A reader writes:

As you move up the corporate ladder, you are forced to play more and more politics, and for an entrepreneur like myself it is the hardest part cause I feel like its all a wasted time.

Sun Tzu's strategy is the science of comparing relative positions. Sun Tzu's strategy offers a system for understanding the dynamics of positions. These dynamics create short-term random "jitters" in positions, but when you understand them, you can harness their power to create long-term progress in one direction or another.

Sun Tzu's book was suppressed in China for two thousand years because of its revolutionary nature. However, the revolution that it taught was not a socialist revolution but an individualist revolution, which is much more dangerous to every established order. Sun Tzu's revolutionary ideas was that we are all individually responsible for our position in life, that we all can control and advance our positions using good strategy, and that we all can find our own valuable ground, which we can dominant because of our superior knowledge of that ground.

Sun Tzu taught that advancing in small, certain steps were always preferable to using larger, riskier steps. What science considers "illogical" choices are very logical when we factor in the difference between controlled environment, where planning works, and competitive environments, where strategy works. Good strategy seeks to exploit the mistakes people naturally make in calculating risk and reward. Planning assumes that the future is controllable and predictable.

Sun Tzu teaches that we cannot see our own position clearly. We need the viewpoints of others to give us perspective on our situations. But what happens when that perspective comes through an increasingly political and dishonest media? One part of the answer comes from in this article about America's general unawareness of its own material financial success: