A Card Game with Life

“Well taken.” That’s all I can choke out when life has outplayed my hand. Damn the Joker... I think about it and laugh; I can’t win, but I can still choose to have fun.

I don’t know when I made the shift from a Type A personality to a Type B. Was it already in high school, or did university shake me sane? Truthfully, I still love to work – to preoccupy my mind. I can be ambitious, organized, and overly concerned with how others see me, but I feel I’m playing a game of unwritten rules.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe that being proactive and taking initiative will get you to the top, if that’s where you want to go. It’s better than being idle and I’m still a business student after all. The problem is that there are hurdles we cannot predict and our own mental models can be too rigid.

Last week, during my Organizational Change class, the professor asked who thought the course was like a game. Three hands were raised including my own. Then, he asked who thought it was a competition and more people raised their hands (the rest were sleeping). In fact, he assured us, this class was a competition. At the University of Macau, for any course with more than 24 students, the grades must be relatively distributed, and not necessarily given on absolute merit. That is, even if you understand the material respectably well, you can get a terrible grade because everyone is squashed into a bell curve. I abhor such systems – constricting and flawed.  

The professor asked one more thing: what if we originally thought this was a game, but found out it wasn’t (as I did)? He expected that people might study harder, or cheat. But the answer in my head was different: I would either quit the competition or continue playing my own game. I simply do not care about winning based on someone else’s rules. If I did, how could I enjoy life, whose rules are endless and often indecipherable? I play to my own values.

Of course, class is different than life. I could indeed win this competition. I could get the highest grade and stand tall among my peers. After all, perhaps we’re just playing semantics with ‘competition’ and ‘game.’ For me, the difference is in the answer to: “Do I believe that the outcome of this event will largely affect my future moves?” In a competition, I care if I mess up because losing limits my prospects. It’s stressful. But, in a game, every snake leads to more ladders and every ‘pick up two’ just means more cards to play. No one wins every hand, so life must be about learning from your losses. Why not admire your adversary’s moves?