Chapter 3: Your Own Arms: Skills Nobody Can Take Away

When the Script Ran Out

Hadiza is thirty-one and works as an adviser in a call centre that handles questions for an energy supplier. For three years, she has answered calls from customers about bills, meters and payments. The company gives its advisers a detailed script for every kind of call, and a computer screen that suggests what to say next. Hadiza follows the script well. Her supervisor praises her for her politeness and her fast call times.

One afternoon, a customer called with a problem that did not fit any part of the script. An elderly man had received a bill that seemed far too high, and he was frightened that he would not be able to pay it. The suggested answers on Hadiza's screen did not apply. Her supervisor was in a meeting and could not be reached. Hadiza realized, with a sinking feeling, that she did not actually understand how bills were calculated. She knew what to say in normal situations. She did not know why.

Hadiza put the man on hold, searched the internal help pages and eventually found a colleague who could explain. The problem was solved, but the call took forty minutes, and the man was upset by the long wait. Afterwards, Hadiza sat at her desk feeling shaken. She had thought she was good at her job. Now she wondered whether she had only been good at following the script.

That evening, Hadiza thought about something else that worried her. There had been rumours that the call centre might introduce new systems that would handle simple calls automatically. If that happened, the advisers who were kept would probably be those who could handle the difficult, unusual calls, the ones that did not fit the script. Hadiza realized that her skills, as they were, depended entirely on the company's script, the company's screen and the company's supervisor. Without them, she was not sure what she could do.

Machiavelli had a great deal to say about the danger of depending on forces that are not your own. He wrote about it in terms of soldiers, but his idea applies with surprising force to modern working life. He called it relying on your own arms.

Borrowed Soldiers and Your Own Arms

In Machiavelli's time, many rulers did not have their own armies. Instead, they hired professional soldiers, called mercenaries, who fought for pay. Or they borrowed troops from a more powerful ally, which Machiavelli called auxiliaries. Both choices seemed convenient. A ruler did not need to train and maintain an army. He could simply pay for one, or ask a friend to lend him one, when he needed it.

Machiavelli thought this was a disastrous mistake. In chapter 12 of The Prince, he argued that mercenaries are useless and dangerous. They are divided among themselves, ambitious, undisciplined and unfaithful. They are brave among friends and cowardly before enemies. They fight only for their pay, which is never enough to make them willing to die for you. In peace, they rob you themselves; in war, they leave you to be robbed by the enemy. In chapter 13, he argued that borrowed troops are even more dangerous. If they lose, you are ruined with them. If they win, you are at their mercy (The Prince, chapters 12–13).

His conclusion was firm. A wise ruler, he said, avoids such forces and relies on his own. He would rather lose with his own troops than win with others', because a victory won with borrowed strength is not truly his. To illustrate this, Machiavelli retold an old story about a young man who was offered a king's armour to fight a giant. The young man tried it on and found that it was too heavy and did not fit. He refused it and went out to fight with his own sling and his own knife. Borrowed armour, Machiavelli says, either falls off you, weighs you down or holds you too tightly (The Prince, chapter 13).

For an ordinary worker, the lesson is clear, and it has nothing to do with armies. Your "own arms" are the skills, knowledge, understanding and relationships that belong to you: the abilities you carry with you wherever you go. Your "borrowed arms" are things that help you but are not truly yours: a script someone else wrote, a system someone else controls, a manager's favour, a single client, a tool you use without understanding. Borrowed arms are useful. But if they are all you have, your working life depends entirely on forces outside your control.

Hadiza's script was a borrowed weapon. It helped her greatly in ordinary situations. But it was not hers. When a situation arose that the script did not cover, she had nothing of her own to rely on. And if the company changed its systems, her ability, which existed only inside the script, might become worthless. What she needed were her own arms: a real understanding of how bills worked, how to listen to frightened customers and how to solve unusual problems.

Practise in Peace

In chapter 14 of The Prince, Machiavelli turned to how a ruler should prepare his own forces. A ruler, he wrote, should never take his thoughts away from the practice of his craft, and in times of peace he should practise even more than in times of war. He can do this in two ways: with actions and with the mind (The Prince, chapter 14).

