What it Means to Play the Game

Participation in a game does not guarantee knowledge of that participation

In my last article I briefly mentioned that to excel in life one must play the game, and to play a game well, you must know that there is a game to be played. The game in question being the game of life and its many quests, side quests, and mini-games.

I like to refer to life as a game or series of games because it becomes easier to see the underlying competition that surrounds us every day. To be fair, there are plenty of cooperative elements in these games, and life as a whole is far from a zero-sum-game, but when you dive into specifics you can see the zero-sum elements. Often in life you will find out you were already playing a game, and sometimes you’ll find it is too late to win that game with your unplanned strategy. Over long enough timelines this can be overcome, but this revelation always feels terrible at the moment of discovery.

Competition can take many different forms, and life gets so much easier when you learn to identify competitions. Once you know you’re in a competition, you can research a strategy and begin to win. Some examples of competitions are job searching, university admissions, salary negotiation (or negotiation in general), posting on social media, dressing well to go to the mall, getting promoted, dating, and countless other competitions we enter into every day.