On the highway, a large truck suddenly changes lanes. It is barely ten meters from your front bumper.
In this split-second where life and death are separated by mere tenths of a second, what do you do? Do you first build a mental physics model to calculate the relative speed of the two vehicles, tire grip, and friction coefficient, only to conclude: “I should turn the steering wheel half a revolution to the left and apply 60% braking power”?
Of course not. If you did, you’d just be another headline in tomorrow’s newspaper.
Your body bypasses your brain entirely: violently jerking the steering wheel, slamming the brakes, your heart rate spiking. By the time you smell burning rubber and the car is safely stopped on the shoulder, your brain finally catches up: “Holy shit, I almost died.”
In a true life-or-death moment, thinking is the most luxurious—and the most fatal—behavior.
Strangely, however, once we switch contexts to the workplace or daily life, we become heavy addicts to “thinking.”
Rationality is the Most Exquisite Fig Leaf in a Crisis
Your biggest client suddenly blows up and demands to cancel their contract; Your core team member sends a long goodbye message late at night, the day before a project launch; A competitor suddenly cuts their prices in half.
When encountering these moments—the corporate equivalent of a highway collision—what is the instinctive reaction of most managers? They immediately fire up the brain’s most intricate calculations, pretending to be a field marshal.
“Quick, let’s call a meeting!” “Get a SWOT analysis on the whiteboard immediately!” “We need to evaluate the pros and cons of three alternative plans…”
Sounds calm and highly strategic, right? Wrong. In a truly high-stakes crucible—when a crisis closes in at the millisecond level, your agonizingly slow “rational thinking” is just a prettier name for a “system crash.”
Because thinking takes time. And in the highest dimension of combat, there isn’t room for even a single millisecond.
Senna and “The Car Was Driving Me”
Look at the phenom who pushed this state to its absolute limit in human history: Ayrton Senna.
The 1988 F1 Monaco Grand Prix qualifying. The Monaco circuit is not a dedicated racetrack; it threads directly through the narrow city streets of Monte Carlo. There are no runoff areas on either side, only cold, hard concrete barriers. Scrape it, and the race is over; crash, and your life is over.
In that day’s qualifying session, Senna laid down a lap time that simply defied physics. He left his teammate, Alain Prost—a world champion himself—trailing by an absurd 1.427 seconds.
After the session, someone asked him: “How did you drive that lap? What were you thinking at the time?”
Senna’s answer read like a revelation: “Suddenly, I realized I was no longer driving the car consciously. I was in a completely different dimension… That moment frightened me. Because I realized that the car was driving me, rather than me driving the car.”
In that terrifying minute and a half, his brain was completely empty of thought. Approaching a corner at 250 km/h, he wasn’t calculating “how much brake should I apply here,” nor was he analyzing “which gear is optimal to downshift into.” If those thoughts had flashed through his mind, even for a ten-thousandth of a second, the immense centrifugal force would have long since smashed him into the concrete wall.
At that moment, he entered the most mythical—and most misunderstood—neurological state in Kendo: Mushin (No-mind).
”Suicide Testing” in Times of Peace
Return to the business crises we mentioned at the start.
Why do the vast majority of companies instantly paralyze, call meetings, and shift blame when a sudden crisis hits? Because in times of peace, they have become far too comfortable. They have never undergone brutal “stress tests.” They have never forged their extreme-case protocols into a “muscle memory” that requires zero meeting or deliberation.
Look at how true top-tier players operate, such as Netflix. This company built a system called “Chaos Monkey”. It has only one function: in the middle of a workday, randomly and without any warning, it forcibly shuts down Netflix’s own production servers.
Is this not the purest form of Kendo Keiko (rigorous training)? In peacetime, they repeatedly force the simulation of worst-case scenarios until the entire team is numb to it. When the servers actually go down due to a cyberattack or a massive power outage, Netflix engineers do not need an “emergency meeting to assess the situation.” They enter the state of “Mushin”—backup networks automatically take over in an instant, and the crisis is seamlessly neutralized within seconds.
This is the beauty of instinct, born from pushing deep deliberation to its absolute limit.
Do not look for strategy guides while on the battlefield, and do not believe that nonsense about “taking a deep breath in a crisis.”
Composure in the face of a crisis is not determined by personality; it is determined by the volume of daily beatings you take.
If you feel your current life is quiet and pleasant, your operations run smoothly, and you clock out every day from a stable comfort zone—do not be smug. That means you are not building any muscle.
Unless you have been pushed to the edge of breakdown, you have no right to talk about “Mushin.”
Because when the real storm hits, terrifying your peers—who only know how to make PPTs and write analysis reports—into wetting their pants: There is only the person who has taken ten thousand beatings in peacetime. They don’t even need to think. A casual strike of the sword pierces the heavens.
