About 1500 years after Sun Tzu wrote The Art Of War, Niccolò Machiavelli wrote The Prince, which was followed this last century by Anton La Vey’s Satanic Bible. All are infamously brutal, unrelenting tomes about acquiring and keeping power through mental dexterity and military force. There are few other works of humanity that so brazenly indulge and celebrate the dark side of human nature and the ruthless avarice oif we are capable of as a species. There is no pretention; we must know what we want, and take it when the opportunity arises, fearlessly and without hesitation. And show no remorse for wanting it or getting it.

There’s a strange stigma about being confident and knowing what you want, almost as if its some kind of arrogance, or cynical in some way to have an agenda. I have an agenda. We all do. Its more a case of whether we actually divulge it or try to hide it behind our modesty and general niceness. You have to search for it and ask yourself the most important question you will ever ask. The world we live in is a human jungle and we are nothing if not animals - a species of ape to be precise. Don’t fool yourself, as you are capable of cold-blooded killing. If your children were threatened or you were attacked, you could, and would, kill someone. You are designed for it and you wouldn’t hesitate once the adrenaline was pumping. Nothing in the world is more natural.

The reason you overhear so many pub regulars on fruit machines and other perpetual losers going on about “luck” and wondering why some people are so successful in life is that they fundamentally misunderstand what it takes to be successful. There is no such thing as “luck”. It doesn’t exist. Banish it from your mind immediately and never let it back in again. “Being in the right place at the right time” is nothing more than being in as many places as you can all the time. Success is a simple maths equation that most people never learn. Life is a matter of probability, and the sooner you learn it, the easier everything becomes. The more places you are, the higher the likelihood that you will get your break. If you don’t bother to better yourself, you won’t get anything. The harder you work, the luckier you become, as the saying goes.

We all know how to back off, relax, procrastinate, let it wash over us and leave it to another day. Its a cutesy little mechanism we use to avoid rejection, failure and disappointment and pick up when we are young from our parents and schooling. We squirm and run away when the pressure kicks in or something is demanded of us, and then complain about our lot in life. We are indirectly told not to rise above our station or stick our neck out so we’re one of the crowd and live a nice risk-free and safe life that’s similar to everyone else’s. As several very wise men have said, 90% of life is about just waiting around, and 80% of success is showing up. Think about it. Its what we are trained to do whether we admit it or not - wait around, be apathetic, shut up, sit down and do as we are told.

Just one ride on the tube will show you how utterly miserable most people are. They get up at the early hours and work themselves to death building someone else’s company and/or dreams, so they can earn money to pay the interest on their mortgage that provides a home ultimately owned by someone else. The traps lulls them in and before you know it, time has flown by and all the things you said you wanted to live when you were younger have past their jump-in date and gone forever. All the opportunities that presented themselves were put off, missed or left to another day, along with accompanying excuses as to why you did nothing about them.

A lot of people are happy just to drift through life, but many aren’t. If you work in a job you hate or your passions life elsewhere, you can put it off for a while but it will begin to eat at you. That other career, that hobby, that idea, that longing, that passion you’ve had since you were young will always be there at the back of your mind and the longer you leave it, the harder it gets. You can only resist your nature so long before you have to do what you want to do. It takes a long time to work out what you nature is in the first place, but once you have it, you are driven and compelled by it. It becomes a hunger that drains you and makes the world you live in grey compared to the one you want.

It takes courage to step out, and there are real-world concerns about where the money will come from to pay the bills and what it will ultimately cost you. You never know if you’re making the right decision or whether you will succeed. But no-one who has ever given everything to something has ever regretted it, and neither will you. Fear and apathy can be paralysing, but if you risk nothing you are risking everything. Living closer to the edge means you sacrifice certainty for excitement, and you don’t know what will happen. You are in control and set the rules, and whether you succeed or not is up to you and down to the effort you make.

It takes courage, strength and will to overcome your fear. How many times have you stood there and done nothing, or waited for the moment to pass so you could seize the moment next time? Knowing when to strike is more important than knowing when to back off, and we are never taught it at any time in our lives. We must plan for it and recognise it when it arrives. It requires aggression and surgical precision, coupled with massive and deadly force concentrated into one moment. Its the moment you commit to your decision and stand behind it to see it through. You act boldly to take what you want without waiting or worrying, so you can have what you want in future. There is no selfishness in securing a future for yourself or being a person who isn’t scared to exploit an opportunity.

Nature understands and thrives on the principle of knowing when to strike, and it loves boldness. All animals hunt and/or are opportunistic, never knowing where their next meal is coming from. They wait, scout in advance and camoflage themselves in the background in order to be ready for when they need to attack and take what they need. The deadliest animals are the cold-blooded ones whose strike is unexpected, overwhelming and extremely fast. The greatest military victories are those that involve surprise, explosive ferocity, massive numbers and/or strategy that renders the target indefensible. Its the way the world works and has always worked, whether you like it or not, or even if you accept it.

Knowing when its time is one thing, acting to violently deliver a blow is another. You can never be 100% sure whether the time is right, so again it comes down to a matter of probability. You consult the life weather chart and use your instincts. You follow your heart and back it up with your head. You collect all the information you can and sharpen your sword for when the time comes. There is a time to cuddle on the couch and a time to ruthlessly punch through the wall in front of you until your hands are bleeding and you are surrounded by broken rock. The trick is knowing one from the other and discerning the action the context demands. When you face a poet, you don’t draw your sword to him, and when you face a swordsman, you don’t recite him poetry. Not everyone in this world wishes you well, and many you just can’t reach.

Fear makes the wolf bigger than he is, and the bigger they come, the harder they fall. The good news is that you are designed as an assassin and your nature means you are very, very good at it. Embracing your inner darkness means you accept that it is a permanent beast that is better exercised than exorcised. You fight until you’re numb, and it doesn’t hurt any more after that, just like skin thickening where you continually batter it. The war is inside you, not out there, and more often than not you’re fighting yourself and spinning around confused. Life is as simple as the jungle because if you don’t take what you want, someone else will take it first or directly from you. You can second-guess and analyse all day long until you are blue in the face, but the time comes when you find out exactly whether your backbone is a wishbone or its made of steel. You have to put your money where your mouh is.

So the question is, when is it your time to strike? As the biblical saying goes, you fool, this very night your life may be demanded of you and what have you done for yourself? What do you have to show for all your worrying, fear and faffing - did it add any extra hours to your life or get you where you want to be? There is an opportunity staring you in the face right now that may not be there tomorrow, and you will miss it if you don’t act. You may never have the chance again and it may be slipping away before your very eyes while you sit there and watch. You have no reason whatsoever to wait unless its part of a bigger plan. Step out and risk it, because the reward from just doing that is delicious enough because you are truly living.