What Game Are You Really Playing?
Game Selection is important, but Game Identification is Paramount
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The game is the game is the game.
As humans, we naturally live in a state of delusion, assuming we know which game we're playing, and believing all games follow the same rules.
The true reality eventually hits us in the face.
In 2025, this reality is hitting harder and faster than ever and misidentifying the game you are playing is like bringing a tennis racket to a boxing bout.
"In life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you're playing."
Kwame Anthony Appiah
This is a persistent error that even the most talented people make.
In most things, there is a game that is widely publicised and, at face value, makes sense.
It can be as simple as trying to get promoted at work. The logical approach would be performing at a high standard and ensuring your boss recognises your contribution.
The actual game of getting promoted likely involves being loud and vocal about what you have accomplished, networking through the organisation, and being visible to not only your boss but the entire team.
This misidentification scales brutally. What's true for individual careers becomes exponentially more costly for entire companies and industries.
Take startup building. Many founders approach it with a level of certainty that their initial product hypotheses are correct and that if they build a great product, customers will naturally adopt the product.
But what about AI companies in 2025? When 50 startups are building the same product, using the same foundational models, and targeting the same customers, it's brutally zero-sum. Your gain is literally someone else's loss.
In that same vein, I’ve written a lot about startup fundraising and the hidden nuances that exist. One such example is that founders are often taught that early-stage investing is all about the people and that if you have a strong team, you should be able to raise capital.
Whilst this is true to a degree, what isn’t captured in VC marketing-speak is that the real game of startup fundraising often involves timing, market conditions, and having the right narrative.
This fundamental misalignment between perceived and actual games manifests across all domains of life - business, relationships, career development, and personal growth.
The tragic part is that people aren’t intentionally failing due to a lack of effort or ability - it’s rather because they are playing and winning games that don’t matter. The cost of this misidentification is both in opportunity and exhaustion.
The challenge is that we naturally gravitate toward games we're good at. But comfort is often the enemy of success.
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So, how do we avoid these costly misidentifications?
First, ruthlessly classify your game. Define the objectives, the stakeholders and the incentives that exist. Talk to people who have both succeeded and failed at playing the game and understand what they think worked/didn’t work. You’ll find some interesting lessons, but also be wary of being led down the wrong path if these people don’t actually know why they won or lost.
Second, look for ways to transform the game you are playing. This is what the best startup founders do. Whilst this is a rare example, Uber’s ability to attract capital and grow at all costs literally enabled them to beat out direct competitors and eventually reach a point where it is a strong business today. Instead of playing the current game on the field, it changed the competitive landscape and created a new playbook for companies operating in head-to-head competition, which we are now seeing play out between foundational model providers.
Third, know when to fold. This is perhaps the hardest skill to develop as you can literally waste years of effort due to falling prey to sunk cost fallacy. I've watched brilliant founders with impressive track records spend 18 months optimising products that showed zero signs of product-market fit after month three. This isn't persistence or resilience - it's delusion.
There's a quote frequently misattributed to Einstein that I like: "You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else."
This quote isn't just about mastering rules - it's about understanding which rules actually matter. You can't play better than anyone else if you're playing the wrong game.
The hard work isn't in the playing. It's in making sure you're playing the right game in the first place.
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Abhi