With actions, Machiavelli suggested, a ruler should keep his body hardened and his knowledge of the land fresh, for example by hunting, which teaches him the shape of valleys, hills and rivers. Knowing one landscape well, he says, makes it easy to understand others, because they resemble each other. With the mind, a ruler should read history and study the actions of excellent people: how they behaved in difficult moments, what made them succeed or fail and what they did that others could imitate. In this way, he says, the ruler is ready when fortune changes, and can resist it.

Translated into ordinary working life, this advice has two parts. The first is practical practice: doing the actual work, deliberately and with attention, so that our skills are always sharp, and learning the "landscape" of our field, its tools, its people, its typical problems, so well that we can find our way in it even when things are unfamiliar. The second is mental practice: reading, studying, learning from people who are better than us at what we do and thinking about what we would do in difficult situations.

The key word in Machiavelli's advice is peace. The time to build your own arms is not in the crisis, when you are already under pressure. It is in the ordinary weeks, when nothing seems to demand it. This connects with the previous chapter. Building your own skills is one of the most important embankments you can build against the floods of fortune.

It is also worth noticing what kind of skills Machiavelli valued. He did not only want rulers to follow instructions well. He wanted them to understand the land, to know why things happened and to be able to act wisely in new situations. In modern terms, he wanted understanding, not only routine. This is exactly the difference between following a script and knowing your work.

Machiavelli's point about knowing one landscape well is also worth thinking about. He said that a ruler who knows the valleys and rivers of his own land will quickly understand any other land, because landscapes resemble each other. The same is true of work. A person who understands their own field deeply, its problems, its tools, its people, will usually adapt quickly to a new job or a new system, because the underlying patterns are similar. A person who knows only the routines of one particular workplace may struggle when they move, because routines do not travel. Understanding does.

Hadiza Builds Her Own Arms

After the difficult call, Hadiza decided to change how she approached her work. She did not stop using the script, which remained useful. But she began to learn what lay behind it. She asked her supervisor whether she could spend some time with the billing team, to understand how bills were calculated. The supervisor agreed, and Hadiza spent two afternoons with them, asking questions and taking notes.

She also began to study the unusual calls. Whenever a call did not fit the script, she wrote a short note afterwards: what the problem was, how it was solved and what she had learned. After a few months, she had a small notebook full of these notes. She found that she was handling unusual calls much more confidently, and that colleagues had started to ask her for help with difficult cases.

Hadiza also worked on a skill that no script could teach: listening to frightened or angry customers. She noticed that the most experienced advisers did something different from the script in such calls. They slowed down, used the customer's name, repeated the problem back to show they had understood and explained what would happen next. Hadiza began to practise these habits. She found that difficult calls became shorter, not longer, because customers calmed down more quickly when they felt heard.

A year later, the call centre did introduce new systems for simple calls. Some advisers were moved to other roles. Hadiza was asked to join a small team that handled complex cases, and she was given a raise. Her supervisor told her that she had been chosen because she understood the work, not just the script. "I used to be good at following instructions," Hadiza says. "Now I am good at my job. The difference is that the second one goes with me wherever I go."

Hadiza's story shows that building your own arms does not require dramatic changes. It requires curiosity about what lies behind the routines you follow, steady attention to the moments when routines fail and patient practice of the human skills that no system can provide. These are exactly the abilities that make a worker valuable in any workplace, and that cannot be taken away when a system changes.

Joaquín and the One Big Client

Joaquín is forty-five and works for himself, laying tiles and renovating bathrooms. For seven years, most of his work came from one source: a building company that renovated old flats and hired him for all their tiling. The work was steady and well paid. Joaquín rarely needed to look for other customers, and he gradually stopped advertising.

Then the building company was sold to new owners, who brought their own tilers. Within a month, Joaquín lost almost all of his work. He had no other regular customers, no advertising and few contacts. For several difficult months, he struggled to find enough jobs to pay his bills.

