What are the rules to the game?
What game are we even playing?
A couple years ago, we caught the Super Bowl on TV, with the 49ers playing in the biggest sporting event of the year. As my son was asking why things were happening, I found myself having to explain, more and more, the strategic aspects of American football: timeout and clock management, probabilities of field goals versus touchdowns, point spreads, etc. It's genuinely impressive how much game theory is accessible to casual fans.
But that intricacy was lost on my third grade kid; he just enjoyed seeing dudes smash into each other. When he discovered Retro Bowl on his iPad a few years later, his only goal was to score as many points as possible, as fast as possible. Thus, much like many games of Madden NFL, the only plays that mattered were either QB sacks or Hail Mary pass plays[1].
In sports, this cliché is often referred to as the "game within a game." The phrase refers to in-the-moment subgoals that can contribute to winning the game, but come with their own set of operating principles. Or, they may not contribute; winning games may hamper that season's goals[2], or not be in the best interests of the sports franchise. Each layer of "game" can institute its own rules of engagement and definition of success, and it's not necessary for all layers to be pointed in the same direction.
In this, sports can become a microcosm for life. Many of us don't recognize that we're playing the games fostered onto us by our environments, our cultures, or our upbringings. We end up following an implicit set of rules and constraints, shaping our behaviors to conform to an opaque rulebook, often without a scoreboard. If we can become conscientious of our participation, we can actively decide to keep playing—or opt into another game entirely.
A Game of Wealth
I have always been interested in personal finance. But beyond the numbers and accounting, there is a very individual, inherently subjective, yet completely fundamental question: what is the goal of building wealth?
Now, there are definitely bad answers—even though few will admit to their intrinsic motivations. Some chase money for clout, which is particularly acute in this era of social media. Some live for competition, where wealth becomes the way they keep score and "win" against their peer groups. Some believe money buys them happiness[3], not just in the sense of being content, but that it'd drastically turn around a dissatisfactory situation—I've known distant relatives who strongly espoused that belief, who became devastated when their low-probability windfall never materialized.
As you can imagine, these unhealthy pursuits pull people to the extremes: they turn to crimes, sacrifice health and family, or go into unsustainable modes of saving and thrift to "make their number."
A better game to play—though still not perfect—is to accumulate a nest egg for an early retirement and the freedom for personal pursuits, i.e., joining the Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) movement. Although FIRE is not without its faults, its adherents focus more on buying back time and insulating their families from economic turbulence. The community celebrates people reaching their thresholds, rather than compare each other's brokerage accounts. In fact, the toughest transition that potential early retirees make is letting go of the "one more year [of work]" trap—making a choice to play a different game.
A Game of Work
In the context of work, the idea of shifting behaviors typically segues into discussions about role progression, promotions, and inevitably, career goals. As a manager, this conundrum comes up frequently during performance reviews.
Sometimes people don't want to admit that they're playing the job title game, or that they're locked into a contest comparing their salary with acquaintances within our industry. Some people lean into prestige, whether it's a brand-name company they're a part of, a team that's lauded by executives, or even trending technologies getting all the attention. Occasionally, by chatting through motivations and rationales, folks realize they had trapped themselves into games they didn't enjoy.
Identifying which game you want to play also clarifies its rules. With promotions, the typical advice focuses on climbing the corporate ladder. But context matters. If, for instance, your company's career ladder mandates that staff-level engineers build complex systems, yet all of your team's staff engineers are hands-on firefighting all the time—the written best practice is overruled by cultural convention. There are the expressed rules, then there are the shadow rules to the game.
What the company values, what the HR team says they value, and the actual values demonstrated by your team and manager—would ideally be the same, but usually differ in subtle and nuanced ways. Navigating success in the workplace means understanding these implicit norms, and deciphering the rules that govern the game you're willing to play.
A Game of Life
My immigrant background provides me a wide range of attitudes, when sampling friends and family, on what matters. Many of the family members with my same background prioritize setting the foundation for future generations. Some of my relatives who grew up here emphasize stability and self-improvement, to fulfill the expectations of their immigrant ancestry. Colleagues who moved here to Silicon Valley are driven by participating in the technological frontier and making a lot of money along the way; friends who grew up in the Bay Area are more mellow, caring more about longevity and social status.
These are, of course, broad generalizations, but the through-threads of family background and cultural expectations do shape each group of people. This is why a luxury hotel for some would be considered just another place for others, or admission to an Ivy League college could be unremarkable, versus a profound source of pride. When folks aren't even playing the same game, it takes a mental adjustment or two to engage at the right level, to situate myself in each environment and its implicit set of rules.
Subconscious Scorekeeping
Whether it's money, career, or life, the most important aspect for each domain is to recognize the game and its rules—and then change them if they are not serving us. The trouble is that figuring out the game itself can be intimidating.
Sometimes I see this not with the big, broad ideas, but in the small things. It's a well-off relative always angling to get a good deal, and feeling aggrieved for the rest of the day if they overpaid by $2. It's a coworker who spends all of their spare time studying to add course certifications to their résumé. It's a friend who will drop a backhanded compliment while subtly boasting about their own kids' accomplishments. There's a flavor of "game within a game" at play that I notice, and on some level appreciate.
But I also suspect that a lot of the mental accounting and scorekeeping is subconscious. I wish people were more self-aware of the rules they're following, and more importantly, why they're adhering to these rules. Because if they can stop and think about the consequences and second and third-order effects of their behavior, maybe they can tweak the rules that don't serve them well, or opt out of that game altogether. The first step is honest self-assessment.
It's a huge mental shift, and I can attest that it's really hard to do consistently. What helped me was reading about the philosophy of stoicism and trying to live by it, governing my thinking and emotions with reasoning and self-control. In particular, its core tenet, the Dichotomy of Control, has been instrumental in regulating my reactions—most of the time. The goal is to be intentional with the games I play. When I'm successful, I get to craft a set of rules that serve me well in wealth, work, and life.
He took this one step further by going for a two-point conversion every time he scored a touchdown, regardless of either team's score. ↩︎
This is currently playing out in the NBA, where incentives for some of its teams to lose have gotten so bad that it's making news on mainstream media. ↩︎
Daniel Kahneman published a famous paper back in 2010 that claimed that happiness plateaued at a certain income level—around $75,000/year—which was then contradicted by another study published in 2021 that claimed that happiness still increases after that mark. Remarkably, the two researchers reconciled their findings and concluded that happiness does increase with more income; it was the level of unhappiness that plateaued after an income threshold. ↩︎
