A Video to Watch if You're Ambitious and in Your 20s or 30s | Ep 1003

0:00Just got off the phone with a friend of mine who's competing in a fitness thing, and she didn't win this fitness thing. And she looked at the winner of that fitness thing and was like, I don't know if I would want to look that way in order to win this prize. And so it created a really good conversation that I think I'll share with you, which is that if you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes. I'll say that again. Play dumb games, win dumb prizes. And so I think one of the most tragic things that can happen to us throughout our lives is that we work very hard. We sacrifice a lot. We get to the top of the podium and we're given a trophy that we realize this is not where we want to be and this is not what I wanted to win.

0:35And this game really didn't matter. And it was only to win in the eyes of people that I don't care about. And so I think one of the most interesting ways of thinking about life is through game design, right? Like we are all playing games. Many of us are involved in multiple games. You know, at the same time, we have our business game. We have our fitness game. And we have our relationship games. There's these games that we're involved in many of them. Some are finite, some are infinite. But this particular thing, let's just say your career, your interests, understanding who the person is who determines who wins.

1:07And so in this particular instance, I said to her, number one, you are not the one who is defining the physique that is going to win this competition. Someone else is. Number two, it's not super clearly defined. And even if it were, would you want it? Now, the way that they do this in the aesthetic shows for bodybuilding and things like that is they try and signal to the whole sport what they want by who they select as the winners. Seems kind of obvious. It's a little bit backwards, but that's kind of how it works. Like, this person won. By the way, that's what we're looking for. It's like, well, no shit.

1:46The game's already over, right? But that's kind of how it works. And so for the next competition, people try to look more like that one, and then somebody else wins. And if they want to shift a look over time of what they're looking for, then they start moving what they want the champions to be. But the point is this, is that in order for her to look that way, she would have to make sacrifices in her life that I don't think are worth making. Rather, they would be too costly to the other parts of her life. And so in talking about this, it was just such a really interesting notion as you compare it to how people live their lives.

2:19And I think so many people live mediocre lives because they play games that other people designed that even if they did win, they wouldn't want the prize. and so if you're if you're playing a game right now and you're losing you have to ask yourself is this a game that when i take it to the natural extreme i actually want to win and what is the price of winning and what is the benefit of winning and in the and i think that the fittest in the aesthetic world is kind of interesting because like many people who are in that world believe that if they somehow become a pro or win a certain number of shows or become top on Olympia or whatever, that that's somehow going to make them successful in business.

3:06And it really couldn't be further from the truth. There's tons of broke fitness people. And all they have to do is look at past champions. And some of them who didn't learn business just are broke, right? They just stopped getting their moment in the sun, they get their sponsors to go away, and then they're back to zero again. And so what I think happens more often is that they have a way that they kind of understand how to do it. They know how to increase their reps and eat and do cardio and all that stuff, improve over time. And so because they understand how to improve at this, they choose not to be a beginner in other places like business, like marketing, like sales, et cetera.

3:39And so they, without conscious knowledge, end up dedicating five, 10 plus years of their life and taking years off their life from a health perspective, because the sport, especially at the highest levels is really tough on you to not actually get what they want because they never played it out because it was emotionally uncomfortable to think about what it would be like to suck at something new. And so I think it's a really good allegory for how a lot of us, myself included, right? We live our lives where it's like, what thing am I doing? What game am I playing that I am, that I'm only playing because I'm comfortable in the game and I understand the variables and the players and I know how to win.

4:20And so just because you know how to win doesn't mean you should win. And it doesn't mean the game's worth playing. And there might be a different or parallel or superior game that if it were played would result in the thing that I actually want. And so I saw this really interesting interview. I can't remember who it was, but it was David Senra at the Founders podcast. And there was this soundbite that I thought was really, really intelligent, which was the business that plays the most dominant game wins. So he gives this example between MySpace and Facebook. He said, so MySpace was playing the get the most users game.

5:02Facebook was playing the monthly active users game. And monthly active users game, that metric that they optimized around was the dominant game, because it doesn't matter how many people opt into something, what matters is who's actually using it, right? It was a dominant game. And if you accomplish this one, all the things that come from the inferior game, the spoils of that would go to the person who played a superior game. And so this is conceptually the same idea of a finite versus an infinite game, right? Now, both of those are, I guess, technically infinite games, I guess you can keep going, right?

5:38But from a finite versus infinite perspective, a finite game would be like baseball. There's a, you know, known rules, known players, and then there's a decreed upon outcome at the end, right? Whereas in finite game, there are known and unknown players. There are no rules. And the point of the game is to keep the game going. And so whenever you have an infinite game player who's going against a finite player, the infinite player always wins. So when the U.S. went to Vietnam, for example, we had a finite frame. We tried to win the war, but Vietnam, I'm just the goal for them was to keep the war going until eventually we stopped.

6:10And that's exactly what happened, right? We just like kind of like gave up and just went home. Again, I'm not trying to, this is not a political thing, but point is, is that dominant games, playing dominant games allows you to win better prizes. And so right now there are games that you are playing either consciously or unconsciously. And I think the question to ask is one, am I the person who design this game? Two, if I didn't design the game, do I want the prize that comes with this? Three, am I willing to pay the price or the sacrifice required to win at this game? And is that globally worth it?

6:48So think about the difference in global and local. Like locally, I can win this game, but globally, it might lose my life, right? You don't want to have a local thing come at the cost of a global thing. Hopefully that's tracking. Subset, superset. And so this is yet another Sunday thought from a conversation this week that I thought was really important. And so I said, if I were you, if you enjoy competing and you like having the target, then control the controllables. Look the way you want to look. Work your ass off on your posing. Prep the way that you know that you should prep. And then go in and do your best and you judge yourself based on how well you think you did, based on what you wanted.

7:30if you think you look the best on stage by your standards then congratulations you won and you don't need the ten dollar trophy and if you want to use this to make more money then this is obviously a terrible way of making more money there's a hundred other ways that you can make more money besides this and so that was um that was what i told her and that's what i'll tell you which is um play your own games of your own design where if you were to win you would be happy with the W and the price that it came at was one that you were willing to pay. Out. Real quick, I'm going to show you the exact 10 stage roadmap from zero to a hundred million plus that less than 1 % of companies finish.

8:08I've now done multiple times. And so I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as headcount increases that you need to get through. And I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business, what the constraint feels like, like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it, and then what steps we actually took to graduate. And we've done this across software, physical products, service businesses, brick and mortar, all of this, and it works. And it's my gift to you. It's absolutely free. And so the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.com forward slash roadmap.

8:37Just enter your info and it'll spit it right back to you all free.