Looking back, Joaquín saw that the building company had been his borrowed army. It had fought his battles for him, bringing him work without effort on his part. But it was not his. When it changed sides, so to speak, he was left defenceless. His skill as a tiler was entirely his own. But his ability to find customers, which is just as important for someone who works for himself, had been borrowed.

As he rebuilt his business, Joaquín made a point of building his own arms in this second area too. He made a simple website with photographs of his work. He asked satisfied customers if they would recommend him to friends and neighbours. He built relationships with several small builders and with a shop that sold bathroom fittings, so that work came to him from many directions. He still takes work from larger companies when it is offered, but he makes sure that no single customer provides more than a part of his income.

"I used to think my only skill was tiling," Joaquín says. "But when you work for yourself, finding customers is a skill too, and I had let someone else do it for me. Now I have both. If one door closes, there are others."

Joaquín also noticed a change in how he felt about his work. When almost all his jobs came from one company, he had lived with a quiet fear of displeasing it, accepting tight deadlines and low prices because he could not afford to say no. Now that his work came from many sources, he felt freer to set fair prices and to turn down jobs that did not suit him. Having his own arms did not only protect him from disaster. It also gave him the independence to work on fairer terms. Joaquín's story shows that our own arms are not only technical skills. They include every ability we need to stand on our own feet in our work, including the ability to build and keep relationships.

Dagny in the Restaurant Kitchen

Dagny is thirty-three and works as the second cook in a busy restaurant. The head chef is talented and creative, and he designs all the dishes. Dagny's job is to prepare them exactly as he has taught her, which she does very well. She is fast, clean and reliable. But she has noticed that she never really understands why the dishes are made the way they are. She follows the head chef's recipes the way Hadiza followed her script.

One weekend, the head chef fell ill, and Dagny was left in charge of the kitchen. Most of the dishes went well, because she knew the recipes. But when a delivery of fish arrived that was not as fresh as usual, she did not know how to adapt the dish to make the best of it. When a guest asked for a version of a dish without dairy, she did not know which ingredients could be replaced without spoiling it. She managed, but she realized how much she depended on the head chef's knowledge.

After that weekend, Dagny decided to learn the principles behind the recipes. She asked the head chef, when he returned, to explain why he made certain choices: why a sauce needed acid, why a particular cooking time was used, why certain flavours were paired. He was pleased by her interest and began to explain more. Dagny also read books about the basic techniques of cooking and experimented at home with variations of the restaurant's dishes.

Over the following year, Dagny's understanding grew. She began to suggest small improvements to dishes, some of which the head chef adopted. When ingredients changed, she knew how to adapt. When guests had special requests, she could create alternatives confidently. Eventually, the head chef asked her to design two dishes for the new menu. One of them became one of the restaurant's most popular dishes.

Dagny's story shows something important about borrowed arms. The head chef's recipes were not a bad thing. They were a valuable gift of knowledge. But as long as Dagny used them without understanding them, they remained borrowed. When she learned the principles behind them, the knowledge became her own. This is often how our own arms are built: by taking what others teach us and working to understand it deeply enough that it becomes part of us.

Practical Steps: Building Your Own Arms

The first step is to identify your borrowed arms. Think about what your work depends on. Which of these things belong to you, and which belong to someone else? Scripts, systems, tools, a manager's favour, a single client, a colleague's knowledge, a particular job title: these are often borrowed. Your skills, understanding, judgment, reputation and relationships are more truly your own. Write down the borrowed arms you rely on most.

The second step is to ask what lies behind your routines. For each routine you follow at work, ask: do I understand why it is done this way? What would I do if it did not apply? Like Hadiza with the billing team and Dagny with the head chef, seek out the knowledge that lies behind the script. Understanding turns borrowed knowledge into your own.

The third step is to study the unusual cases. The moments when routines fail are the best teachers. Keep a simple record of unusual problems you encounter, how they were solved and what you learned. Over time, this record becomes a store of your own knowledge.

The fourth step is to learn from excellent people. Machiavelli advised rulers to study the actions of excellent people in history. In working life, you can study the excellent people around you. Watch how the most skilled colleagues handle difficult situations. Ask them questions. Read about people who have done your kind of work very well. Then practise what you learn.

