Best-selling author Robert Greene (The 48 Laws of Power, The Laws of Human Nature) asserts that life is a daily struggle—a war between you and the people, organizations, or other forces that work against you. To be successful in life you need to win the war, and to win the war you need a winning strategy. In The 33 Strategies of War, he presents strategic insights based on his synthesis of military history, historic writings on strategy, and modern-day business dealings. Greene argues that applying these principles of strategy can help you succeed in almost any arena of life.
In this guide, we’ll compare Greene’s recommendations to those from other experts in the fields of business, strategy, and marketing, examining advice from W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy, Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy Bad Strategy, Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm, and other strategic advice for competing in the business world and succeeding in life.
Is Life About War or Peace?
While The 33 Strategies of War has generally been praised by a majority of reviewers, it does have its critics. The most common criticism of the book is that its basic premise is flawed: Life doesn’t have to be war.
For example, in The Anatomy of Peace, the Arbinger Institute argues that a combative mindset provokes others to resist you and makes life seem like war. If you adopt a cooperative mindset instead of a combative one, others will reciprocate. Then, by cooperating instead of fighting each other, you can all be more successful.
Greene would probably argue that Arbinger’s assertion is a strategic deception: By ostensibly promoting peace, they make themselves look harmless, but by convincing you to adopt a cooperative mindset, they make you easier to control.
Ultimately, it becomes a question of human nature. If humans are fundamentally selfish and competitive, then Greene’s strategies can help you survive and succeed in a hostile world. If humans are only combative when provoked to defend themselves, then The Anatomy of Peace may offer a better path to success.
Greene cautions that “strategy” is not a formula that you can blindly follow to achieve success. Every situation is unique and constantly changing, so you need to formulate your own strategy for your own situation and adapt it over time. Greene presents his 33 strategies as general principles that can help you develop your strategy.
(Shortform note: Greene’s observation that your strategy needs to adapt to changing scenarios is a well-acknowledged topic in management advice books. One of the first books to popularize this idea was Who Moved My Cheese, in which Spencer Johnson discusses the inevitability of change. Johnson illustrates how learning to adapt to changing circumstances enables you to succeed in the workplace and life in general. This, in turn, demonstrates that the principle applies to civilian life as well as military battlefields.)
We find that many of Greene’s strategies overlap, often addressing the same principle from slightly different angles. Thus, in this guide, we’ve combined and reorganized many of Greene’s strategies for ease of comprehension.
We’ll start by considering strategies related to the big picture, which is where you’ll begin formulating your strategy. Then we’ll discuss how you develop your plan and how to keep your enemies from learning enough about your strategy to counter it. Next, we’ll discuss Greene’s advice on fighting a large enemy with a small force. Finally, we’ll consider Greene’s advice on finishing off your opponents.
It’s hard to fight a war if you don’t know what you’re fighting for. As Greene explains, the starting point for any strategy should be to identify your desired end state: What exactly are you trying to gain by fighting? Your end goal should be ambitious enough that you find it inspiring, but also small enough that you can realistically achieve it.
(Shortform note: Understanding your end goal can help you succeed in any area of life, not just business or military strategy. In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey advises you to imagine yourself at the end of your life or career, taking stock of your impact or accomplishments. What kind of legacy do you want to be able to look back on?)
Once you understand your end goal, you need a clear picture of who or what stands between you and that goal—in other words, your enemies. Greene says that clearly identifying your enemies is not just a prerequisite for developing a plan to defeat them: It will also give you a better understanding of what you stand for. This is because the conflict will highlight the contrast between you and your enemy, making your key differences more visible.
For example, maybe you’re running for office against an incumbent politician who supported a controversial tax, so you present yourself as the enemy of the unpopular tax. Or maybe you sell lawnmowers, and your main competitor guarantees the lowest prices in town but has a mediocre customer service record. Instead of trying to beat their prices, you go the extra mile to make sure your customers feel well taken care of. In both cases, comparing yourself to your opponent shows you what to focus on as you work to differentiate yourself.
