s like a musician thinking about applause while playing, or a lover calculating the return on their affection.
The purist embodies Nishkama Karma—desireless action. But this isn’t passivity. It’s action so aligned with one’s essential nature that it needs no external justification. The Barcelona player doesn’t pass to score; they pass because passing is their nature perfectly expressed.
Here’s the profound insight: When action flows from essence rather than calculation, it paradoxically becomes more effective. Why? Because it accesses a power unavailable to the calculating mind—the organizing intelligence of consciousness itself.
The American Paradox: Pursuing Happiness into Misery
This principle exposes a foundational error in modern culture. The American Declaration of Independence enshrines “the pursuit of happiness” as an inalienable right, thereby institutionalizing the exact mental pattern that makes happiness impossible.
Happiness, like goals in football, cannot be pursued directly. The moment we chase it, it becomes our shadow—always retreating as we advance. Every anxiety disorder, every burnout case, every midlife crisis is evidence of this fundamental error.
The Gita knew what neuroscience now confirms: consciousness is reflexive. When we make happiness a target, we change the very system we’re trying to optimize. It’s like a thermometer that heats up when trying to measure temperature—the measurement corrupts the reality.
From River to Ocean: The Journey of Mastery
Understanding this principle intellectually is one thing. Embodying it is another. This is where the concepts of Swa-dharma (one’s path) and Swa-bhava (one’s essential nature) become crucial.
- Swa-dharma as Sadhana: This is the disciplined practice, the 10,000 hours, the daily training. It’s Barcelona’s youth players doing rondos endlessly. It’s the conscious effort to refine one’s craft.
- Swa-bhava as Realization: This is what emerges when practice becomes nature. The skills are no longer “performed”; they simply express themselves. The player doesn’t “decide” to pass; the pass happens through them.
The journey from Swa-dharma to Swa-bhava is like a river flowing to the ocean. The river (practice) has direction, force, boundaries. But when it reaches the ocean (mastery), the flowing stops. Not because movement ceases, but because it has arrived at its nature.
The Master’s Choice: After the Summit
But then what? When mastery is achieved, when one’s essential nature is fully realized, what remains? Here, two paths emerge:
The Ascetic’s Choice
Remain on the peak, absorbed in the bliss of pure being. The game is over, the journey complete. This is the player who retires at their peak, the artist who stops creating, the master who withdraws from the world.
The Bodhisattva’s Choice
Return to the valley, not as a seeker but as a guide. This is Guardiola taking his realized vision to Bayern Munich and Manchester City. Not because he needs to prove anything, but because expressing mastery in new contexts is itself a form of play—Leela.
But there’s a third choice, barely visible because it transcends the mountain metaphor entirely…
The Revelation: Love as Prime Mover
Here we reach the heart of the matter, the insight that reframes everything: What if love is not just one element in the system but the organizing principle itself?
Consider how we typically think:
- Set goals
- Create strategies
- Execute actions
- Hope for results
But from the state of love—real love, not sentiment but the fundamental attractive force of consciousness—the sequence inverts:
- Love evokes action
- Action manifests goals
- Goals generate strategies
- Results emerge naturally
And here’s the crucial point: None of this requires conscious management. Love is the strange attractor that organizes everything else into coherent patterns.
The Self-Organizing Principle
This isn’t mysticism; it’s observable in every domain:
- A master chef doesn’t strategize about flavor combinations. Their love for food evokes experiments, which reveal new dishes, which suggest menus, which create culinary movements.
- A great teacher doesn’t plan transformations. Their love for learning evokes interactions, which reveal student needs, which generate methods, which produce breakthroughs.
- Barcelona didn’t strategize possession. Their love for the ball evoked passing patterns, which created control, which suggested pressing triggers, which produced victories.
In each case, love provides the initial conditions from which everything else emerges as naturally as:
- Rivers carving valleys
- Trees creating forests
- Markets finding prices
No apple tree strategizes about making apples. It simply expresses its apple-tree nature, and apples emerge.
Who Cares About Emergence?
But here’s where most analyses go wrong—they become fascinated with the mechanism. They study emergence, map feedback loops, model complex systems. This is like analyzing the chemistry of taste while the meal grows cold.
The mind wants to understand how love creates goals creates strategies creates results. But this very analysis breaks the natural flow. It’s like a dancer stopping mid-movement to check their foot position.
“Who cares about emergence?” isn’t dismissive—it’s liberating. It recognizes that understanding the mechanism is far less important than living the reality.
