day no. 15,828: someone else's fire

"We were better off, I believe, letting them adjust to us. My belief was that we'd be stronger executing our system at the highest possible level than trying to change each week depending on who the opponent was." -- John Wooden, Wooden on Leadership

We are better off being someone else's fire than we are being everyone else's firefighters. Our best bet is always what we believe to be best, not combating what others believe to be best.

If someone else's fire is your focus, you spend your time worried about them burning your stuff down. But if you focus on your fire, spending your time adding gas to what you care most about, you make yourself into someone else's fire. When that happens, they spend their time trying to put your work out instead of building or protecting their own strongholds. 

One of the best ways to demolish enemy strongholds is to be such a time consuming problem for them that they neglect their own fortresses. We must always be careful not to fall victim to this tactic from the other direction in abandoning our posts for the sake of worrying about their progress.

Proverbs 26:20

Where no wood is, there the fire goeth out

If your enemy is busy about your fire, they are lazy about their own. If they are spending their energies on water in order to put out your fire, they are negligent in finding wood to keep their own going.

Ecclesiastes 10:18

By much slothfulness the building decayeth; and through idleness of the hands the house droppeth through.

We can destroy enemy strongholds merely by distracting them with the building of ours.

All that said, spend more time pouring into your passions than trying to find water to pour onto someone else's.