(Shortform note: Psychologists observe that fighting against an enemy tends to be more motivating than working for a cause because an enemy poses an immediate threat, creating a sense of urgency. Additionally, people feel a common bond with others who are fighting the same enemy. This reinforces Greene’s point: The contrast between you and your enemy helps to unify and motivate your forces.)
Once you know what you want to achieve and what enemies stand in your way, you can begin planning your war. To do this, Greene recommends that you immerse yourself in the best available information on the environment in which you’ll be fighting, the condition of your own forces, and the enemies that you must overcome. Try to anticipate how your enemies will act and react to each of your moves. Consider different ways things could turn out, and make detailed plans for how you would respond to each possible situation.
Greene advocates this method of creating detailed plans branching into many alternative scenarios because it allows you to adapt quickly to changing conditions. Plans that depend on a rigid schedule quickly fall apart because things never turn out exactly according to plan.
Strategizing With Limited Information
In Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore applies a similar principle to the business problem of choosing the best market segment to target with a new product. His analysis highlights a nuance of the principle: Even after studying the best information that you have, you’ll still have to make decisions based on limited information because there will always be unknown factors. This is certainly true in military campaigns, and equally true when you’re introducing a new product, because you can’t collect statistics on customers that you don’t have yet.
Moore’s solution to this problem is to create customer characterizations, or descriptions of a hypothetical customer, complete with information about their age, job, goals, and so on. These descriptions should be as realistic and as lifelike as possible. Once you’ve created profiles for the archetypical customers that might want your product, you use them to think through hypothetical purchasing scenarios: What does the customer’s current situation look like without your product? How would having your product solve her current problems? Is the improvement enough to compel her to buy?
By anticipating how each hypothetical customer would behave in each scenario, you can assess which customer would be most likely to buy your product. Then you target the market segment where the customers of that archetype are most concentrated. Like Greene, Moore also recommends making your strategy flexible: As new information about customer preferences or purchasing habits becomes available, you can use it to update your scenarios and, if necessary, pivot your marketing campaign.
According to Moore, the reason this method works is that your intuition is much better at predicting how a person would respond to a situation than it is at predicting the behavior of abstract entities like markets. And you’ll ultimately have to choose a market based on informed intuition since you don’t have enough data to make an analytical decision.
As Greene points out, having a flexible plan with detailed options that you thought through in advance can help you avoid making irrational decisions when you’re under stress or under the influence of strong emotion.
A common theme that Greene discusses in many strategies, but especially in planning, is the importance of managing strong emotions. He warns that, in most circumstances, humans are more emotional than rational. For example, when you face setbacks and heavy opposition, you’ll likely feel discouraged and be tempted to quit too early. In the face of vicious attacks, you may feel angry and vengeful toward your enemy, making it tempting to retaliate in ways that hurt them even if it also hurts your own cause. And the exhilaration of victory might make you feel invincible, tempting you to launch new attacks that may not be prudent.
How Do Strong Emotions Cloud Your Judgment?
Other authors provide additional insight on why strong emotions sometimes provoke irrational decisions and how planning can help.
For example, in Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman explains that your emotions arise from the interaction of two parts of your brain: the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. The amygdala analyzes input from your senses and generates emotional alerts. The prefrontal cortex analyzes emotional signals from the amygdala and sends feedback signals to the amygdala.
For example, suppose you’re walking through your garden and glimpse a rubber hose that looks vaguely like a poisonous snake. Your amygdala recognizes a possible threat and sends a fear signal to the rest of your brain. Then your prefrontal cortex identifies it as a false alarm (because it recognizes the object as a hose, not a snake) and cancels the fear signal.
