Playing To Win, Not Just To Survive

Playing to win and playing to avoid losing are two completely separate things, although on the surface and to an untrained eye, they can look indistinguishable, so much so that the person playing may not even know that they’re playing the wrong game. 

Although it may sound self-explanatory, if you actually want to win, you’re going to need to play with the intention of doing so.

We (humans) tend to feel negatives more than we do positives, therefore, we’re much more likely to avoid taking a risk when there’s a chance of loss, even if the upsides are massive, causing us to only choose the safe options over and over again.

It's a consequence of a brain designed for survival, but by trying to win, you’ll want more than merely to survive. 

So how do you make sure you’re not playing the wrong game? And what do you need to do in order to play that right one? Well, the following 3 principles answer both questions.

Risk

As mentioned, we’re much more likely to avoid the chance of winning when there’s also an equal (or otherwise any) chance of losing, but in order to win, especially win big, that’s going to have to change.

The risk aversion side of a person is a tricky one to undo, because it plays on fear and anxiety, but it’s something that you must pay attention to.

The curse of risks comes from our ability to rationalise, we’re conscious beings, and as a consequence, we’re able to think of quite literally everything that could potentially go wrong with any given situation. It’s why risk-taking is considered bad in the eyes of many.

But some risks need to be taken, especially the ones where you’re relying on yourself for them to pay off.

I recently watched a video on the internet, it was a guy saying the quote “When a bird lands on a branch, does it trust the branch or its wings?”, and he then goes on to comically say “I’m not quite sure what that means yet, but it sounds good”.

But I instantly made sense of it and recognised it as a lesson on risk-taking.

When you take a risk, you can either try to trust that it will definitely work (the branch) or trust that regardless of the outcome, you’ll have the ability to get through it, but also come out the other side as a better and more experienced person (the wings).

Therefore, risks are often worth taking, even if only for the adventure and journey.

Either way, if you want to win, you’re probably going to need to put something on the line, take some form of leap. Just remember that if you trust your wings, jumping becomes a little less scary.

Failure

A problem with risk-taking is a worry and fear surrounding failure, you’re worried that if the risk doesn't pay off, you’ll look like and be a failure.

Changing your relationship with failing can drastically change how big you can win and significantly speed up how quickly you get there, but how do you change it?

You need to stop seeing “Fails” as a sign that you’re not good enough, or signs that you should quit, because they’re quite literally the opposite; they're progress.

Instead of seeing them as failed attempts, see them as lessons. Each time you try something and it doesn’t pay off, take what you can and learn from it, this massively improves the chance of you succeeding the next time around.

If you never try, you’ll never find out what you need to do to win. You need to increase the number of times you fail because it increases the number of times you win.

Failing is uncomfortable because we fear what others will think and say, but we also play a part when we see them as failures and nothing else. The good news is, both of these are from inside your own head, even if someone does say something, how you react is up to you, too.

This gives you full control over your relationship with failure, so improve it and see it as something to learn from, as lessons and experience that will only make you better.

No Plan B

If you want to win, you have to commit. Fully commit.

The only way to do this is to see your path to success as the only possible outcome, no fail-safe, no contingency plan and no plan B.

By having a plan B, you create an exit door, and having an escape plan lingering in the back of your head only reduces how well you execute plan A.

So never give yourself a plan B, and if you already have one, get rid of it.

You may feel stupid to do so, you may get worried about what will happen if plan A doesn’t work out, but it doesn’t matter. People who have succeeded at the extraordinary could only do so because they were obsessed, and plan B’s do not exist when you’re obsessed.

And remember, the outcome of plan A matters less when you trust your wings!