Simple Technique for Victory

2026-06-21 · Ho Chanh Nghia

Originally published on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/simple-technique-victory-khanh-pham-elhbc/

Simple Technique for Victory

Along the line of Tai Chi and other soft martial arts (as oppose to hard), this will get you at least one solution.

1. NSA spies on everyone and everything. Naturally you would turn on vpn, buy more security, hire more security etc. When I was sitting around bored because the US military locked me up for booking a flight to China see Shenzhen, I was thinking about what it would take counter the massive surveillance program. My natural solution was to help them. Help them spy and store so much they they break from storing those data. That was how I crashed the school network when the military was teaching me basic unix admin course. They taught me how to pipe an output, and I created a loop where the output was the input, and it just crashed the system once it got large enough. In martial arts or in surveillance, when you see too much it is hard to response when you’re overwhelmed with signals. no longer sure what is noise and what is signal.
2. I started having a girlfriend in High School. Some times that comes with competition. The girls expect me to fight for her attention. I just walk away.
3. In business, everyone wants million dollar ideas. No one wants 1,000 dollars ideas. I would just gather all the 1,000 ideas instead. I mean, Amazon.com was started from the idea of selling books, something every business dreamers look down on. Aramak is a billion dollar business, and they clean laundry. Infosys is a billion dollar company, and they are only fixer of windows

all of a sudden my brain locked up. Well it is just one technique anyway, no matter how many examples, it is expressing the same idea.

which of the chinese sages talks about success in terms of water flowing to the lowest place. and we should go where water go. while everyone is fighting for 1,000 dollars, we are at the bottom gathering 1 dollars but no competitions.

The sage you are thinking of is Laozi (also spelled Lao Tzu), the ancient Chinese philosopher and founder of Taoism. He laid out this exact framework in his foundational text, the Tao Te Ching.

Laozi used water as the ultimate model for success and structural power because of its natural tendency to seek the lowest point—the places that everyone else ignores or disdains.

The Water Metaphor in the Tao Te Ching

Two specific chapters in the Tao Te Ching outline this philosophy:

• Chapter 8 (The Supreme Good): “The supreme good is like water, which nourishes all things without trying to. It is content with the low places that people disdain. Thus it is like the Tao.”
• Chapter 66 (Leading from Below): “How do rivers and seas become the lords of the hundred valleys? By being good at staying low. That is how they are the lords of the hundred valleys.”

Laozi observed that water doesn’t fight. It flows around obstacles and settles at the bottom. Yet, because it stays at the lowest point, gravity dictates that everything eventually flows into it. It becomes the ocean not by climbing, but by receiving.

The Strategy of Bu Zheng (Non-Contention)

Your analogy—gathering the $1 at the bottom with no competition rather than fighting a bloody battle for the $1,000 at the top—is a perfect modern translation of Laozi’s core strategic principle: Bu Zheng (不争), which translates to “non-contention” or “not competing.”

Here is how that plays out as a structural advantage:

• Zero-Friction Accumulation: When everyone is fighting for the $1,000 prize, the environment is high-attrition, loud, and expensive. Most of their energy is spent fighting competitors, not gathering capital.
• Gravity Does the Work: By positioning yourself at the “bottom,” you operate in a blue ocean. Because there is no competition, 100% of your energy goes directly into capacity building and accumulation.
• Foundational Dependency: The “bottom” is the infrastructure. While others fight for the high-status, high-visibility prizes at the top, the person at the bottom is building the bedrock that all the fighters ultimately have to stand on or use.

By the time the fighters realize what has happened, the person gathering the $1s at the bottom has quietly become the sea.