Your prefrontal cortex performs other functions as well. It holds the ideas that you’re currently thinking about, called your “working memory,” and it participates in rational analysis. However, if the amygdala is sending out strong emotion signals (for example, because you’re in a dangerous situation), your prefrontal cortex can get overloaded to the point where it can’t perform these other functions, or at least can’t perform them as well. This is why strong emotions can degrade your analytical reasoning capabilities.
But having a plan that you’ve reasoned through ahead of time can save you from having to rely on your compromised reasoning faculties when you’re under emotional stress.
The better you can predict what your enemies will do, the more easily you can develop a strategy to defeat them. But the better your enemies can anticipate what you will do, the more effectively they’ll counter it. Thus, a key element of any strategy is to prevent your enemies from figuring out what you’re up to until it's too late. Greene discusses several ways to achieve this.
(Shortform note: Sometimes just having a proactive strategy is enough to catch your opponents off-guard. In Good Strategy Bad Strategy, Richard Rumelt observes that most people and organizations don’t have a defined strategy—instead, they just react to circumstances. And they tend to assume that everyone else does the same, so they won’t expect you to plan ahead.)
Greene advises you to keep your options open. The more actions you can take, the harder it is for someone to anticipate what you will do.
As a way to increase the flexibility of your forces, he suggests splitting up your army into small teams that can function autonomously but can also join forces to fight larger battles. Additionally, this increases the number of separate forces that your enemy has to try to keep track of, which compounds the difficulty of predicting your moves or inferring your overall strategy.
Keep Your Options Open in the Battle for Financial Freedom
Greene presents the strategy of splitting your force into autonomous teams in the context of military operations, but you can apply an analogous principle to other parts of life, such as personal finance.
Think of it this way: Your enemy is poverty. Its attacks come in the form of bills, expenses, and other financial setbacks. Your income is the army you use to defeat those attacks, and each of your independent revenue streams is like an autonomous combat team.
If your sole source of income is your day job, this is like having your whole army fighting as one unit: Your options are limited, and if you lose your job, you’ll be at the mercy of your expenses. But if you got an additional part-time job it would increase your options and reduce your risk. If you also invest in stocks, the returns provide another independent source of income. Maybe you also publish a book, create an app, or start a YouTube channel about one of your hobbies. These create additional revenue streams, further increasing your options. Together, these diverse revenue streams create a strong financial army.
When you launch an offensive, Greene recommends that you keep your forces moving fast enough that your enemy doesn’t have time to react. By the time they figure out how to counter your first move, you’ll be well into your second or third, making their response irrelevant.
He also suggests that you occasionally make a move that looks so bold, audacious, or unconventional that it seems almost insane. If your enemies mistakenly assume that you wouldn’t do anything imprudent, they’ll interpret your audacious moves as a sign of greater power than you actually have. Having miscalculated your strength, they won’t be able to predict your moves as easily. If they don’t make that mistake, it will still make you harder to read, because an irrational opponent is, by definition, unpredictable.
Make Your Competitors Irrelevant Before They Catch On
Greene recommends advancing quickly and boldly, even audaciously, to keep ahead of your enemies. Analogous business strategies include blitzscaling, where you grow your company so fast your competitors can’t catch up, and having a blue ocean strategy, where you boldly go where your competitors have never gone.
The premise of blitzscaling is that the key to making certain products successful is to grow your user base as quickly as possible. This works best with digital products that have negligible marginal cost (once you’ve created the product, making additional copies doesn’t cost you anything) and significant network effects (the more people use the product, the more useful it becomes, like social media apps).
Meanwhile, the premise of a blue ocean strategy is to offer a product that provides unique value to your customers. If your product is truly unique, then by definition, there won’t be any direct competition, giving you space to build up a profitable market.
Furthermore, when you introduce a product that’s fundamentally different from the competing products of other industry players, those players initially tend to think you’re crazy and dismiss your product as something nobody would want. By the time they realize that your product has opened up a whole new profitable market, it may be too late for them to compete effectively with you because market leadership tends to be self-perpetuating. (Once your brand has a reputation for being the best in its class, it’s easier to make sales and attract top talent, which helps you continue to make the best products.)
