Tactics from the most successful conqueror in history
Genghis Khan conquered more territory than anyone in all of history. This in the 1200’s, when people were getting around on horseback and foot instead of tanks.
His brilliance as a military leader has a lot to teach us about how to conquer our own life obstacles — in this case, debt.
Khan’s Road to Success
Khan didn’t rely on brute force alone. He combined many factors to become a winner:
Embracing new technologies: Adopting stirrups so that his men could fight mounted. Having his engineers improve gunpowder so that it would explode instead of slow-burn. Improvising siege machines on the fly from local materials, obviating the need to transport them.
Practicing psychological warfare: Using decoy armies to make his army look huge (such as lighting tons of extra campfires).* Sending men ahead of him to spread rumors about the success and ruthlessness of the Mongol warriors, causing many local residents to flee instead of fight.
Most importantly, Khan rejected traditional war tactics for more effective ones. It is this change in particular that holds significance in eradicating debt.
A Tactical Overhaul
Relying on current wisdom can lead us astray when it comes to military tactics — or debt, for that matter.
In the 1200s, military strategy dictated that an army should do the following:
- Get the enemy retreating until they retreat beyond their own camp.
- Instead of pursuing the enemy, go immediately into the enemy camp and take as much loot as possible before the enemy regroups and counter-attacks.
This makes sense given the time: soldiers were largely compensated with plunder, so they were impatient to start looting as soon as possible. It had the added benefit of taking all the enemy’s food and supplies.
The problem with this tactic was that it put the enemy in a position of strength. While your army was wandering through the ruins loading up their saddlebags, the enemy would return, riding through the camp in a tight group and picking your men off one by one.
After your army retreated, both armies would rest, only to fight another difficult battle the next day. Battles could drag on and on for days in this manner.
Khan took a new approach. He instructed his men to stay focused — bypassing all of that tempting loot — and keep the enemy running until the opponent’s army was completely decimated.
His men would then be allowed to ride back and grab the loot.
Debt: The Ultimate Anti-discount
To understand why Khan’s method applies to debt, we need to see debt for what it is:
| You owe money: debt.
| Someone offers you an agreement: pay them additional money on top of your debt, and they will make the debt go away for now.
In other words, debt means spending your own time to earn money for someone else.
Debt is essentially an anti-discount, like a coupon that lets you pay 50 cents more for milk.
Debt is enslavement: that the longer you take to pay, the more of your life you spend earning money for someone else.
Get Your Debt on the Run
The prevailing wisdom on debt today is stuck in the 1100s:
Attack debt a little bit each month — with the minimum payment — until it eventually goes away.
Banks have a vested interest (haha) in perpetuating this notion. The longer we stretch out paying back debt, the more of our lives we spend working for them to pay it off.
The problem here is the same problem Khan faced. With tiny attacks from you separated by collecting “loot” by spending on other stuff, debt will just counter-attack repeatedly at greater strength, bolstered by compounding interest. You’ll be fighting the same debt, again and again, thus dragging the battle out longer and longer.
The key to defeating debt is to run it out of town as fast as possible and keep pursuing it until it’s gone.
Don’t let debt keep coming back to bite you.
Fun fact: 700 years later, Khan’s decoy army idea was used by the Allies in WWII before the Normandy invasion.
For further lessons from history, I highly recommend the Context podcast by Brad Harris. Genghis Khan episode here.