Machiavelli noticed that people are compulsive pattern-finders, and Greene's account of why is the useful part:
They like to see events conforming to their expectations by fitting into a pattern or scheme, for schemes, whatever their actual content, comfort us by suggesting that the chaos of life is predictable.1
Note whatever their actual content. The comfort is not in the pattern being correct. It is in there being one at all.
Which makes pattern-recognition a standing vulnerability rather than a competence:
This mental habit offers excellent ground for deception, using a strategy that Machiavelli calls "acclimatization"—deliberately creating some pattern to make your enemies believe that your next action will follow true to form.1
Having lulled them into complacency, you now have room to work against their expectations, break the pattern, and take them by surprise.1
The word is exact. You are not lying to anyone. You are training them.
The case is a state running acclimatization for six years.
In the Six-Day War of 1967 the Israelis inflicted a devastating and lightning-fast defeat on their Arab enemies. And in doing so:
they confirmed all their preexisting military beliefs: the Arabs were undisciplined, their weaponry was outdated, and their strategies were stale.1
That is the pattern, and crucially the Israelis had earned it — it was built from their own direct experience, which is the strongest kind.
Six years later Anwar Sadat did not attempt to contradict it. He fed it:
Sadat exploited these prejudices in signaling that his army was in disarray and still humbled by its defeat in 1967, and that he was squabbling with his Soviet patrons.1
Every signal confirmed what Israel already believed and had personally verified.
When Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on Yom Kippur in 1973, the Israelis were caught almost totally by surprise. Sadat had tricked them into letting down their guard.1
The chapter then takes the technique one level further, and this is where it becomes genuinely counterintuitive.
This tactic can be extended indefinitely. Once people feel you have deceived them, they will expect you to mislead them again, but they usually think you'll try something different next time.1
And the reasoning that protects the repeat:
No one, they will tell themselves, is so stupid as to repeat the exact same trick on the same person.1
That, of course, is just when to repeat it, following the principle of always working against your enemy's expectations.1
Greene's reference is Poe:
Remember the example of Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Purloined Letter": hide something in the most obvious place, because that is where no one will look.1
The general shape here is worth stating separately from the examples, because it is what makes the whole thing work: an opponent's model of you is itself a pattern, and it includes their model of your cleverness. Once they have decided you are too sophisticated to repeat yourself, sophistication becomes the thing they are defending against — and the crude, obvious, already-used move walks past unguarded.
It helps to see that acclimatization runs on two different timescales, and confusing them is how people get it wrong.
The short version is a setup measured in days or weeks: be predictable in a negotiation, arrive at the same time, respond at the same pace, concede in the same increments — then don't. This is cheap to build and cheap to lose, and it works on tempo.
The long version is measured in years and works on character. Sadat did not establish a pattern of behaviour; he established a pattern of being a certain kind of adversary — humbled, disorganised, quarrelling with his patron. That is a claim about what Egypt was, and it took six years of consistent signalling to hold.
The difference matters for what each can buy. A tempo pattern buys you one surprising move. A character pattern buys you an entire strategic decision made wrongly, because the other side plans its posture, budget and readiness around a picture of who you are.
It also determines what breaking it costs. Violate a tempo expectation and you have been unpredictable once. Violate a character expectation and you have permanently told your opponent that their model of you was manufactured — which means they will never again accept the evidence of their own eyes about you, and that door does not reopen.
Two properties are doing the work in the Sadat case, and both are transferable.
The pattern was built from their own experience, not from your assertions. The Israelis did not read that the Arab armies were undisciplined; they defeated them. A belief someone acquired by winning is the most durable kind available, and it is exactly the kind an adversary can afford to feed.
And the maintenance signals were unglamorous. Disarray, humiliation, squabbles with a patron — none of it looks like a message. Acclimatization fails when the pattern is too clean, because a suspiciously regular pattern is itself a signal.
You want to do something a watchful counterparty would block if they saw it coming.
Do not start with the surprise. Start by finding the pattern they already hold about you — and note that the useful one is not what they say about you, but what they would bet on. How do they expect you to respond to pressure? To an offer? To being ignored? That expectation is your working capital.
Then spend a period confirming it, and confirm it in ways that cost you something small and visible. Sadat's signals were of weakness and disorder; the confirmations that work are the ones that appear to be against your interest to reveal. A pattern maintained by things that flatter you reads as performance.
Then break it once, on the thing that matters, and understand what you are spending. Acclimatization is a one-shot asset. The pattern took six years to build and was consumed in a morning, and afterwards Israel's model of Egypt was permanently different.
