Do not fight inside the narrow narrative.
A narrow narrative is always extractive—crafted to capture the next election, the next funding round, or the next quarter’s margin. It is built to expire the moment the result is declared. Accept its boundaries, and you have agreed to lease power for a season instead of reshaping a century.
True power lies in dragging every participant—ally, opponent, investor, citizen—onto a wider field where the only question that matters is: “What future are we willing to bleed for?” That wider field is built on ruthless inclusiveness: a story so large that millions see themselves as co-authors and are ready to pay a heavy price to belong to it.
Politics reduced to winning elections is the most dangerous activity a society can normalise. It is governance without a destination, leadership without vision.
Great leaders never arrive offering better management of the present. They arrive carrying an idea large enough to alter a people’s fate.
Four Men Who Refused the Narrow Ground (and rewrote their nations)
Winston Churchill, May 1940
Britain had a functioning government under Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, ready to negotiate peace with Hitler. Churchill did not debate the terms of surrender. In his first speech as prime minister, he promised nothing but “blood, toil, tears and sweat”, followed by victory. The narrow debate about “peace with honour” vanished. Churchill dragged the entire nation onto a field where the only choices were triumph or annihilation. The British people, offered a destiny instead of a compromise, chose destiny.
Charles de Gaulle, June 18, 1940
France had capitulated. Its armies were broken; its legal government was signing an armistice. From a BBC studio, an obscure brigadier general declared that France had lost a battle, not the war. He did not ask the French to love him; he offered them an appointment with immortality. Overnight, the legal question of Pétain’s authority became irrelevant. The real question became: “Which France will you serve—the one that surrendered or the one that still fights?” Millions who had never seen de Gaulle chose the wider narrative and kept a nation alive in spirit long before they liberated its soil.
Konrad Adenauer, 1949
Germany was rubble, occupied by four armies, its sovereignty erased. Many Germans and most Allies wanted a permanently weakened, pastoral, neutral state. At seventy-three, the former mayor of Cologne announced that West Germany would tie its fate irrevocably to Western Europe and America, rearm within NATO, and rebuild as a market democracy. He forced his defeated people to choose between permanent occupation and a new national destiny. The narrow path of victimhood and neutrality collapsed. Because one old man refused to let Germany define itself by its defeat, the Federal Republic rose.
Deng Xiaoping, 1978–1982
After Mao’s death, China was exhausted by ideological purges and poverty. Deng did not attack Mao’s portrait on Tiananmen; he simply declared it didn’t matter whether a cat was black or white as long as it caught mice. He opened coastal zones where capitalist acts were legal and invited former Red Guards, cadres, and peasants alike to get rich under new rules. The debate ceased to be about Marxist purity and became, “Do you want your children to stay poor to protect a corpse’s reputation?” Hundreds of millions stepped onto Deng’s wider field, and in one decade China began the greatest poverty reduction in human history.
These four stories—Churchill’s defiance, de Gaulle’s voice in the wilderness, Adenauer’s refusal of victimhood, and Deng’s pragmatic heresy—follow the same pattern. Each leader rejected the cramped arena offered by circumstances and forced everyone to fight on a continent-sized plain of his own creation.
Machiavelli’s Eternal Instruction Manual
Five hundred years earlier, Niccolò Machiavelli had already codified the method. When Cesare Borgia conquered the Romagna, the province was a chaos of petty lords and ancient vendettas. Borgia did not bargain with them. He crushed resistance, imposed order through the ruthless Ramiro d’Orco, then—once peace reigned—cut Ramiro in half in the public square and displayed the pieces with a placard blaming him for past severities. The population, Machiavelli wrote, was left “satisfied and stupefied.” They stopped arguing about which local tyrant was least oppressive and asked only: “Do we want Borgia’s new order of justice and low taxes, or a return to anarchy?” Borgia had dragged an entire province onto his wider field with a single theatrical stroke.
Machiavelli’s deeper law: men forget the death of a father sooner than the loss of their patrimony. Offer them a greater patrimony under your banner, and they will cross any line.
The Same Law in Commerce
Henry Ford, Sam Walton, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk did not negotiate with the existing order. They announced new worlds—mass car ownership, everyday low prices for rural America, the smartphone, reusable rockets—and forced incumbents to justify why yesterday’s reality should survive tomorrow.
How to Build and Hold the Wider Field
1. Begin with an idea so large that sophisticated people laugh. Ridicule is the toll history charges for entry.
2. Speak directly to the people, over the heads of the professional narrators who profit from keeping everything small and urgent.
3. Never defend on the opponent’s terms; always widen. When they attack your plan’s price tag, answer with the price of continued mediocrity.
4. Make inclusiveness a weapon: leave a door open for former enemies who accept the new order (de Gaulle welcomed PĂ©tainist officers; Deng welcomed capitalist roaders; Adenauer welcomed former Nazis who accepted democracy).
5. Build institutions, laws, and technologies that outlive your pulse. Charisma opens the wider field; only structure prevents it from shrinking the day you depart.
The narrow game can be won by clever tacticians with modest gifts.
The wide game can only be played by those willing to be called mad, extreme, or tyrannical—because from the vantage point of a dying status quo, every attempt to change a civilisation’s fate looks like dangerous insanity.
