----Strategy: How to win the game of life.

intro
mission vision values selfishness/altrusm there are 2 basic opposing views you can take. either that your interests are prime, that everyone/select braoder group of people are important too. it's up to you to determine which you'll fight for and base goals around it. note that various people are affected by your actions, not just you, and many suppose that individuals are responsible to sicety. some aruge the individuals contribute to society in the course of their own selfishness more often than not anyway.be careful to consider that if you run your life in the sole interest of yourself, it is often the case that being good to those awide will help you more than not in the long run. determine what you want this is the part of the book that can't guide you at all. before you start, you must determin, in whatever fashion, what you want out of life. that is your vision (you huge big ideal goal in life), mission: where you see your ideal self/life, what you're going ot be doing - desribe that, , values: what principles/conditions of how your going to be aching your mission. teh external environmment - the otuside - the exoteric the macroenvironemnt look around you. what do you see. the politics of your country, is there a famine, whetherthere are many farms in your neighbourhood, how many black people there are. anything and everything that affect all people around you, not just specific to yourself.these factors are of course interdisciplinary but the major ones to consider are teh political/lega, global, technological, socio-cultural,economic, demographic, swot even thought this is relevant to also internal environment, it's a useful toool her for determining your position relative to the external and internal enviornment you simply ned to list your strengthns & weaknesses (internal) and the opportunties and threats to you (external, based on the macroenvironmentla AND the microenvironment which is your specific life version of the maccroenviornment ie: is there a new neighbour next door or something) 'industry; environment find out who yuor competitors are. your rivals. the epople trying to get better marks that you, the ones in your school, in your workplace, in your grocery store and family home. be sure to consider both existing and potential commpetitors, this means even a new guy on the street who is charming and might steel your girlifriend if he meets her. But apart from competitors its importnat to also be aware of the people and resources and 'things' which aid you in life - the ones who engage with you, and the ones that you engage with, seperately. the ones who enable you and the ones you are 'gaming', that is. lifestylles some lifestyles indicate success more easily than others. that's just a characteristic of the lifestyle. for example, a careerist marketer may earn plenty of money and fame doing what he does, whereas a hippie whose lived his life perfectly to his wants will not have. choose the lifestyle in line with what you need..However you acn assess the ability to do well in your lifestyle/career choice if you porters 5 forces framework so you want to understand your comeptition better? welll it has been said that bargaining power of the things that help you and aid you (ie: the sports drink bargaining poewr of those that 'want you' like those you are trying to impress substitutes to your greatness pose ;like a new guy in the street who has more you should be wary of the following: new unexpected cmompetitiors,the you rely on to stay energetic or your parents for a home), the with your greatness, fans for their fame and stuff, the threat that blonde hair than your famously platinum blonde hair.

>new threats: be aware that the more attractive a lifestyle (ie: going for the chief cheerleader or athlete in team) will attrack more competitors than others and is a harder goal to achieve. if you make this position and others in future can challenge you for it, you need to make it harder for others to reach your place. even if it was something easier and you need to defend the ground you have,you can raise barriers to other people taking your position by: differentiating yourself in that role dramatically so others cant copy you easily, making use of your power inherent to that position to make it more unreachable (ie: dictaotor declares that all voters need to have his approval to vote in next election),indicate your own likelihood to be competitive again them to scare them away as you might be when choosing what you do. >targets threat: your prey, the ones you exploit in life for a game (like someone you make a bet against) may be weaker than knowledge, so you can beat, individually.should they band together they are more powerful.if the pwoer you have over them is capable of beating you. if it is not hard for them to be exploited by someone else they will be lost from your reserve.or if feel like they need in another way (ie: don't need to buy your drugs because they switch to growing themselves) then you are should try and avoid this kind of ever happening. you in some way like singular tehy are more they can get what they screwed. by all means you

