Or, Life is Just a Series of Games…

This post is a work in progress that I’m publishing because I’ve meant to release it years ago but it keeps getting stuck on my personal logseq

Most Important Parts

• Examine the game you’re playing, to see if you want to play it. Often times you are playing a different game than you thought, or the game you are playing never truly mattered.
• If you want to play it, understand what the true rules. Not what people tell you about how the world works, how does this system actually work? What tactics, inputs, outputs lead to winning this game? Is fame the goal? No. Fame sucks. Freedom is the true goal of wealth. Etc.
• Understand what true winning looks like. Is a good engineer one that can write code fastest? Solve algorithms most efficiently? Or the one that builds a product people actually want and creates value in the world? All 3 are distinct ways of winning the software engineering game, make sure you are aware of the actually right score to keep.
  • Example: “being an AI expert” vs being a no brainer hire to any senior AI role. Latter is not only more prescriptive, it measures success in a manner that closely resembles how success is measured in the real + applied world.
  • Another: winning life by graduating harvard and doing a prestigious job you hate for 30 years vs winning life by your own standards of freedom, health, wealth, and happiness
• Find people who play the game well.
  • Copy what they do
  • Then, seek to understand - reverse engineer why they do what they do or ask them their keys
• Figure out the best path and tactics and cheatcodes that get you aiming at the right goal/result + moving as fast as possible directly down that path

Examples of Games

• Being a good friend: read the cheat code books that have been written on the subject

• Software Engineering: just hire a staff engineer somewhere to teach you the shortcuts to be a god tier programmer.

• Becoming a Billionaire: see how past ones have done it, what industries they were in and what games they were good at, then get good at those games.