Knowing when you had better put on the brakes and realize you have as much as you can keep, and that grabbing more means losing it all. There is a brilliant passage in Robert Citino’s book The Death of the Wehrmacht: The Campaigns of 1942, where the Germans have already way overshot the mark, in Stalingrad. A brilliant commander would see this, and act accordingly. But they were not blessed with such a commander at that point. So they did the one thing they know how to do: They kept on attacking. And the Russians did the rope-a-dope, and let them exhaust themselves.

The general who knows his means are limited and that the culminating point has been reached will have to face the howls of outraged armchair commanders in his own age and down the ages thereafter, saying he should have gone that one step farther.

It takes moral courage to face the reality of the culminating point, even if you possess the genius to see it, and to act accordingly.