Your boss giving you a ton more work, even though you’re the most overworked person at your 9-5? Some sneaky coworker taking credit of your work and getting a raise because of it? Your work culture is toxic and you hate it? In this post, I’m going to show you how to conquer all these obstacles and win at office politics.

As a caveat: this post is mainly about big companies. This post may be irrelevant for startup companies as 1) they’re a lot smaller and move a lot quicker, and 2) I’ve never worked for a startup so I can’t give a good opinion on it.

Secret On How To Win At Office Politics: Knowing You Can’t Win

Office politics is like a fight. Someone might be the victor of a fight, but nobody actually wins.

There’s a couple of approaches to winning office politics.

First, you can do it the conventional way: you can read 48 Laws Of Power and execute it if you’d like. The book contains 48 cardinal rules on how to navigate people in order to gain power. More specifically, you should never outshine your master and make people above you look good. Be fake and avoid drama. Be positive even when things are very negative. And a lot more.

I personally don’t recommend this conventional way of doing things (as I’ll explain below), but if you’re set on becoming the CEO of your company via politics, you should definitely pick up that book to read.

OK, so the reason why I don’t recommend this conventional way of dealing with office politics is because you’re never going to win, in my opinion.

Sure, you might get some short-term result you desire, but you’ll always need to look over your shoulder for the next “thing” that’ll come up.

This blog’s entire philosophy is to do minimal work for the highest return. I advocate 10-hour workweeks here.

Office politics’ philosophy is the complete opposite. Do the maximum amount of work and get minimal return. Even if you do accomplish some goal, take someone’s credit, and be a nasty little prick – your reward is just going to be a raise that’s at-par or below inflation. So with all your emotional investment and effort to navigate something as volatile as people…all you get is almost nothing.

The only way to win at office politics is to disengage and work less. Care less. Produce minimum results and nobody can take credit for it. If your position is redundant, they’ll fire you regardless of results. If your position is invaluable, they’ll be too lazy to fire you no matter what. As a result, if you work at a big company, the most important skill to learn is to know how to 1) last long enough at your current job, so 2) you can successfully interview for a new job that pays a lot more.

Let’s say on the off chance you win and get some promotions quicker than others. And let’s say you even become CEO one day at your company by beating out every other employee out there (this is nearly impossible by the way at a 10,000 employee company and you’re much more likely to make the same amount as your CEO by starting your own company and making that successful). You climb the corporate ladder and you’ve “won,” or so you think.

But all you’ve done is dug yourself a deeper whole in wage slavery. This defeats the whole point of this blog, which is to make good money and live a good life. As long as you’re locked inside wage slavery and your life is controlled by office politics, you’re not winning anything in my book.

Lastly, trying to win at office politics is too risky. Results from office politics are based on the opinions of a few key people, whereas your side hustle’s results is based on the collective opinion of the market. A market as a whole is much more predictable than 1 or 2 people in your organization.

If you do excellent work and are the best at office politics, you can still be in a situation where everyone except 1 or 2 key people love you. In this case, you’ll never become CEO and you might never even get another promotion. In other words, you’re not in control of your own destiny when you go down the path of trying win at politics.

The Real Way To Win At Office Politics

The first step to “win” is to not care about office politics at all. This is the only rational move.

Second, realize that your coworkers and your manager are nothing but a bunch of dopamine craving monkeys that’s addicted to approval.

Third, realize also that your coworkers’ lives have 0 meaning and the only way they can validate their existence is to feel powerful about their wage slavery situation.

Finally, realize that no matter what anyone at work says to you, it simply DOES. NOT. MATTER. The reason’s simple: your coworkers and your manager do not matter. They’re only a speck in your life. They don’t affect your side hustle at all.

The only thing that matters is your own personal goals outside of your 9-5 and what you’re doing everyday to get there.

Here’s some ways/examples of how you can disengage from work to actually win at office politics – by not emotionally participating at all:

• Your manager says you suck despite your delivering half the results for a billion-dollar project for a 6-person team? Shrug it off and say some BS like “OK, I’ll improve.”
• See something? Don’t say something. Say nothing. If someone does something egregious, let them (except if you’re in the healthcare industry where people’s live at risk, then definitely say something). Don’t even bother calling people out on it. Trust me, I used to try and raise standards at work, but all I got was “feedback” saying I was “too harsh” for giving feedback to other people.
• Just be stoic and neutral about everything. Have some obvious improvement that’ll make everything better? Just keep your mouth shut. Your work culture might say “we wanna hear your feedback!” Don’t fall for that trap. Just save your best thinking and work for your own side hustle and business.
• Don’t get involved in work drama. Nor start it. Not because you’re in the “wrong” – you’ll normally be “right” and can even get everyone to understand. But the only thing you’ll accomplish is build animosity because nothing’s going to change even if it’s obvious everything’s wrong. Trying to improve the work situation is futile and is a waste of the limited amount of time you have left on this planet.

It’s Not “Either/Or” — It’s Both

Once you remove the emotional control work has over you, it’s time to remove the financial control that work has over you.

Only in this way will you achieve complete freedom from wage slavery and actually “win” office politics.

After all, what better feeling is there when your manager tells you that you suck, and you can genuinely not care at all in your soul because your side income is making more than your 9-5? You’re only in that meeting with your manager to burn some time so you can go back to doing nothing and collecting an extra paycheck to supplement your side hustle income.

That’s winning.

To recap: office politics is much harder to win at than a side hustle. And even if you “won” at office politics, you just get more money but not the freedom.

We do more than that here on this blog.

Starting your own business or side hustle is much easier than becoming a CEO in a large corporation. Except when you win at your business you’ll get paid just the same (if not more) as being a CEO at a large corporation. The only difference is you’ll also enjoy freedom and be in control of your life.

So, don’t be dumb and try to climb the corporate latter. Don’t try and trade your freedom for more money. It’s not “either, or.” It’s both.

To truly win, you’ll need to have both good money and a good life.

P.S.: If you can share this with someone you know that’s suffering from “I need to climb the corporate ladder” syndrome, I’d be super grateful to you in helping grow my blog. Shoot any comments or questions my way at hello@goodmoneygoodlife.com and I’ll *actually* respond.

P.P.S: This post won’t apply to you if you’re one of the psychopaths that actually enjoy manipulating people and being a cuck to your corporate job though. If you derive real pleasure in being a slave, kissing up to people, and sacrificing your freedom in some weird perverse way, you’re free to either 1) pursue office politics in the conventional way as mentioned above, or 2) seek a psychiatrist.