Rising at the crowing

Zu Ti and Liu Kun served in the same office and shared a room. In that period they were young and their country was losing territory and they commented on each other's potential.

One night they were asleep when a rooster crowed in the middle of the night. Zu Ti woke, kicked Liu Kun, and said: this is not an evil sound.

Then they both got up and practised swords in the dark.

They did that for a long time, and the phrase became a fixed idiom for diligent self-preparation.

The detail I think about is that the rooster crowing at the wrong hour was, by superstition, a bad omen. Zu Ti relabelled it in the moment. Not the situation. The interpretation.

That's worth learning. Two people with the same circumstance and the same training will end up in completely different places based on whether the strange sound is a warning or a call.

I'm not saying every bad circumstance is secretly good. That is the kind of advice that ruins people. I'm saying that at 3 a.m. when something wakes you, the frame you choose in the next ten seconds is under your control and the rest isn't.

What's the rooster in your life right now, the thing that keeps waking you up? You can spend the next decade treating it as a judgement, or get up and train.

MOJOWAY asks what your rooster is, and whether you have decided to call it a warning or a call.