The moment of victory is often the moment of greatest peril. In the heat of victory, arrogance and overconfidence can push you past the goal you had aimed for, and by going too far, you make more enemies than you defeat. Do not allow success to go to your head. There is no substitute for strategy and careful planning. Set a goal, and when you reach it, stop.

This means not getting too high or too low — stay unwavering to avoid reacting out of emotion.

The most common thing people try to avoid is staying too low — the depressive emotions. People are quick come to come to someone’s aid to try and lift you up. But how often do people come in a moment of great achievement to help you bring your emotions back down to neutral? Some may think, ‘but why would you want to bring someone down from the high of an achievement?’. It’s not about stopping the elated feelings of achievement, rather it’s about mitigating the potential character defecating effects of letting success get to your head.

Tasting the sweet elixir of success puts you in a vulnerable position, especially if you haven’t tasted it before. So when other people come to challenge your success and achievement, it can reveal insecurities.

Power has its own rhythms and patterns. Those who succeed in the game are the ones who control the patterns and vary them at will, keeping people off balance while they set the tempo. And the essence of strategy is controlling what comes next, and the elation of victory can upset your ability to control what comes next, in two ways.

First, you owe your success to a pattern that you are apt to try to repeat. You will try to keep moving in the same direction without stopping to see whether this is still the direction that is best for you.

Second, success tends to go to your head and make you emotional. Feeling invulnerable, you make aggressive moves and ultimately undo the victory you have gained.

But the lesson is simple. The powerful vary their rhythms and patterns, change the course, adapt to circumstance, and learn to improvise. Rather than letting their dancing feet impel them forward, they step back and look where they are going. That is the challenge. To pause amongst the midst of victory is the challenge, is the hardest thing. To take a breath, analyze, and move with caution, but swiftness.

It is as if their bloodstream bore a kind of antidote to the intoxication of victory, letting them control their emotions and come to a kind of mental halt where they have attained success. They steady themselves, give themselves the space to reflect on what has happened, examine the role of circumstance and luck in their success. As they say in the riding school, you have to be able to control yourself before you can control the horse.