>your dependencies: you need clothes in society. think about how you are obliged to the clothing industry. fortunately there are many clothes makers so you don't have to worry about them duping you into buying overpriced things. however, your not, as an indivdiual, that important to them. if you acn reverse these problems you can switch the tables. they have such an important input into the running of your life that you take it for granted that you need them. this gives them power.fortunately, its easy to switch from one supplier of clothes to another because they are not united, which you don't want. Also, they can't make your redundant cause clothes are made for people in society to wear and can't be used for much else (ideally). but be careful here, and keep on recalling the conflict between altruism and selfishness. your dependencies are inside and outside of you and you need to make a tradeoff. my emotional wants are so important to me i decide i will give in to the, i am dependent on them but i don't fight it because i'm not trying to. it's part of my. whereas addiction as a component of emotional needs is something i do fight. you make all the deicisions based on your mission vision and values and amtch them up.. >substitues: if somebody elses better is better than you're better you are a goner when they come along. never let anyone be better than you in what you do. if theyy can beat you in your speciality, and you don't have some severely redeaming qualities or they some huge fault you can exploit then you will be substitued in whatever you are doing. remember of coruse, we are all assuming comeptitiveness is the way to go in your life, not creating 'your own life like disregard world counterculture) and also assuming zero-sum games a lot of the time as a discalimer. >rivals: the more homogenous you are with your rivals the greater problems you face and the more intense the competition there will be. the harder to leave a way of life, the harder the people part of that way of life will fight as part of it. You can't give up a lifeg getting money outside of the law if youa re already outside the law cause you need to be inside it to get money inside it. Basically, for this whole section,these competitive forces determine how attractive a choice the path you take in life is currently, whatever it might be and the opportunity to excel in (assumpiton is that excellence is better than mediocrity). you need to forecast these things and see your positiion in the future before you charge head in. you shouldn't seize soemthing when your not sure its an opportunity or something else. 6th >and because of the limitations described elsewhere, and life isn't a zero sum game, you can aadd 'compliments' of your life to this list. you may be trying to be a better environmtnal person than the next guy but if you are impressing yourself in sheer numbers of trees saved then working together might save more than the total as individuals. be careful usuing this framework that you do not think of lifestyles in isolation. you can blur the lines in any way you like and make somethign unique for youself and transcend ordinary competition. a battle mage doesn't have to be the best fighter or best mage, she's a battlemage. a very hole proof but easy way to determine whether someothing is friend or foe is to see if its in the same lifestyle group as you. As in , sub-subculture. If you are a cyber goth and someone else is a traditional goth, you are both goths but you are only indirectly competiting as goths, you more so want to be the best rivethead and darksoul respectively. however, this concept is limited to the fact that these distinctions are permeable. when you both wear the same boots you are directly confronting one another in you gear (without the hostile undertone all this writingo on competition implies remmeber!). if nothing else, using these strategic groups will help your prioritise how you deal with competitors. the internal analysis - the inside - esoteric secrets knowledge from strategy - or, how to be less of a ruthless bastard and more of a legeng from within....the poewr that's inside.

an interesting fact to know is that the characteristics of yourself, what's inside, what you do is more likely to matter than what's going on outside of yourself. you will not be just a victim of circumstance,a nd especially not so if you have ther situation in which you are reading this manual. never forgot: don't forgot, the first half o this manual was not abuout nothing. it's about your lifestyle. never forget that. it's not irrlevant. you can't win a rowing competition by being the best at swimming. we will be taking a resource based view of the person here. leading your life in your lifestyle/discipline/role. an actor is compromised of a bundle of his resources (what you have) and capabilities (what you can do). This as interplayed, what you do with what you have got is something. they enable one another, unlock one another, at every level, even when seeming seperate. you may impress someone with your car you happened to inhereit and it seems its just a resource win but minorly that the fact you allowed to occasion to impress someone is something of a capability. recall we take a non-berkelyidealist/sollipist view and that we assume for practical purpsoes, not determinist universe and that you haev free will and everything. basically, this section is all about exploiting your particualrly distinctive resources and capabiltities to create an advantage for youself in winning. we make a few ordinary assumptions that are minor. firstly that you actually are special. you can be succesful only if you are actually special in some way. that might come down to nature or nurture or something else. but if you aren't special you are nothing. your resources must be heterogenious from everyone else. and you can create that simply by will and chance if you want. know that

