I think, if in doubt, you could do a lot worse than use this as a list of guidelines for what not to do. It's designed to sell by masking itself as frightfully hard-nosed realism while actually appealing to the audience's baser instincts.

What does 'baser instincts' mean? Recall that in the Stone Age, life was mostly a zero-sum game. Wealth was mostly foraged, not farmed or manufactured. You spent your life in the tribe you were born in, which was unlikely to grow or find new opportunities except at the expense of another tribe. You couldn't win except by making somebody else lose. None of these things are anywhere near true anymore, but evolution hasn't caught up; we still have instincts honed for that environment, against which our main antidotes are a sense of moral value together with a widening of the scope of what we consider our tribe. In other words, if you feel a sense of moral revulsion when presented with what looks like hard-nosed, realistic advice, it's quite likely that your visceral reaction is correct and the advice is wrong.

"Never outshine the master"? Wrong. A master worth having, would have it no other way. A master not worth having is, well, not worth having.

"Conceal your intentions"? Wrong. Make your intentions clear, then follow through on them. It attracts those who would deal honestly with you, and deters would-be aggressors so that a fight doesn't have to start in the first place.

"Get others to do the work for you, but always take the credit"? Only if you want your employees to be those who know they can't find work elsewhere. The competent are no longer permanently stuck in the positions into which they were born.

"Learn to keep people dependent on you"? Then you'll be able to keep them in the mud and your boots on their faces slightly higher in the mud - meanwhile, those who fostered independent allies, will be climbing the highest peaks.

"Play a sucker to catch a sucker: play dumber than your mark"? Only if you want to become entangled with suckers. If your own self-interest really matters to you, don't exploit suckers, just stay away from them.

(Okay, granted there are a few pieces of often-good advice, like "Always say less than necessary" and "Do not go past the mark you aimed for; in victory, learn when to stop". You can't literally use this list as anti-advice. But on the whole, it's bad.)

Caveat: if your life's ambition is to become chief of your tribe, then to a certain extent you are playing a zero-sum game after all, and perhaps this advice may serve you well. But outside that, if you ever find yourself in a situation where it starts looking like good advice, that may be a warning sign you have stumbled into a zero-sum game. In that case, don't spend your efforts on becoming good at it. Spend them on getting the hell out of it.

"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."