Status Games You Can Win
Use the top 10% method to live a good life, make better decisions, and be happy
Good things await those who make the right comparisons in life.
We can’t turn off the comparison machine that’s always running in our heads. The next best thing is choosing comparisons that make us feel great instead of feeding sad thoughts.
Why Not Play Games You Can Win?
Feeling that we have status and a sense of self-worth is vital to our self-esteem, which drives many positive outcomes in life. The trick is to choose which status games we play rather than being inadvertently forced to play others’ games.
Daily life offers so many options. Why not choose to play status games we can win? Let’s consider “winning” as getting to the top 10% of a particular game (as we define it) because that level of performance will drive self-esteem.
It is simple to create games that suit this purpose. Examples:
I have never been more than an average runner, in terms of speed, that is. So I focused on simply sticking with it. By running the Zurich marathon every year for 20 years in a row, I became one of just a handful of people who did so. Who cares how fast I am?
Same thing with completing the World Marathon Majors and even getting a Guinness World Record in the process. That was similarly a function of simple determination and persistence. While others worried about finishing in under four hours or three hours, I just kept going.
If you can’t compete on speed, compete on duration. If you can’t win along one dimension, choose another that suits your abilities.
If this sounds delusional, as in, we’re making up competitions that no one else even realizes or cares about, you’re right. But if it makes us feel accomplished, it’s a happy delusion that serves a purpose.
Your Game Hacks: Be Pragmatic, Stoic, and Machiavellian
As I’m using the terms here, the guidance is simple:
Pragmatic means focusing on what works
Stoic means looking within
Machiavellian means being tactical
Be pragmatic … or you can do stuff that doesn’t work
Even assuming it’s well-intentioned, most advice doesn’t work. It’s too generic (or too specific), too hard to implement, doesn’t solve the underlying problem, only works temporarily, etc.
When I set up a global legal team for a new public company, I had to sift through mountains of advice. I found myself forced to adopt pragmatism as a guiding philosophy. No matter what others said, the only metric I valued was this: Does it work?
Does it work for me and my company? In our context, at this exact moment in time, with the specific challenges we’re facing? If not, scrap it. If yes, figure out why and do more of it.
After some time, I began experimenting with pragmatism in my private life. What made one person succeed while other similarly situated people failed? Can others do it as well?
This may sound harsh but most people are not good role models, except as object lessons in what not to do. They waft through life like insects borne on the wind, flitting from one colorful flower to the next. Worse, many people act in demonstrably harmful ways, sabotaging themselves.
Whatever is important to you (health, wealth, career success, relationships, etc.), start by finding people who are good at it. Make them your focus. Spend time with them.
To give a personal example, I wanted to get fit after realizing in my early 30s I was overweight and unfit. I started hanging out with accomplished runners, which transformed my life.
Be Stoic — first for tough times and later for making times of your choosing
We will face tough times in our lives. Knowing this means we need not live in fear or lament when the tough times come.
Stoicism initially helped me by encouraging me to embrace hard things. I relished pushing boundaries and discovering I could do more than I first thought.
The combination of pragmatism and Stoicism results in profound effectiveness. For many years, I championed effectiveness at work and in private life.
If the story ended there, it would be perhaps interesting but unimportant. What shifted the plot was, ironically, too much success. How many people upon achieving all they once sought, ask themselves: “Is that all? I thought it would feel better. What’s missing?”
What was missing, for me and I suspect for many, was meaning, the why of it all. That question led to another round of pragmatism — asking who is happy and satisfied in life and why. What are the things that contribute to living a good life?
How wonderful that answering this question led me right back to Stoicism. This time beyond the superficial finding that we can endure tough times to the underlying vein of wisdom: What we see is a function of where we look.
Put differently, our experience in life is shaped by how we think about it. And we have ultimate control of our thoughts. This allows us to not only overcome any situation but to determine what environments we find ourselves in altogether.
The power to look at what we want
Just like we are surrounded with mounds of advice, most of it ill-suited to our needs, we are invited to make comparisons that don’t make us happy. Rather, the comparisons pushed on us are designed to make us feel lacking.
Marketers have made an art (and a giant industry) of emphasizing what’s missing in our lives. They tell us that if we want to be happy, we must buy their products, drink their beverages, and download their apps. The immediate impact of this dark art is to make us unhappy.
Online influencers emphasize what we’re missing by highlighting what they’re enjoying. Lifestyles of the rich and famous satisfy our voyeuristic instincts while driving dissatisfaction.
This comparison group is hopelessly large, often the whole country if not the entire world. What are the chances you are the luckiest, wealthiest, most attractive, and most accomplished person among millions or billions?
Would you rather play games you can win or games where you’re almost certain to be the sucker? Put that way, few would knowingly choose games they’re designed to lose. Yet accepting what marketers and social media offer sets us on the path to disillusionment.
Be Machiavellian by choosing battles you can win
Now we come to the beating heart of it, dear reader. If finding happiness is a meaningful pursuit, then directing our thoughts is a path to doing so.
The comparison machine constantly running in our heads is the greatest risk to happiness, always threatening to lead us astray by spotting how often we fall short.
We can put happiness in our hands by grabbing control of the comparison machine. Stoicism tells us we can choose how to direct our thoughts and Machiavellism points the way forward: We shall only play status games we can win.
Find areas where your current or achievable performance automatically puts you in the top 10%.
This approach works because it feeds the comparison engine. The engine is blind. It doesn’t know whether some accomplishments are worth more than others. It only knows whether you’re excelling in the areas it’s been trained to look at.
Here are some ways to collect status by playing this game:
Education — Did you do well in school or earn an advanced degree?
Work — Are you working, does your company value you, do you have management responsibilities?
Finances — How do your earnings and savings compare to the rest of the globe? You’d be surprised how little it takes to be in the global top 10%
Physical aspects — Are you tall, do you have blond hair or blue eyes?
Fitness — Do you have a healthy weight, are you mobile, have you made it to the age of 40?
Anything else — Do you have a fine sense of humor, a huge collection of matchbooks, or come from a tiny country? Anything that makes you uniquely you can serve as your path to relative status.
It does not matter what you choose to focus on, just that you measure up relatively well. Unhappy people look too long at the areas where they fall short. Happy people appreciate what makes them stand out.
To live a good life and find happiness, learn to direct your attention to the ways you are lucky enough to already be winning. I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t in the top 10% at something — what’s your game?
Be well.
Putting yourself into a dimension you can dominate is a brilliant idea, James.
James, you have provided some very good guidelines for everyone with this article. "Giving your strong suits a Purpose" is how I interpret your words. Know yourself and be the best at it. Cultivate relationships that synergize with your strong suits and purpose. Let others cultivate a few of yours who are worthy of coming into your garden. Thanks, Peace!