“All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don’t know by what you do; that’s what I called ‘guessing what was at the other side of the hill.’”
So said the Duke of Wellington. I have misquoted this so often that I am finally at pains to write it down properly. I have mistakenly used the “other side of the hill” analogy to counter the business challenge that there lies a squadron of enthusiastic buyers of one’s products, all waiting out there, but they remain annoyingly unidentified and unapproached.
Yet no matter how many missions are sent galloping over the proverbial hill, sometimes there just aren’t more mystery buyers to unearth. Beyond the hill is sometimes just more uninhabited land.
The proper quotation is more profound than my misreading of it. I do like the Duke for acknowledging we use what we know to find out what don’t – a pretty fragile basis but it is all that we poor humans have. Past knowledge might be the only guide to the future, to paraphrase.
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