“With regard to precipitous heights, if you are beforehand with your adversary, occupy the raised and sunny spots and wait.”
Heights favor the first occupant; get there first and let the opponent come up to you.
Chapter 10’s fifth ground: precipitous heights — if you are beforehand with your adversary, occupy the raised and sunny spots and wait. The rule compresses all of Chapter 9’s terrain doctrine into its competitive core: on heights, first occupancy is nearly decisive, because dislodging an established occupant costs multiples of arriving. Waiting is not lost time on this ground; waiting is the win condition.
The first serious analytics vendor in a niche spends its early years doing what looks like waiting — deep documentation, the integrations nobody else bothered with, the conference talks that define the vocabulary. Later entrants describe the market as "mature" and "hard to crack," which is altitude speaking: the raised and sunny spots are occupied, and every assault pays the climbing tax. The first vendor never fought for the height; it arrived, and then it was the height.
First does not mean fastest-to-announce — the vendor’s years of documentation are occupancy work, not waiting-around work. Heights are taken by building at the top, which is slow in exactly the way the verse rewards. Companies that claim the summit with a press release discover they have announced a claim, not a position.