Love Is Necessary and Sufficient
This brings us to the ultimate insight: Love begets love. This isn’t poetry; it’s physics. Love is:
- Self-catalyzing: It creates more of itself through expression
- Self-organizing: It arranges whatever is needed for its flow
- Self-sufficient: It needs no external goal to justify itself
- Self-transcending: It naturally expands beyond any container
When you love your craft purely, that love evokes practice. Practice reveals possibilities. Possibilities suggest directions. Directions create what others call “goals.” Goals generate what others call “strategies.” But you’re not thinking about any of this. You’re simply loving.
This is why Barcelona could ignore opponents. Their love for their own expression was so complete that it naturally adapted to whatever it encountered. The strategy was there—unconsciously competent, emerging moment by moment from the depth of their collective mastery.
The Death of Strategy (And Its Resurrection)
So is strategy dead? Yes and no.
Dead is strategy as we typically conceive it—the anxious calculation of moves and countermoves, the obsessive optimization of outcomes, the treatment of life as a chess match where we must always think three moves ahead.
But from its ashes rises something else: strategy as the natural intelligence of love organizing itself. Not imposed from above but emerging from within. Not calculated but revealed. Not pursued but received.
This isn’t passive or weak. It’s the most powerful position possible because it aligns with the fundamental creative principle of the universe—the same intelligence that organizes galaxies and grows forests and evolves consciousness itself.
The Practical Revolution
What does this mean practically?
For the individual: Stop strategizing your happiness. Instead, find what you love and love it completely. Let that love evoke actions. Let those actions reveal goals. Let those goals generate whatever strategies are needed. Trust the process.
For organizations: Stop obsessing over strategic planning. Instead, clarify what you love—your core purpose, your essential contribution. Hire people who share that love. Create conditions where that love can express itself. Then get out of the way.
For relationships: Stop strategizing connection. Instead, love. Love without calculation, without expecting returns. Watch how that love naturally creates the very intimacy you were trying to engineer.
The Final Recognition
We started with strategy as a financial derivative—complex, fragile, dependent on countless variables. We end with love as the underlying asset—simple, robust, self-sustaining.
The deepest irony? When you stop trading derivatives and invest fully in the stock—when you stop strategizing outcomes and start loving the process—the “derivative value” takes care of itself. Excellence emerges. Success manifests. Goals achieve themselves.
But by then, you don’t care about the outcomes. You’re too busy loving.
This is the final freedom: discovering that everything you were strategizing to get—success, happiness, meaning—was always available in the simple act of loving what’s in front of you completely.
Love is necessary. Love is sufficient. Love begets love.
Everything else is commentary.
Addendum: Strange Loops and the Mathematics of Love
The Hofstadter Mirror
Douglas Hofstadter, in his exploration of consciousness, identified what he called “strange loops”—self-referential structures that seem to paradoxically contain themselves. The classic example is Escher’s hands drawing each other, or the sentence “This statement is false.”
Strategy, when applied to conscious systems, creates exactly such strange loops. Consider:
- I strategize based on what I think you’ll do
- You strategize based on what you think I’ll think you’ll do
- I adjust based on what I think you think I think…
This infinite recursion isn’t a bug; it’s a feature of consciousness interacting with consciousness. Each strategic actor must model not just the game but other actors modeling the game, including their model of the first actor’s modeling. It’s mirrors reflecting mirrors, creating an infinite corridor of recursive complexity.
But here’s Hofstadter’s insight: consciousness itself IS such a strange loop. The self is the system observing itself, creating itself through the act of observation. We are the universe looking at itself, creating what it sees through the looking.
This is why strategic thinking ultimately fails in conscious systems—it tries to step outside the loop to manipulate it, not recognizing that the strategist is always already inside what they’re trying to control. It’s like an eye trying to see itself directly, or a hand trying to grasp itself.
Love transcends this paradox not by solving it but by dissolving it. Love doesn’t try to step outside the loop because love IS the loop—the fundamental recursive process by which consciousness creates and knows itself.
The Mathematics of Value
This understanding allows us to propose a mathematical formulation of value that captures the essence of our discussion:
Value = ∫(Love(t) × Presence(t))dt / ∫(Attachment(t))dt
Let’s decode this:
The Numerator: ∫(Love(t) × Presence(t))dt
- Love(t) represents the intensity of love at any moment
- Presence(t) represents the degree of conscious awareness
- Their product gives us “conscious love”—love that knows itself
- The integral sums this across all time
The Denominator: ∫(Attachment(t))dt
- Attachment(t) represents our clinging to outcomes
- The integral sums all our accumulated attachments
The Formula’s Wisdom:
- When attachment approaches zero, value approaches infinity
- But this isn’t achieved through rejection or withdrawal
- It’s achieved through such complete love and presence that attachment becomes unnecessary
This mathematics reveals something profound: value isn’t created by strategic accumulation but by reducing the denominator while maintaining the numerator. We don’t need more love; we need less attachment to love’s fruits.