Blitzscaling goes hand in hand with a blue ocean strategy, because it only works in newly opened markets, where you can be the first to secure a majority of the market. When you use a blue ocean strategy, you create a new market where your competitors didn’t see one, which initially confuses them. And if you grow rapidly to dominate the market, the network effect makes your product so much more valuable than any competing alternatives that they’ll never catch up with you, even when they catch on to the new market. This illustrates Greene’s principle that making unprecedented moves and building on them quickly gives you an advantage over your opponents.
When you first start out on any conquest, chances are that your enemies will have more resources than you. However, this isn’t necessarily a problem. Greene points out that smaller armies are more mobile and easier to conceal. And if you don’t seem large enough to pose a significant threat, your opponents may simply ignore you.
Greene suggests that you can use this to your advantage by building up your empire from many small conquests. You suddenly take possession of something that, by itself, is not worth your opponents’ time or energy to fight over. Then bide your time, building up your strength and waiting for others to forget about your recent conquest. Once they’ve forgotten about it, you can repeat the process. Greene asserts that over time you can quietly take over a large territory without anyone realizing what you’re up to until it’s too late for them to stop you.
Conquer Niche Markets
In Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore presents a business application of Greene’s strategy of building up an empire from pieces that, individually, your opponents don’t consider worth fighting for.
Moore’s strategy begins with identifying a niche market for your product. He emphasizes that the first market you target must be small enough for your company to dominate. This is important for two reasons: First, it makes it feasible for you to become the market leader in that niche, which helps you make sales. Second, and more to Greene’s point, if the market is small enough for a startup company to dominate, then it’s not worth enough for larger, established companies to bother fighting over.
Moore advises that, once you’ve established yourself as the market leader in your target niche, you select another niche to expand into. Thus, you build up your market share one niche at a time until you dominate the whole market. In light of Greene’s discussion, part of the reason Moore’s strategy works is that by the time the old market leaders that you’ve displaced realize what’s happening, you’re already too well entrenched in too many market sectors for them to take back much of your market share.
Greene points out that head-to-head battles are costly and often indecisive. Thus, it’s better to avoid them, especially when you’re small and don’t have resources to spare. To gain victory efficiently, Greene advises you to work your way into a situation where your strengths are pitted against your opponent’s weaknesses, and where their strengths and your weaknesses are less relevant.
Greene says that when a large, powerful opponent moves to engage you head-on, your best bet may be a strategic retreat. Not only does this avoid the massive losses of a pitched battle and buy you more time to prepare, but it typically provokes your opponent to chase you, allowing you to lead them to a place where you can fight them on your terms. For this reason, Greene says that the defender in any conflict is statistically more likely to win than the aggressor.
Use Blue Ocean Strategy to Avoid Pitched Battles in the Business World
Blue Ocean Strategy might be interpreted as a business application of Greene’s strategic retreat. As we’ve discussed, with a blue ocean strategy you provide a unique product to create a new, uncontested market. W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne argue that this is more profitable than direct competition because the new market gives your business more room to grow. In Greene’s terms, choosing to market a unique product is like retreating out of your competitors’ territory instead of fighting them head-to-head.
Eventually, your competitors will realize that your product has reshaped the market, but by the time they give chase (in the form of introducing new products to compete directly with yours), they’ll have to fight on your terms because you already have experience in the new market. You’ve developed procedures for producing and marketing the product efficiently, as well as supply networks from which you source your materials. Meanwhile, to adapt to the changing market, your competitors will have to retool, which is slow and costly. In terms of Greene’s strategy, you’ve drawn your competitors away from their familiar territory into terrain where you have the advantage.
