Sun Tzu: The Strategist's Board

The Method of Sun Tzu · 25 pages

You keep getting outmanoeuvred by people who are not smarter than you. You prepare what you'll say, you turn up, you argue well, and somehow the decision was already made.

The comforting explanation is that they're sharper or more political. That is mostly wrong, and it's a bad explanation because it puts the difference in a trait you cannot change instead of a process you could copy. They knew things you didn't. They had chosen the terms in advance. And they were willing not to compete at all when the odds were bad.

The oldest surviving book on strategy spends most of its length explaining how to avoid the fight. This is that argument, turned into something you can run.

Inside: a diagnostic across information, ground, timing, and selection, six drills, a 21-day tracker, weekly audits, and a one-page code. Every quotation cited by chapter, including one famous line the internet gets wrong.

For anyone who wins the argument and loses the decision.