The fifth step is to spread your sources of support. If your work depends heavily on one client, one manager or one tool, look for ways to widen your base. Joaquín built many sources of work. You might build relationships across different parts of your organization, learn more than one way of doing key tasks or keep in touch with people in your field outside your workplace.

The sixth step is to practise in peace. Choose a regular time, perhaps an hour a week, to work on your own arms: learning, practising, reading or building relationships. Do it in ordinary weeks, not only when you feel threatened. Small, steady practice over months and years builds abilities that no one can take away.

Your Own Arms Do Not Mean Standing Alone

It would be a mistake to read this chapter as advice to rely on nobody but yourself. Machiavelli's warning was about depending entirely on forces that are not loyal to you and that you do not control. It was not a warning against cooperation. Even rulers with their own armies need allies, advisers and the support of their people, as we will see in later chapters.

In working life, cooperation is essential. Scripts, systems and tools are valuable. Learning from colleagues is one of the best ways to build your own arms. Teams that share knowledge and support each other are stronger than individuals working alone. The point is not to refuse help, but to make sure that, alongside the help you receive, you are building abilities of your own, so that you are not helpless if the help disappears.

There is also a generous side to this idea. When you build your own arms, you become someone who can help others. Hadiza's colleagues began to come to her with difficult calls. Dagny began to teach younger cooks. Joaquín recommends other tradespeople to his customers. A person with real skills and knowledge becomes a source of strength for their whole team, not a lone fighter.

Finally, it is worth remembering that some people face real barriers to building new skills: lack of time because of caring responsibilities, lack of money for courses, health difficulties or workplaces that offer no training. If this is your situation, start with what is possible, even if it is small. Many skills can be built through attention and curiosity in the work you already do, without any course at all. And it is reasonable to ask your employer what support for learning is available.

A Short Exercise: An Inventory of Your Arms

This exercise helps you see which of your working strengths are truly yours, and choose one to build. It takes about twenty minutes.

Take a page and divide it into two columns. At the top of the left column, write "My own arms". At the top of the right column, write "Borrowed arms". In the left column, list the skills, knowledge and relationships that belong to you and would go with you to any job: technical skills, understanding of your field, ways of working with people, your reputation, your network of contacts. In the right column, list the things you rely on that belong to someone else or could disappear: a particular system, a script, a manager who supports you, a single client, a colleague who always helps.

Look at both columns. Is your left column strong enough to support you if some of the right column disappeared? Which borrowed arm do you depend on most? What would happen if it were taken away?

Now choose one item from the right column, and write one way you could build an equivalent of your own. If you depend on a script, you might learn what lies behind it. If you depend on one client, you might look for two more. If you depend on one colleague's knowledge, you might ask them to teach you. Write a small first step and a time to take it.

Finally, choose one item from the left column that you would like to strengthen further, and write how you will practise it in the coming month. Keep the page and look at it again in three months. When Hadiza did this exercise, her right column included "the script", "the help pages" and "my supervisor's answers". Her left column included "politeness" and "speed". Her first step was "ask to spend an afternoon with the billing team". Three months later, her left column had grown to include "understanding of billing", "handling unusual calls" and "calming frightened customers".

Chapter Summary

Machiavelli warned rulers against depending on hired or borrowed soldiers, which he called useless and dangerous, and urged them to rely on their own arms (The Prince, chapters 12–13). He retold the story of a young man who refused borrowed armour and fought with his own sling. He advised rulers to practise their craft even more in peace than in war, both through action and through study of excellent people (The Prince, chapter 14). For an ordinary worker, our own arms are the skills, understanding, judgment and relationships that go with us wherever we go.

Hadiza beyond the script, Joaquín after losing his one big client and Dagny learning the principles behind the recipes all found that turning borrowed knowledge and support into abilities of their own made them stronger and more secure. Building your own arms does not mean standing alone. It means making sure that, alongside the help you receive, you are building something that is truly yours, and that can help others too.

In the next chapter, we will turn from our own abilities to the people around us, and to Machiavelli's way of seeing them clearly: from the valley and from the hill.