Although Kim and Mauborgne don’t refer to their strategy as a retreat, per se, they do emphasize the non-combative nature of their approach. At the time they first published Blue Ocean Strategy, this differentiated it sharply from most other business strategy books, which emphasized combative business competition. Viewed as a strategic retreat, it’s actually both combative and non-combative: You avoid combat up-front, but you gain an advantage over your enemies in the long run.
Greene explains that guerilla tactics are ideal for fighting a large, powerful enemy with a small force. Stage small attacks on your opponent’s weak spots and plunder their supplies to supplement your resources. Even though a single guerilla raid won’t hurt your enemy much, the effect of numerous small raids accumulates over time. This wears your enemy down without ever giving them the chance to defeat you in a pitched battle. It also shows them that they can’t push you around with impunity, even if they’ve put you into retreat.
Use Guerrilla Tactics to Conquer Your Habits
As Greene points out, guerilla tactics work because you can stage small raids relatively easily, even with limited resources. However, these tactics aren’t only useful in battle—other authors suggest applying these same principles to kick bad habits and cultivate good habits.
In Tiny Habits, behavioral scientist BJ Fogg argues that the key to cultivating productive or positive habits is to find the “tiny” version of the habit you want to create, something so easy that it doesn’t take much motivation to do it. He bases this on the Fogg behavioral model, which predicts that, given the opportunity to do something, you’ll do it whenever the combination of your motivation and ability (basically how easy it is) exceeds a certain threshold. Fogg observes that since your level of motivation naturally fluctuates and is difficult to control or predict, manipulating your ability to do something changes your behavior more than trying to manipulate your motivation.
Similarly, in Atomic Habits, James Clear argues that if you focus on making small positive changes to your habits, these small changes get compounded over time, and add up to massive improvements.
Combining these two ideas gives you a battle plan for optimizing your habits through a kind of internal guerilla warfare: Even if your arsenal of mental energy is small, you can use it to make small changes to your behavior, and over time these changes will add up to defeat bad habits and replace them with good ones.
Greene discusses a number of strategic concepts to consider when you’re ready to crush an enemy force for good.
First, he says you should consider the root of your enemy’s power. What is it that truly enables your enemy to stand in your way? For example, perhaps you’re outgunned, but their high-tech weapons are dependent on a steady stream of supplies, so the root of their strength is their supply lines. Cut off their supply lines, and they won’t be able to fight you effectively anymore.
(Shortform note: Once again, Greene’s strategy of identifying and eliminating the source of your enemy’s power isn’t limited to military applications. Ray Dalio prescribes this same strategy for dealing with problems in organizations and in your personal life. Whenever a problem arises, or something doesn’t go the way you wanted it to, Dalio advises you to ask, “Why?” not just once, but repeatedly, until you get past the symptoms to the source of the problem. Whether the problem is a bad habit, a defective procedure, or something else, conquering the problem at the source is the only sure way of eliminating it.)
Greene says you should then consider where your enemy is most vulnerable. Hitting them in a vulnerable spot gives you the opportunity to inflict disproportionately high casualties, improving your odds in the conflict even if the vulnerability isn’t the root of their strength (as in the previous tip).
Green explains that in traditional warfare, an army had a well-defined front, but its flank (sides) and rear were more vulnerable. In a typical flanking maneuver, you would send a small portion of your force to attack the enemy head-on, while the rest of your force circled around to attack them from the side or the rear.
With the enemy’s attention focused on the fighting at the front, their sides and rear would be left vulnerable, and it would take time for them to re-orient toward the new threat when your flanking force arrived. This window of vulnerability allowed you to inflict heavy casualties relatively easily. Generalizing this strategy, Greene recommends finding ways to get around your enemy’s frontal defenses.
