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?"
Want to advance based on the commercial value of your own work? Sure: Be a founder of a startup.
>"...[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?
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.
For more, there may be some cliques; join them and appear to be loyal to them.
A lot of the advice in the OP will scare your supervisor and cause him to try to get rid of you.
Net, play politics.
For one step more, the politics you are playing is well known in the literature of public administration, organizational behavior, and sociology and is called goal subordination where the workers subordinate the goals of the organization to their own goals.
Goal subordination is common in middle management in an organization big enough to have several levels of management. There commonly a middle manager wants to arrange that his position is relatively well paid and stable. To this end he wants to build an empire of subordinates who will not challenge him. The middle manager gets paid more because of his relatively large number of subordinates.
In a lot of medium to large organizations, an employee who is a star gets attacked. E.g., an employee A who sells more makes the other employees look bad, and they can retaliate by sabotaging employee A.
E.g., in a research university, never tell the others how your research is going. Instead, say nothing until the corresponding papers are PUBLISHED -- then it is too late for the others to sabotage the research, e.g., cause you to waste time by constantly dropping by your office to talk, putting you on silly committees, assigning you new courses to teach where you have to do new preparations, etc.
Net, instead of working to make the organization more successful, it is super common to replace reality with easier to do/defend processes and to fight with others in the company, especially just down the hall.