Burning the boats

Xiang Yu was sent to relieve the siege of Julu. His commander wanted to wait; the army was to go north across the Yellow River and it was going to be bloody.

Xiang Yu took the army across, then had the boats sunk and the cooking pots smashed. He let the soldiers carry three days of provisions and told them there was nothing to come back to.

They fought nine engagements, broke the Qin lines, and the troops of Zhao who were watching from the walls were so frightened by what they saw that some of them fell from the parapets.

It worked, and it needs two caveats, because this story gets used dishonestly as an argument for recklessness.

First, Xiang Yu had already won the argument about whether to go. The boats were sunk after the decision, not instead of it. That order matters and it's usually skipped.

Second, he died in a similar blaze of decisiveness a few years later, at the Wu River, when burning the boat would have been exactly wrong.

The tool isn't "cut off your exits". It's "make the commitment visible to the body". Some decisions need the boats.

The test I use is whether the honest hesitation is about courage or about information. If it's courage, burn something. If it's information, look before the crossing, because no flame fixes a wrong direction.

MOJOWAY asks whether the hesitation is about courage or information, before anything gets burned.