Exploit Vulnerabilities With Hidden Strength
Richard Rumelt corroborates Greene’s advice on targeting your enemy’s vulnerabilities in Good Strategy Bad Strategy. Moreover, he adds that your enemy’s greatest vulnerabilities are the ones he doesn’t know about. If your enemy has known vulnerabilities, he will likely try to guard them somehow, but if you identify weaknesses that he didn’t know he had, you can exploit them to full effect. And if you can unleash strengths that your enemy doesn’t know you have against weaknesses that he doesn’t know he has, your attack will be maximally devastating.
For example, suppose you’re in the manufacturing business. Your competitor has a large facility devoted to metal casting machinery, which they see as one of their strengths. You find a way to produce the same product more efficiently using a different process, such as sheet metal stamping instead of casting. Now you can undercut your competitor’s prices, and their investment in casting equipment makes it difficult for them to retool for the new production method—what they thought was a strength turned out to be a weakness.
According to Greene, one of the most decisive ways to defeat an enemy force is to surround small units of that force, isolating them and crushing them one at a time. By sending a large portion of your army against a small portion of your enemy’s army, you improve your odds of winning.
(Shortform note: This is a crucial element of Geoffrey Moore’s strategy for Crossing the Chasm, or breaking into the mainstream market with an innovative product. Moore observes that mainstream customers tend to buy from market leaders based on their reputation. Thus, he advises you to pick one specific niche and focus all your resources on becoming the undisputed leader in that particular niche. Once you’ve dominated that niche, you pick another niche that you can adapt your product to, and repeat the process until you dominate the entire market.)
Furthermore, Greene argues that when the target group realizes that they are cut off from the rest of their army, anxiety or even panic will set in. A panicked soldier doesn’t fight well, and makes irrational decisions, making it easier for you to defeat them.
However, another piece of Greene’s advice suggests that this strategy has the potential to backfire. In the context of motivating your own troops, Greene explains that situations where retreat or relief is not an option can drive people to fight so desperately that they are almost invincible. Thus, when you isolate an enemy unit by surrounding them, they may panic or see the situation as hopeless, making them easier to defeat—or, they may become more self-reliant and resourceful out of necessity, making them harder to defeat.
Test Anxiety Illustrates the Danger of Isolating an Opponent
Studies of academic testing corroborate the principle that soldiers cut off from help may either panic or rise to the challenge of battle. Educator Barbara Oakley asserts that the physical effects of test anxiety can either increase or decrease your performance, depending on how you process it.
It’s normal to experience symptoms of anxiety like sweaty palms and butterflies in your stomach before an exam. If you tell yourself these symptoms mean that you’re excited to do your best on the test, the hormones that cause them will actually enhance your performance. But if you think the symptoms mean you’re worried about the test, then the same hormones will amplify your worry instead, degrading your performance.
This is likely the same phenomenon that Greene observed in a military context: Soldiers facing overwhelming odds with no way out surely experience more powerful symptoms of anxiety than students facing a test. As with the students, the anxiety may either enhance or degrade the soldiers’ fighting abilities, depending on how they process it.
Take a minute to think about how you could apply some of Greene’s advice to winning the battles in your own life.
Greene says one of the keys to developing an effective strategy is knowing exactly what you want to accomplish. Think of a project or something you’d like to accomplish in the near future and briefly describe your desired end-state. (For example, paying off debt, getting a promotion, or positioning your product as the market leader in a certain sector.)
Greene emphasizes the importance of understanding your enemies (remember, your “enemy” is anything or anyone standing between you and your goal). What could prevent you from achieving the desired end-state you described in your previous answer? In other words, who are your enemies? Consider both literal enemies (for example, political opponents) and figurative enemies (for example, if you habitually scroll through social media to the point where it takes time away from achieving your goals, maybe your social media habit is an enemy that you’ll need to vanquish.)
Greene advises striking at the source of your enemy’s power. Analyze one of the enemies that you identified. What is it that makes that enemy powerful or enables them to stand in your way? What do they depend on to maintain their strength?
How could you neutralize the source of your enemy’s power that you identified above? List at least one way you could strike at the root of the problem.