The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Vikings

Have you ever wondered how some Vikings are able to win glory, wealth, fame, and an enduring place in the sagas while others have to settle for looting a few small coastal villages? What principles seperate these highly effective Vikings from ordinary marauders? Effective Vikings embrace the Plunder Mindset. The Plunder Mindset is a business concept in which a person believes that all of the resources and success should be taken for himself. The following seven habits can leverage effective strengths to foster this Plunder Mindset.

Habit 1: Be Destructive: Principles of Personal Choice

Accept responsibility for your actions in order to take control of your situation. You can be either reactive or destructive. When you are reactive, you blame other people for your problems. When you are destructive, other people blame you for their problems.

Habit 2: Begun with Their End in Mind: Principles of Personal Victory

Set long term goals based on the Total Victory principle. Formulate a ‘Personal Mission Statement’ that involves crushing your foes. Visualization is an important tool. Visualize overwhelming their warriors, plundering their villages, and carrying off their women and cattle. Unless your longship has limited cargo space, in which case you might want to visualize leaving some of the heftier ones behind.

Habit 3: Put Your Things First: Principles of Priority & Execution

Set the right priorities to magnify your effectiveness. Prioritize work aimed at achieving long-term goals at the expense of your enemies. Pillaging is an important part of time management. Successful pillaging focuses on results and benchmarks that involve taking other people’s stuff.

Habit 4: Think Win/Lose: Principles of Personal Benefit

Successful Vikings take into account the consequences their actions might have upon their clients and customers. Maintain an attitude whereby personally beneficial solutions are sought that satisfy the needs of yourself, and, in the case of a conflict, none of the other parties involved.

Habit 5: Seek First to Pillage, Then to Burn: Principles of Doing Things in the Right Order

Burning a place before pillaging it will likely result in less loot. Pillaging a place before burning it will increase the amount of loot. Keep this in mind before you pull out the torches.

Habit 6: Go Berserk: Principles of Creative Confrontation

Going berserk is an effective way to overwhelm the enemy’s team. Avoid decision making. Apply destructive problem solving. Employ brute force to promote successful confrontation. Embrace and leverage annihilation. When going berserk is pursued as a habit, the result will exceed the sum of what each of the warriors could have destroyed on their own. In this way, "The whole is reduced to a collection of parts."

Habit 7: Sharpen the Sword: Principles of Belligerent Self-Promotion

Between battles, regain Destruction Capacity by engaging in carefully selected weapon-training activities. Then, as battle approaches, eliminate unwanted decision-making capacity by quaffing vast quantities of mead.

In conclusion...

Man is different from other animals in that he has self-consciousness. Because of this unique gift, he has the ability to reflect upon his experiences, observe his own self, and think about his thoughts. But why waste your time on stuff like that when you could be spreading a reign of terror across Europe?