weaknesses are also uniquenesses and that qualities and properties are not discrete in nature, they aer almost always on a cotinuous spectrum. If your hand eye cooridination is slightly worse than somone else but nothing else is different, it might just be distinction to earn you a legacy of the Texan sharpshooter when synergised with your common ingenuity that he didn't implement cause he wasn't terrible at shooting, only bad. the other thing is the following applies to directly the time you are aplying it. that may seem to make no rael sense or add value but you ralise that people can improve and build and change themselves. that is, that in real life many limited resources have mobile access - many peoplee can buy guns quickly illegal but having one right not when others don't would stand as an advantage at the moment that you are threatening someone with one. with the above 2 assumptions, any person could follow any strategy in life for real. the fact is they can't beause you are born into situations (ie: being born poor you have less monetary resources) and can't buy a knife for exampe. In a way, this imperalistic condition is benefiical for the competent individual such as yourself because you can and will create a desirable condition and use a strategy that cannot be imitated and thus erode away from your positon (again, recall earlier universal zero sum assumption) - adjust this statement as appropriate based on your assessment of zero sum or not. resources are both tangible nad intangible. intangible resources include relationships and good will you have with friends. intangible skills are increasing more valuable in a world where the material is less and less enmphasised and the opposite is true in the opposite world. whether you see plutocrats having more power increasing or the oppsite thats for you to decide and not a book on strategy. do your own macroenvironmental analysis! things are not true as they were always and are subjective to your perspective anyway. So how do you priortiise and identify what is a good resorue and capability? well, you can look at how it gives you an advantage. being a non-substitutable thing and the following, is better than being only a inimitable skill + the following, is better than being just a rare skill and the following is better than being just valuable. Valuable and rare make something a competitive advantage for you but if it is also inimitable and non-substituable then that advantage will be sustainabille and not merely temporary. the order of pre-requisities is importance. if something is rare but not valuable it is still not important to you. if it rare and valuable but imitable then is will lead to parity with your competitiors on success even if you use it right. question: so what exactly is value? ansswer: something is valuable if it will give you above greater results on your goal (finishing faster in the athletics track or making more baskets in your team basketball) that otherwise. the value must be greater than the costs. You might become unpopular for making a video about your ability to stick your tongue in your nose which made your more known from the popular definition but not popular at all. question: how can i make something inimitiable if otherwise it would be? answer: something is difficult/costly to imitate if it psosess a set or part thereof the physical uniquensss, path dependency, causual ambiguity and social complexity. So many things you think!

not easy to understand. let me break it down for you. if something is tangibly not available to anything. say you hold the key to a door and nobody else does. something might be path dependent, to also open the door they might need to have already failed to enter a competition to win the key and you did. they can't retrace the path and the earning the key is depending on that path. causual ambiguity is where they didn't know the competitinon was even being held and social complexity is where they don't know who it is who won so they can't even steel it off you later. question: where can I get something inimitiable? answer: the easiest way, although not the greatest, is tacit knowledge. Which is, by its very nature, inimitable. it is the opposite of codified knowledge and can't be trasmitted independent of the knowledge carrier. there is much relating to strategic managemeent that this book is unable to cover but I can, if you were to be partnered or apprenticed by me. but that is simply by fault of my own, there is little reason why I can't if I was a perfect author or strategist but I am not. the fact is, that until then, i hold the power. It's my failing yet i hold all the power and that is why it is inimitable (without my consent). be aware that everything here is 'loose'. when I say non-substitituable that is ideal, but if somthing is substituable technically, but that substitute is rare in itself and hard to aquire then of course you are still having the one up by having it. this whole section is again tapered by common sense. if you don't apply common sense nothing will the realized. logically, if something is not 'appropraite' that is, if you are a warfrcaft dota gaming expert then you might have a distinct sustainability advantage but if your goals are in dancing then what. what do you think then? that is why a top down approach has been suggested from the start of this tihng. for clarity, not just wining you way through life on a macro level. but anotehr crucical thing to remember is adaptability: this whole thing is a tool you use, a frame through to look at life, but not the frame of itself. not a crutch, but a infrared vision that can blind you from the nuinses of non-red world. this, you see, is the dark side of distinctive resource and capabiltiies. inflexibility. when the macro and microenvironment changes, which as i warned you,y ou shuld always keep in midn throughout this thing, then a capabiltiy can become a rigidity due to human nature. if you are a musician who is good at jazz music but then nobody plays jazz anymore, and you passion is for money from music not the jazz intrinsically, then by not moving with the times and thinking...i'm good a jazz, i'm gonna do this - you can be destroying yourself..simialry if your bands power structure is such that you arent' the one deciidng and they awnt to do jazz then your a g oner...also not only a psychological investment bias but people are inherently inert lazy someitmes. getting down to business well i've understood somethings, but not i want chanellise and attack my goals head on with all this mental equipment I have. no what to do. It is useful to look at your thing as asystem, where you are not and where you want to go and the parth of how youa re getting there. idaelly, you should already be on the path and feeding the process from the to start to finish of you doing it. optismiisng it and process iporvmenets all the way! that's how we go. you can call this your lifestyles value chain.