The Reflexive Revolution
The formula also captures the reflexive nature of conscious systems. In financial markets, George Soros identified how market participants’ beliefs about value actually change the value—creating boom and bust cycles. Similarly, our beliefs about love, strategy, and value actually change their nature.
When we believe value comes from strategic optimization, we create anxiety-driven systems that underperform. When we understand value emerges from love divided by attachment, we create self-organizing systems that exceed all strategic projections.
This isn’t just philosophy; it’s practical wisdom for navigating reflexive systems:
- In markets: The best traders aren’t predicting; they’re present
- In relationships: The deepest connections aren’t strategized; they’re allowed
- In creativity: The greatest innovations aren’t planned; they’re received
The Ultimate Strange Loop
Here’s the final paradox: This entire analysis—including the mathematical formula, the discussion of strange loops, even this very sentence—is itself part of the strategic mind trying to understand the non-strategic.
But that’s okay. Because recognizing the loop is the beginning of transcending it. Not by escaping—there is no outside—but by loving the loop itself. By seeing that the strange loop of consciousness strategizing about non-strategy is itself a movement of love trying to understand itself.
And in that recognition, something relaxes. The formula collapses into a smile. The strategy dissolves into presence. And love, which was always already here, simply continues its eternal play of creating worlds, goals, strategies, and outcomes—not because they matter, but because creation is what love does.
The mathematics points beyond itself to a truth too simple for equations: When you love completely, everything else takes care of itself. Including the mathematics.
Value = ∞ when Attachment → 0, but only if Love remains constant. This is the koan modern life must solve: How to reduce attachment without diminishing love. The answer isn’t in the formula—it’s in living it.
A fertile seed (love), when planted in the soil of its own nature, contains all the intelligence required to organize reality around it, blossoming into a form far more complex, resilient, and beautiful than any blueprint could ever design.
The anxious strategist tries to write the music. The master simply becomes the instrument through which the music of the universe plays itself.
Intention is not to abolish strategy, but to recontextualize it—to return it to its rightful place as secondary, derivative, and emergent rather than primary or causal.
- Strategy is useful as a response, not a source.
- Love creates the game; strategy arises to serve the expression of that love.
- When we begin with strategy, it indicates we have forgotten the game itself.
Love is not a means to a goal. Love is the source from which both the goal and the path emerge.
“Systems don’t produce genius; they create the conditions for genius to reveal itself.”
The universe is not engineered—it is revealed.
The Problem with Strategy Isn’t Just Calculation—It’s Contamination.
Every strategy carries with it the desires of its maker: the strategist’s personal ambition, the executive’s anxiety, the investor’s expectations, the performer’s ego. These desires interact—often unconsciously—with the desires of everyone else in the system: employees, customers, opponents, even the tools or technologies in use. Each carries its own inertia, fear, attachment, or hidden agenda.
The result? Not a clean execution of a rational plan, but a sophisticated mess—a tangle of competing psychologies masked by the illusion of coherence.
Strategy, in this sense, becomes not a map but a projection. It pretends to show the way, but in reality, it reflects the chaos within.
Only when love—not desire—becomes the organizing principle, can the parts harmonize. Love dissolves the fragmentation that desire multiplies.
Strategy is rooted in the logic of scarcity.
It begins with the assumption that there isn’t enough—time, resources, attention, market share, love—and from that fear, it builds systems of control. It seeks to optimize, to extract the maximum from the minimum, always under the shadow of limitation.
Strategy formalizes this limitation through goals, which act like containers for possibility. But the container becomes the confinement. What is not measured becomes irrelevant. What does not serve the goal gets discarded. This is the corruption at strategy’s core: it trades wholeness for efficiency.
Love, by contrast, begins with abundance. It doesn’t optimize—it augments. It expands what it touches. It generates more capacity than it consumes. Where strategy is linear, love is generative. Where strategy narrows focus, love widens perception. Strategy sets goals; love makes goals irrelevant by manifesting their highest form without chasing them.
In this way, goals become spectators, not drivers. They arise naturally, then stand back in awe as something far greater unfolds—something no strategist could have planned, predicted, or manipulated into being.
The strategist optimizes. The lover overflows.
Reinvent The Self! 