Soldier’s minute

In Season 1, Episode 6 of Peaky Blinders, main character Thomas (Tommy) Shelby utters one among his many notable lines.

For context, this scene occurs right before a gang fight against the rival gang led by Billy Kimber, who’s in the same horse race fixing business as the Peaky Blinders led by the Shelby family. While Kimber’s crew approaches the Shelby turf, Tommy is in his pub, waiting.

The past is not my concern.

The future is no longer my concern either.

“What is your concern, Tommy?”

One minute.

The soldier’s minute.

In a battle, that’s all you get.

One minute of everything at once.

Anything before is nothing.

Everything after,

nothing.

Nothing in comparison

to that one minute

I’m reminded of the many other times I’d had to deal with a similar moment right before something big, be it an event, presentation, competition, class, or test. If you’re reading this, you may have recalled moments in your own life as well. The number of times we panic, rush, or just lose it in those crucial minutes.

We almost forget that what is about to happen is going to happen regardless, and that anything last minute won’t make much of a difference. No amount of panic will create more time. No fear will reverse it either. On the contrary, all the running and thinking backwards may even make time feel like it was moving faster.

It was Floyd Mayweather Jr. who said to Triple H right before a big fight against Marquez (Triple H was afraid that he was distracting Mayweather by chatting with him right before the fight):

I’ve experienced this my whole life, but it is only now that it’s become so apparent that I knew I had to do something about it. When online wasn’t the norm, things didn’t start exactly when the should. There was some leeway before things actually began, a slow diffuse. People came late because of bad traffic or things were delayed because some niceties had to be observed. But now, everything more or less starts on time. So when it hits, it hits. And you knew it was going to hit when it did.

So what, then, is the strategy?

We are at our best when we are focused. We are focused when are calm. We are calm when we allow ourselves a moment or two to settle into our senses.

Thomas Shelby is a businessman. He’s a strategist and a thinker before anything else. He could afford a minute because he’s looked ahead to this moment days prior, the same way Mayweather has planned all his pre-fight preparations way ahead of time.

Look ahead at your upcoming battles, at least the ones you can foresee. What can you do now so that a minute, 10 minutes, or even an hour before the shots are fired, you can take a moment for yourself? How do you set yourself up to be at your best and most focused when it counts? Maybe it’s preparation. Maybe it’s partnership or delegation. Maybe it’s a matter of setting your watch 10 minutes earlier. Whatever it is, do that.

And when it finally comes to it, trust that your past self has thought this through. Trust in the way things play themselves out, though not perfectly in our favor, always, to some degree, for the best. Then take your minute. Done enough times, the hope is that every other minute begins to feel like this minute.