note it's not your personal one. everyone youa re competing with has the same roughly, at different nuinses, but if you are not working harder the game will be one by someone else. I could illustrate either as a lifestyle value chain but I'm gonna make it more specialised into a system you can call your personal system because it will highlight out your personal reposnsibilityes as part of the broader lifestyle chain. it should be like this: a->b->c->d if your role in achieving goal D is to complete b (note, you may be doing more than one step along theway, maybe thole thing and it's not a performance measure) then you should have a sub-process on b like: a->1->2->3->c it is done like this because your goal might be something like...go to heaven, which be conditioned by go a lot of good for the world. then to do the good you might be part of a team and your function might be to hand a builder material to build a house for the homeless with so your steps for getting the material can be broken down into 1 2 3/ porters value chain we can make this thing more complex and whole by adding in supplementary function to your initial 1234 with support functions like eating enough food to get a healthy amount of work done for a longer time whilst you're alive. wtf: intermission: understanding 'being the best' when you realise how to do something well, soon enough it will be copied. similarly, when someone else discovers a secret that's making her succeed, you will soon follow or you will try and get your own way of doing things. somewhere along the way a dominant design emerges (typically) and it becomes the flavour of the day that you and your rivals converge on. for example, if you are hosting an office party and people are trying to seem funny, if one person is a joke teller and the other is a practical joker, eventually they will start competiting on telling jokes or practical jokes to see who is better if they are battling. what happens, however, when there are multiple competitors that even later, as you all are getting more succesful or approaching success is that some rivals are 'shook out' of the race. they simply aren't good enough. as this happens, your collective success begins to drop. eventually, after the real big players and doing there thing, there comes a time when it all gets a bit lame and growth stops. after the shakeout, those who remain often reap the rewards of having competition and being the big guns. so given this model, at the early 'embryonic' of your lifestyle learning curve - strategies to adopt are researching and developing your understanding and competence of the thing, marketing your junk and establishing credibility, such as getting a doctorate of theology for all these things matches for the purposes of spreading the christian faith if it's your goal since it'll make you education in content

and also build credibility. the tip if you are unsure to experiment with stuff until your get it right and your start growing. this can be misleading since of course, somethings take time to pay off like your doctorate, but immediately after starting it you can quote that you are doing it for gains. shakeouts happen after the intermittent growth phase if there is excessive people involved in what you do. if lots of people have studied theology and want to apply to be pastors, not everyone will be. this is because demand for that lifestyle element is lower than the capacity. it is known as overcapacity. it's not a favourable state. the secret, however, is not to use absolute ingenuinity and brilliance till you've made it through to the matury stage where a lot of your developments are now inaccessible to outside parties. By that I mean, if you were to start consuming stimulants to help you concentrate more and perform better as a fighter pilot, then you would be less driven to excel when your squadrn reaches its maturity phase, and then, when everyone starts using their stimulant they will be far ahead of you. you will have parity on the drug level but not have the experience aquired skill to meet them halfway. it's the same logic behind the boxer waiting to make a knockout punch and not going full out at the start. this is known as reverse positioning/breakaway positioning. this whole point may seem trivial. It's just patience, or common knowledge. Not strategy. you would be fooled into thinking that. it's much more complex than yuo may first realise because herein lies the intergration from competitive strategy to outside that. while this book is about competiting, it's limited in scope to when you're not competieng for success but merely going for, for that, you don't need competition. that just happens to be the case. when you break away, you can create a new ocean for yourself to swim in, rather than the bloodbath of competition. if you are that seperately remoevd than you have a totally different game to play and all the rules here and in vain when applied by the enemy. the fact that your value chain ultimately declines unless you escape comes back to the nature of the people who rely on you and there power over you. review why. can you think why that is? if so then everything i've taught you till now shuold come together and integrate. it's worth the while making the intellectual connection right now. review if you are unsure. this isn't a textbook but this will be a wonder when you see it now. ps. if you fail to break away it is advisable to harvest everything you can from the activity that can be salvaged for your greater goal then or to continue to feed the activity and let yourself become a niche success there. remember to keep your eye on the prize and not sucked in to easy success here that's not complete. the willigneness to keep going like this, the hunger, incontent is what seperates the millionaris from the billionaris from the oligarchs. you wan to a build an empire not a township. so what? you need to readjust your internal and external analysis to account for each change on the lifestyle life cycle or you'll be misseeing things. such is the nature of change. but more importantly, be careful not to believe that your life will follow a common predetermined pattern of development. there are unpredictable things everywhere, numerous exceptions, an

oversimplification and more often than not, the lifestyle life cycle literally cycles around again and again before you see that it has or will and even make a difference on it. the uncontested victory - beyong the competition so you've exected everything perefectly. victory is almost at hand. but you have yet to conquer the final frontier. to do that you can do this. apply this thang:

THE FOUR ACTION FRAMEWORK What you've go to do to turn red into blue is to reduce somethings somethings, eliminate somethings, create some things and raise some things. this all creates a new value curve for you. UP TO CORPORATE LEVEL STRATEGY (nothing past lecture 8 herein) moving from that one part/element of the goal you have been working on and diversifying to related goals and methods for achieveing you ultimate goal is important. so from earlier when you worked on related activities, you should decide how you want to vertifically integrate into other value areas in your chain. ideally, you should be working really hard and motivated. for that reason you might be able to do a better job than your helpers can even.