Refuse the small arena.
Drag everyone onto the largest possible field.
There, and only there, do nations renew themselves, companies become immortal, and leaders step out of time into legend.
The Wider Narrative: How the Greatest Modern Founders Actually Won
Do not fight inside the narrow narrative.
In business today the narrow narrative is quarterly earnings, growth-hacking metrics, brand positioning, and “beating consensus”. It is extractive by design: it harvests option value for founders and early investors, then moves on. Accept its boundaries and you become another well-funded footnote.
The immortals never played that game. They dragged the entire industry—customers, competitors, regulators, and even sceptics—onto a continent-sized field where the only question that mattered was, “What kind of future are we willing to build, and who is prepared to pay the price to live in it?”
Four Modern Leaders Who Refused the Small Arena
Elon Musk, 2008–2012
The narrative offered to Musk after the financial crisis was simple: electric cars are a niche compliance product for California virtue-signalers; space is a government jobs programme. Musk did not argue about tax credits or launch contracts. He announced that humanity would become a multi-planetary species and that the automobile would run on batteries produced in Nevada deserts. He forced GM, Toyota, NASA, and the entire investment community to choose between joining the new future or defending the combustion/status-quo past. Tesla’s near-bankruptcy in 2008 and SpaceX’s three failed launches in 2008 became, in the wider narrative, mere battles on the road to Mars and sustainable transport. Hundreds of thousands of retail investors and engineers crossed lines they once thought uncrossable because Musk offered them a greater patrimony than stock options: a role in the human story.
Brian Chesky, 2009–2020
The hotel industry’s narrow field was occupancy rates, revenue-per-available-room, and loyalty programmes. Airbnb’s early days were mocked as a cute way for broke millennials to rent air mattresses. Chesky did not compete on star ratings or corporate travel contracts. He declared that the future of travel was not staying in identical hotel boxes but “living like a local” anywhere on earth, and that millions of ordinary people would become micro-entrepreneurs by opening their homes. Regulators, Hilton, and city councils suddenly found themselves defending the 20th-century zoning/hospitality order against a democratic, distributed, post-ownership world. The debate was no longer “Is Airbnb legal?” but “Do we want a world where only licensed corporations can offer shelter, or one where anyone can belong anywhere?” The wider field won. Today more people have slept in strangers’ homes than in all the Hiltons ever built.
Jensen Huang, 1999–2023
In the late 1990s the graphics-card market was a low-margin race to the bottom fought over frames-per-second in Doom. Jensen refused that arena. He bet on NVIDIA on programmable parallel computing years before anyone knew what to do with it, then patiently widened the field: first gaming, then Hollywood rendering, then scientific computing, then deep learning, then robotics, then Omniverse simulation. Competitors kept measuring success in gaming market share while Jensen forced Intel, AMD, and eventually the entire computing industry to justify why the future should remain sequential and CPU-bound. By the time ChatGPT needed a million GPUs, the question was settled: the old architecture was a historical curiosity, and NVIDIA had become the most valuable chip company in history because one man dragged the world onto his terrain three decades earlier.
Reed Hastings, 2007–2019
Blockbuster, cable companies, and Hollywood studios defined the narrow game as rental windows, syndication fees, and Sunday-night appointment viewing. Hastings announced that the future of entertainment would be unlimited streaming for a flat fee, delivered over the internet to any device, and that Netflix would finance its own stories instead of licensing theirs. Studios laughed, then boycotted, then found themselves defending a 70-year-old distribution cartel against a world where creators could reach audiences directly and viewers could binge an entire season in a weekend. The debate ceased to be about late fees and became, “Do we want a future where storytellers are gatekept by six conglomerates, or one where talent and taste compete openly?” Netflix’s $18 billion content spend in 2021 alone was larger than the GDP of Iceland—because Hastings forced the industry to fight on a field where the only alternatives were reinvention or extinction.
Machiavelli in the Boardroom
Every one of these founders followed the same ancient playbook Machiavelli described when Cesare Borgia pacified the Romagna:
* Demonstrate unstoppable will (Musk sleeping on factory floors, Huang betting the company on CUDA three separate times).
* Execute the old order publicly and theatrically when necessary (Netflix killing its own DVD business, Airbnb surviving regulatory bans in New York and Barcelona).
* Then offer everyone a greater patrimony under the new banner—engineers got Mars, hosts got economic freedom, developers got CUDA, and creators got global reach.
Former enemies became evangelists because the new field gave them more wealth, status, and meaning than the old one ever could.
How to Apply It Tomorrow
1. Start with a future so large that sophisticated people call it absurd. (Multi-planetary humanity, living anywhere, GPU-accelerated everything, television without channels.)
2. Speak directly to users and builders, bypassing the trade press and analysts who profit from keeping the arena small.
3. When attacked on margins, unit economics, or regulation, never defend—widen. Answer with the cost of a future that never arrives.
4. Leave a door open for incumbents who accept the new order (Toyota investing in Tesla, Warner licensing to Netflix once defeat was obvious, Intel developers moving to CUDA).
5. Build the platform, the factory, the content library, the dataset—something structural that keeps the field wide long after your personality exits the stage.
The narrow game produces unicorns.
The wide game produces civilisations.
Choose your field accordingly.
