Sun Tzu's strategy is an inherently optimistic philosophy, based on the idea that you can always advance your position if you are doing the right things. It doesn't matter where you start or what uncontrollable situations life throws at you. For example, many assume that America is on a downhill slide because it has grown too prosperous and its economy is too big in comparison with the rest of the world already. Here are the facts about the American economy over the last three years:

Did you know that just over the past 11 quarters, dating back to the June 2003 Bush tax cuts, America has increased the size of its entire economy by 20 percent? In less than three years, the U.S. economic pie has expanded by $2.2 trillion, an output add-on that is roughly the same size as the total Chinese economy, and much larger than the total economic size of nations like India, Mexico, Ireland and Belgium.

This may be the greatest economic boom in history, but it is happening without most people even being aware of it because of the nature of our media. People would rather complain about gas prices that appreciate how extraordinary this boom is. While people are worry about competition from China, America has grown an economy as big as China's in just the last three years. People worry about immigrants from Mexico without realizing America has created an economy as big as all of Mexico's in the last three years. Competitive environments do not produce "bell curve" results where there are a few winners and a few losers with most people in the middle and everyone grouped closely together. Bell curves describe controlled environments. Dynamic, competitive environments are described by power curves, where the winners can succeed on a different scale entirely and the more they succeed, the more success they create for those around them. The lessons of strategy are designed to help you see the opportunities (openings) created by the climb of others around us. The long trailing end of the curve, the land of the losers, doesn't represent those who have had success and wealth stolen from them (as the media and Maxist academics pretend to believe). Instead, the trailing end of the power curve represents those who are the least connected to the high end of the curve. In the modern world, these people live in Islamic nations, Africa, and a few scattered places like N. Korea that have intentionally disconnected themselves from the world. The mathematics of the power curve is the mathematics of the network not the mathematics of the zero-sum game. Zero sum games represent artificial environments not natural dynamic ones. Only the outdated and disproven theories of Marx allow people to claim that the rich get richer on the backs of the poor when that facts of the real world tell a very different story. The poorest people in the world aren't the most exploited but the most disconnected. Places like China and India that have opened themselves up to "exploitation" are themselves experiencing remarkable increases in prosperity. Remember this the next time the do-gooders try to close down a factory in a poor part of the world for "exploiting" its workers. No matter how bad the factory, closing it down disconnects the local people from the power curve and condemns them to a life of crushing poverty, disease, and early death. That which connects the world is inherently better for us all. America itself represents how well the least productive people do in a productive society. People moan about the “income gap” but all that gap represents is the fact that those who produce the most value are producing a LOT more value while those who produce the least value are producing nothing more than they have in the past. Income just measures relative productivity. In terms of life style, everyone close to the successful benefits even when their relative income is extremely low. To quote again from this article by Dinesh D'Souza:

The immigrant cannot help noticing that America is a country where the poor live comparatively well. This fact was dramatized in the 1980s, when CBS television broadcast an anti-Reagan documentary, “People Like Us,” which was intended to show the miseries of the poor during an American recession. The Soviet Union also broadcast the documentary, with the intention of embarrassing the Reagan administration. But it had the opposite effect. Ordinary people across the Soviet Union saw that the poorest Americans had television sets and cars. They arrived at the same conclusion that I witnessed in a friend of mine from Bombay who has been trying unsuccessfully to move to the United States for nearly a decade. I asked him, “Why are you so eager to come to America?” He replied, “Because I really want to live in a country where the poor people are fat.”