Our education system does not teach you how to succeed on your own terms.Your success in life doesn't depend on who you are, it depends on what you do. Why do people who feel that they are losers, have no skills, and that no one appreciates them? Because they are doing the wrong things, in other words, they are making the wrong choices. The good news is that anyone can easily learn a better method of making the everyday choices that shape their lives.

Competition is just comparison. In battle, armies are compared. In the marketplace, products are compared. In sports, teams are compared. All these comparisons have something in common. In everyday life, we are all compared to everyone else. There is no important aspect in how you are compared to others that you cannot control if you know what you are doing. 

You make choices but everyone else's choices affect you as well. People can choose to support you, oppose you, or ignore you. In the end, your success in competition is determined by the choices that others make, but this means that you must make choices that improve your position in the eyes of others. Sun Tzu's nine formulas explain how you can consistently how others view you.  People are judging you, consciously and unconsciously based on comparing you in nine areas: 1) positions, 2) perspective, 3) opportunity, 4) probability, 5) mistakes, 6) situations, 7) momentum, 8) rewards, and 9) vulnerabilities

You learn Sun Tzu's nine formulas yourself in order to easily make faster and better decisions. These decisions are those mostly likely to improve your position in the eyes of others. Even deciding which formula is important is a matter of comparison: 

• Sometimes, we must compare “what we have heard” with “what we need to know” before we make a decision.
• Sometimes, we must consciously compare “what we choose to do” with “what choose not to do,” a decision usually based on unconscious assumptions.
• Sometimes, we must compare “using the best response to a common problem” with “using a creative approach to change people's perceptions.”
• Sometimes, we must compare “our ability to claim more from what we do” with “our need to protect what we are currently getting.”

Choosing Success

As the world grows more competitive, people are being offered more and more choices. The result is that most people are having a much more difficult time making decisions. In a famous experiment, researchers tried two approaches to selling jam: offering samples from 24 flavors and samples from only 6 flavors. While the 24 choices won more interest from shoppers, the six choices won a lot more sales. Only 3% bought jam when faced with 24 choices, while 30% bought from the 6 choices. When faced with difficult decisions, people fail to choose at all. 

Sun Tzu's Golden Key Strategy of comparing alternatives simplifies choices. Its "golden key" is, in his own words, "balancing a coin of gold against a coin of silver." This reduces all competition, including all warfare, into a simple weighing of alternatives against each other. For Sun Tzu, competition means a comparison of alternative choices, nothing more or less. He described those alternatives as "positions." Battles, that is, comparisons, are always won by positioning before they are fought. Good positions discourage others from challenging you and invite others to support you.  Sun Tzu's nine formulas teach us how to systematically build up our positions to win success in the easiest way possible.

Sun Tzu's genius was using that ideas positions and perspective to let us see that people are really comparing when they make choices. Without realizing it, people compare alternatives on the basis of only a handful of elements. Sun Tzu identifies these points of comparison and explains how to leverage them. Sun Tzu taught that fighting to "sort things out" is a foolish way to learn the strengths and weaknesses of a position. Conflict to tear down opposing positions is the most costly way to win competitive decisions. The easy way is seeing the opportunities that are all around us for improving our position. 

Today's More Competitive World

Following a plan is the worker's skill of following orders in the pre-defined functions in an internal, stable, controlled environment. The competitive strategy of Sun Tzu is the warrior's skill of making good decisions about conditions in complex, fast-changing, competitive environments. Sun Tzu's Rules teach us to adapt to the unexpected events that are becoming more and more common in our lives. We live in a world where fewer and fewer key events are planned. Navigating our new world of external challenges requires a different set of skills.

Most of us make our decisions without any understanding of competition, that is, how alternative positions are compared. We don't understand how we should make choices because we cannot clearly see how others make their choices. The result is that most of us lose as many battles as we win, never making consistent progress. Events buffet us, turning us in one direction and then the other. Too often, we end up repeating our past patterns of mistakes.

The Science of Strategy Institute teaches you the warrior's skills of adaptive response. There are many organizations that teach planning and organization. The Institute offers unique training in competitive thinking, and the only place in the world, with a comprehensive Play Book.

Seeing Situations Differently

Sun Tzu taught that good decision-making was a matter of trained reflexes. As we develop our strategic decision-making skills, the critical conditions in a situation simply "pop" out at us. This isn't magic. The latest research on how decisions are made tells us a lot about why Sun Tzu's system works. We retrain minds to see situations and positions differently. The study of successful response arose from military confrontations, where every battle clearly demonstrated how hard it is to predict events in the real world. Sun Tzu saw that winners were always those who knew how to respond appropriately to the dynamic nature of their situation.

The List of Sun Tzu's Plays provides a complete structure for organizing our knowledge of key conditions in complex dynamic environments. This model "files" each piece of data into the appropriate place in the big picture. As the picture of your situation fills in, you can identify the opportunities hidden within your situation.

Making Decisions about Conditions

Success in competitive environments comes from making better decisions every day. Sharp strategic reflexes flow from a clear understanding of where and when you use which competitive tools methods.