And keep the second-order move available. Once you have surprised someone, they will brace for novelty — which is exactly when the move you already used becomes invisible again. The reason nobody defends against a repeat is that repeating yourself looks stupid, and looking stupid is the cover.
The defensive version is one question, and it is worth asking on a schedule rather than when suspicious: which of my confident expectations about this person have they had an interest in my holding? If the answer is "most of them," you are inside a pattern somebody else is maintaining.
The 1973 surprise is well documented and Israeli intelligence's failure — ha-Mehdal, "the omission" — is one of the most studied intelligence failures on record. [POPULAR SOURCE]
Greene's account is much tidier than the history. Israeli intelligence received a substantial volume of warning in the days before Yom Kippur, including from a high-level source, and the failure is generally attributed less to Sadat's signalling than to the Concept — an institutional doctrine holding that Egypt would not attack without air superiority, which caused analysts to discount contrary evidence they had in hand. That is arguably a better illustration of Greene's own point than the one he makes: the pattern was internal to Israel, and Sadat did not need to build it.
And the "repeat the same trick" advice is offered without a single case. It is a satisfying inversion and there is no example attached, only a fictional one from Poe. The strategy is plausible and it is also exactly the kind of clever-sounding rule that survives because failures of it are invisible — a repeated trick that gets caught reads as incompetence rather than as a strategy that misfired.
One thing worth keeping. The observation that patterns comfort whatever their content is genuinely sharp, and it explains why the technique works on intelligent, sceptical targets. What is being exploited is not credulity but the need for the world to be legible.
Against Slow-Slow-Quick-Quick this is the same architecture at a different timescale, and the pairing clarifies both. That page's second beat is a lull that builds an expectation to be violated; this is a lull measured in years. The mechanism is identical: manufactured contrast, where the setup is invisible because it consists of nothing happening.
The difference is what the setup is made of. Slow-slow-quick-quick builds an expectation of tempo; acclimatization builds an expectation of character. Character takes longer and is worth more.
Against Strategy 2: The Guerrilla War of the Mind there is a direct convergence Greene does not draw. That chapter's whole subject is the danger of fighting the last war — the Prussians at Jena executing Frederick's tactics fifty years stale. This page is the offensive use of the same human failing: Strategy 2 warns you against your own patterns; Strategy 23 teaches you to build one in someone else. Twenty-one chapters apart, one phenomenon.
And against The Three Duels of Musashi, Matashichiro's ambush is acclimatization run on Musashi and defeated — the Yoshioka men planned around his well-known habit of arriving late, and he came early. That page's lesson is that a pattern observed twice is not a law. This page is the same fact, sold to the person building the pattern.
Psychology → Pattern-Seeking as a Need Rather Than an Error. Greene's claim that schemes comfort us whatever their content points at something better supported than ordinary bias talk: people are motivated to find structure, the drive intensifies under uncertainty and threat, and the resulting patterns are held with confidence disproportionate to the evidence.
The insight the pairing produces: this makes the most disoriented, most pressured observer the most exploitable — which is the opposite of the intuition that stress makes people watchful. An opponent under strain is not looking harder; they are looking for something to hold, and a stable, legible pattern is relief. Which means acclimatization works better on a counterparty in difficulty than on a comfortable one, and the practical corollary for defence is uncomfortable: the periods in which you most need an accurate model of an adversary are exactly the periods in which you are most likely to accept a convenient one.
Business → The Predictable Competitor Who Isn't. Firms build models of rivals from observed behaviour — this one always follows on price, that one never enters a segment below a certain margin, this one takes eighteen months to ship. Those models become planning assumptions and stop being revisited.
The insight neither domain gives alone: a competitor's most valuable strategic asset is frequently their reputation for a limitation, and it is an asset they can spend exactly once. A firm known to be slow, or uninterested in a segment, or financially constrained, holds a call option on surprise that is worth more the longer the reputation has held — and the reputation is cheap to maintain because it consists of not doing things. This also explains why disruption so often comes from an incumbent's known-quantity rival rather than from a new entrant: the new entrant was being watched, and the known quantity had been filed.
The Israelis' model of the Egyptian army was built from having beaten it themselves, which made it the most trustworthy belief they had and therefore the cheapest one to feed. Which means the expectations most dangerous to you are not the ones you were told — they're the ones you earned, because those are the ones you will never think to re-check and the ones an adversary can maintain for free.