The Art Of War in one sentence: make it easy

Introduction

The art of war is one of my favorite books on strategy. While it’s widely recognized in the western world, I find most were over-interpreting Sun Tzu. Majority of the techniques in the book are actually not applicable to the business world today. I’ve also yet to find anyone sufficiently explained the core ideas, which are both very intuitive and relevant in today’s decision making process. This post will summarize Sun Tzu’s core methodology in one sentence. I will illustrate how this single insight has helped me to achieve several seemingly long shot goals.

The fundamental principle from Sun Tzu

The complete thinking framework of Sun Tzu is based on one principle: never engage a challenging goal as is, but find ways to make it not challenging. This is also illustrated in another classic from ancient China: Tao Te Ching(in chapter 63, “天下难事，必作于易”).

This is Sun Tzu’s core principle and applied by many legendary generals following his methodology. They almost never engage the enemy directly even when they have an advantage to win the battle. They always first find some ways to significantly worsen the enemy’s chances, to the extent that the enemy doesn’t want to fight anymore, before attacking them in the battlefield.

This principle is also at the core of many very successful people’s methodologies with extraordinary accomplishment. Examples quickly came to my mind include Warren Buffett, Zeng Guofan and Mao Zedong. At each step, they never do anything that’s not straight forward, easy and reliable. They rarely prioritize the task that will solve the problem once and for all, but always find ways to make the problem easier to solve, little by little.

I don’t think you have to follow this principle to be successful. There are many counterexamples. However, I do find many people struggling by violating it. For example, in career development discussions, it’s not uncommon to hear questions like: how to work with a boss who’s hard to work with. That sounds stupid? How about this: how to win a turf war against another org when my director doesn’t want to support me? (The answer is that engaging in a turf war is a losing strategy in the long run with or without strong support)

Momentum

Sun Tzu and his followers believe that when we don’t have high certainty of winning, we should avoid fighting. He only strikes by force when there’s a dominant advantage. Before that he will try various clever ways to build the momentum by strengthening himself and weakening his opponent. In his own words, ‘When we are five times more powerful, we can attack. If we are only two times stronger, try to divide the enemy before attacking’.

Put another way, Sun Tzu spends the majority of the time making it easy to win, rather than winning. Momentum makes the weak defeat the strong, like water falling from high mountains can easily smash hard rocks. The explosive power is inverse to the exerting time, thus it’s key to release all built up power in a very short period. In a way, Sun Tzu spends 99.9% of his time building momentum and uses 0.1% of time to do the actual strike!

Success stories of making it easy

Gaokao

Gaokao is a highly selective exam for college admission in China. The score almost solely determines who gets to which college. On average, less than 0.05% students are admitted to the top 2 universities(THU and PKU). I don’t think I’m talented enough to win such a hard battle. However, I managed to get there by making it easy.

Firstly, some context about this story. It’s in early 2000 when the Internet, even computers, were still not common in China. So information sharing is very inefficient compared with today. Otherwise, I think my story might be different as everyone today knows my ‘secret’.

At my time in high school which is not prestigious at all for a 0.05% competition, everyone spends 70% of their time attending classes and listening to the teachers. They spend less than 30% of their time practicing on the past problems of the exams. Towards the last months before Gaokao, I discovered this is a weak strategy as listening to the teachers doesn’t help much in my scores, but alternatively, practicing by myself is way more efficient. I find the exams become easier by week with heavy practicing and NOT attending classes.

Unfortunately, I discovered this too late in my first year in Gaokao and didn’t clear the bar of THU. However, I think I’ve already discovered the strategy that makes Gaokao easier by orders of magnitude. I simply don’t have enough time to let it go through. So I tried again. The next year, I completely dropped off from school and devoted 100% of my time practicing on past Gaokao problems. That time my score exceeded THU’s bar by a fat margin. In everyone’s mind at that time, going to classes is the way to improve the scores. They were all surprised as I didn’t go to a single class. They didn’t know that’s the key to my success.

There’s one extra ingredient in this story: the courage to trust your educated judgement and be different from everyone else.

The American Dream

In 2012, Two years after finishing school in China, I decided to immigrate to the US. To the common knowledge among my circle, there were two practical ways to legally find a job and live there:

1. Attend some graduate schools in US
2. Invest 500K US dollars and get a greencard

Neither is practical for me. 1) is a big waste of time and very costly. 2) is out of my reach, 500K is an unrealistic number then.

After some research I found many companies in my industry hire directly from abroad and they will sponsor my H1-b visa if I get their job offers. Therefore, the American dream is transformed to passing an interview, which I’ve a consistent successful record at.

Again, after I moved to the US, many with similar backgrounds were surprised by the path I took. While there are other tactical details to guarantee a successful execution of this plan, the most critical part is the above path transform. Were I to take either of the harder paths, the cost or even result will be very different.

Many of my readers probably know the first two strategies, so let me talk about something most don’t know.

