You're not able to control if your direct supervisor secretly wants to limit your career advancement by doing anything except quitting.
If you're in a sales environment with public figures, if you're a star, you can't hide that you are; it will be common knowledge and in your example, this will mean sabotage.
While you can control for working hard, arriving early, and knowing more, you can't really control things like your manager's goal subordination: no amount of clique loyalty would get you past that.
In short, how does one play politics, if every example of playing politics secretly is just "Quit your job?"
Sure it's "actionable": Don't play politics, try to do your job the best you can, likely piss off your supervisor, and get fired. Otherwise, play along and don't get fired.
Want to advance based on the commercial value of your own work? Sure: Be a founder of a startup.
But saying playing politics is a good idea so that you "don't get fired" seems to directly contradict why you said politics playing was a good idea in the first place:
>"...[Y]our direct supervisor does not want you to do more or better because that might get you promoted over him. Instead, he wants you to do not very well. Then he can have an excuse to fire you..."
Which means that it's not really play along and don't get fired, it's play along and get fired at an indeterminate time that under such a manager probably is much sooner than later.
It seems that if your boss really fears you being promoted over him, that implies it must be a serious possibility. Since in either case, focusing or not focusing on politics gets you get fired (i.e, it's not actionable, or at best futilely so), why sit and wait on the feedlot to get slaughtered and instead focus on what you do control, getting a promotion and building the skills/doing the things that get you closer to that?
Do well, really piss off your manager, and get fired right away. Of course, if what you do is so good you get a lot of visibility from higher ups, then your manager may slow your work for a year or so and then fire you. Without the visibility, really good work can get you fired right away.
But if you play along, you have a good chance of lasting for some years before the manager fires you to hire someone else he wants so he can have an excuse to pay more so that he can get paid more.
So, right, can get fired either way.
Maybe a big lesson is, do things that are good AND very visible to the higher ups. That also is politics.
And then the other lesson, start your own business.
In a lot of organizations, the worker bees are encouraged to believe that their job is secure, secure enough they can get their kids through school, pay off the house mortgage, etc. For this, the worker bees are willing to accept less pay. But in such a company, firing people starts to convince people that their their job is not secure and want to leave to get just the extra money, what they are really worth.
Generally, a job in a large business organization is one heck of a poor source of family financial security; a lot of people get lucky, but many get badly hurt.
Generally young people should aim at owning their own business.
You're not able to control if your direct supervisor secretly wants to limit your career advancement by doing anything except quitting.
If you're in a sales environment with public figures, if you're a star, you can't hide that you are; it will be common knowledge and in your example, this will mean sabotage.
While you can control for working hard, arriving early, and knowing more, you can't really control things like your manager's goal subordination: no amount of clique loyalty would get you past that.
In short, how does one play politics, if every example of playing politics secretly is just "Quit your job?"