The Golden Key to Strategy (10th Anniversary Edition): 101 Lessons in Winning Small Victories Every Day

This book takes an entertaining approach to teaching practical strategies for success in everyday decision-making. In its 101 two-page lessons can change your life by teaching you to see competition from a completely new perspective. Fully illustrated, the book is full of stories, jokes, and quotes based on strategic principles that go back 2,500 years to Sun Tzu's The Art of War, the book takes competition out of the realm of conflict and redefines it as a matter of making the right choices based to improve the ways you are compared to others. The original edition of this book was the Winner of the Ben Franklin Book Award as Best Self-Help Book of the year. This tenth-anniversary edition contains has been greatly improved based on the author's recent nine-volume work on the various aspects of competitive strategy.

The concept of the “Golden Key” comes from the ancient Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu. He wrote the world’s first book on strategy 2,500 years ago. He made success easy by breaking choices down into a series of comparisons. “Winning is a matter of balancing a gold coin against a silver one,” he wrote. “Losing is a matter of balancing a silver coin against a gold one.” So, the Golden Key is comparison. Golden Key Strategy is a system of comparisons that leads to making the right choices to succeed in life.

Why should you care? Because you can use this strategy every day to make better decisions. These decisions will improve every aspect of your life. They depend on four basic comparisons.

The world will become more competitive. Whether you see this as a good thing or a bad thing, you need to know why. To understand, you need to understand what competition really is and how it really works. People think of competition as a fight among competitors. They think that the opposite of competition is cooperation.

The view that competition is evil almost instantly dooms you to failure. Competition is making comparisons. The comparison is between what are called “opponents.” The opposite of competition isn’t cooperation; it is not making comparisons, not making decisions, and having no choices. History’s most visible competitions—wars—are comparisons of strength. These battles decide which philosophy rules a specific place at a specific time. Athletics compares athletes, deciding which are the fastest, strongest, and so on. The purpose of all these competitions is to decide which competitors are the best. However, the vast majority of such decisions are not made on the battlefield or the playing field.

Most competitive decisions are comparisons made within the human mind. Competition includes all mental comparisons and all decisions. Comparisons take place when you make any decision. Before any decision is made, alternatives are compared. Though you don’t call them opponents, your alternative choices compete in your mind. You can make a decision when, and only when, one of those opponents wins.
This is a strange idea, so you might want to stop here and think about it. Let this new idea of competition-is-comparison fight it out with your previous concepts of competition.

To influence this battle, note that, by this definition, even cooperation requires competition. You must choose when, how, and with whom you want to cooperate. The choice to cooperate, in any way, always has a competitor: the choice not to cooperate in that way. The choice to cooperate must win that battle before any cooperation can take place.

This view of competition is not an intellectual exercise. It explains why the world is becoming more competitive. To put it simply, people have more choices today, and they will have more and more in the future. More choices mean, inevitably, more competition. More alternatives compete with each other for your decisions. More competition is not only a good thing, it is a very good thing. More choices means more freedom.

The problem is that we are not trained to make competitive choices.