No Limit Texas Holdem

No limit Texas Holdem is the best game I know that builds one’s characters. All great players I know are resilient to setbacks and focus on building a winning system rather than short term results.

For a while I was drawn to the game. There was a period of time when new players joined our ‘club’ and we moved to play on an online platform at bigger blinds. While previously a marginal winner, after this shift, it’s very clear that I’m a consistent loser. Most of others who began to lose believed that’s because the platform was rigged or because of bad luck.

I rejected such explanations and began learning from the winners. One of them kindly told me how he studied. He led me to realize that the reason for my loss is because I was playing a very hard game.

My strategy by then has been exploitive, meaning I try to read what the hole cards my opponents are holding and act accordingly. Hand reading is very hard, thus having a low success rate, which leads to my failures. With my friend’s guidance, I learned that modern poker players adopt range based strategies(they call it game theory optimization, or GTO). The idea is to create a range of hole cards to play for each situation. It is a mapping from situation to a collection of hole cards. The situation is described by <board cards, previous actions, current action(raise, call, fold, check)>. In game, convert the range as a reverse index(from hole cards to action) and take the action accordingly. The range is built offline so the playing is just recognizing the situation and then executing an existing game plan.

Building such ranges offline (I’ve created even a software to facilitate that) is much easier than hand reading because it’s independent of the hole cards of my opponents and the majority of the computation is done offline. Thus my win rate immediately pulled back after I changed my strategy from hand reading based exploitation to range based GTO style. I was then the only player who managed to become consistent winning from consistent losing(In fact, I ended up top three winners in the group). I was amazed how many losers just deny that their games are deeply flawed and kept on losing.

Investment

Like poker, the prevailing voices teaching and discussing investment today are formulating the investment problem as a very hard game. They use US dollars as denomination and aim to buy low and sell high. Their default value storage is cash. This is inferior because they don’t really understand meaningful price prediction is not possible, and in general, the future is unknowable.

After a long time studying Macroeconomics and History, I came to understand Warren Buffett’s investment philosophy. I’ve thus changed my view of investment from price prediction to value hoarding. Though simple, it needs many posts to logically and philosophically explain why it’s optimal for me and others with similar financial backgrounds. I included it here because it’s one of the most influential strategy shifts in my life and fit the pattern of ‘make it easy’ perfectly. Value hoarding is much easier than predicting the future, yet few choose to do it for many reasons. That’s why most of us won’t get rich from investment.

Losing weight

I’ve struggled at obesity, thus physical performance my whole life. In 2018, I went rock climbing and couldn’t do it because of my weight. I then workout everyday for a month, either jogging or swimming. My weight didn’t move a tiny bit. I thought the scale must be broken!

After some study, I found working out hard is an inferior strategy, thus a hard way to lose weight. I’ve a whole post about the detailed method I adopted which easily led to success beyond my wildest expectation, so I won’t repeat here. In short, I changed the game to building a sustainable nutrition plan and several habits. The key is avoiding processed food and avoiding added sugar like plague. Losing fat and building a satisfactory physique are easy under this strategy.

I can’t help to visually illustrate the impact of this strategy on my life. Below are the photos of me before and after this strategy.

Breaking career plateau

In the first 5 years of my career, I just tried to become more capable at computer programming everyday. It was a skill I loved and felt cool about, like magic. Everything was easy then. I was promoted fast and my pay was way ahead of the majority. After the first year in senior level, things began to go south. The feel is very similar to my above experience in Poker: everything became so hard.

My extensive knowledge on the nuances of Linux, the network and the whole development stack, my sound philosophy from years of building large scale software became insufficient for the next stage of growth. I found it especially challenging to my work style

• when I switch project because I need to learn low level details from zero
• when I was handed a large project that’s supposed to be solved by a team
• when I want to seek promotion and need to justify my ability with a large scope(whatever that means)

I was stuck there for four years(or six if you count by job level)! I once thought maybe that’s my ceiling. Otherwise, why do you think I spent so much time playing Poker?

In the end, I finally found the right strategy after many reading, talking to mentors and thinking deeply about what had been going on. In short, by switching from how-oriented to who-oriented at work, I managed to break my 4-year-plateau and everything was again very easy. It’s an amazing experience to break the ceiling. At the end of the day, the rank and pay leap will be forgotten after several years. Experiences forever cherished in my memory are either when I meaningfully helped others or when I growed myself to a significantly better person.

My reflection about career development didn’t stop at ‘start with who’, the whole process and my most recent thoughts are in this post.

The character

You may have figured, while ‘make it easy’ is a strong strategy and game changer for each of my challenges, we need to have the character to apply it. Some of the most valuable mindsets to me include:

• Be open minded about my own flaws rather than denying them and blaming others
• Never attach what I’m currently good at to my identity. My identity is defined my values, not my means to fulfill them
• Never be constrained by ego, have the courage to self-reinvent and for self-revolution
• Be gritty, know that sometimes finding the easy way will be hard and long, but it’s finite and worthwhile
• Believe in Science, be humble to learn from others and the books