Do we love the game or love to win?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately and for a few reasons…

When it comes to combat sports, there’s no higher high and lower low than a victory or a loss. When you’re winning, it’s pretty easy to pick yourself up, hop right back into it and get back to work for the next one.

On the flip side, when you lose, there’s no darker place, no larger question than ‘do I still want to do this…?‘

Exploding Kittens card game

Everyone loves to win and if you’re a competitive person, winning is a game of its own that can definitely make or break some friendships (for anyone that’s ever played ‘exploding kittens’, or a competitive game of monopoly, you should know these feels)

I even see it in my own kids as they’re growing. As a parent, I will often let my kids have some wins to build their interest in the game they’re learning so that it encourages them to keep playing.

Put 2 kids together and the competitiveness will either lead to a brawl, or someone no longer wanting to play (ahhh how analagous to life).

It makes sense right - winning is fun, everyone can relate to wanting to win, however if you don’t really enjoy the game you’re playing you’ll be like one of my kids deciding they no longer want to play.

To that point, when it comes to development and growth, finding some wins early as you’re trying to learn things is so important to the feeling of progress. If you were trying to learn something and had no wins at all in the beginning, you’d probably just give up.

Now here’s the kicker… Let’s say you’ve found something you enjoy, you had some wins and developed some actual skills to enjoy what you do.

Are you still playing the game because you love it? Or only because you love to win? Maybe it’s the idea of it that you love?

It’s normal to question yourself when you go through adversity, it definitely resonates for me - I worked for 17 years in the Automotive industry and I’d like to think I was a pretty good operator.

When I first started in it, it was out of a passion for Toyota sports cars that I got into it, alongside needing money and thinking how could I blend the things I was studying at University.

I had some great early wins - a supportive Boss who before I even started, told the people in the dealership that I was some whizz kid about to start his apprenticeship.

Now for those of you who don’t know what apprenticeships are like, it probably actually made me a bit of a target for bullying in the business but I digress.

I kept tunneling down this career pathway enjoying the learning but also enjoying the wins, until I ended up in a business that was a tough one to win at.

I’ll save that story for another day, however long story short it really made me question if I wanted to continue on with it.

I actually did and found some more wins through re-evaluating my perspective on what game it was that I was playing.

The car business can be very simplistic - you buy cars for ‘X’, you sell cars for ‘Y’ - the difference is your profit, you pay people ‘A’ for their time, you charge it out for ‘B’ to service their vehicles. When you frame it like that it could seem a little hollow.

So part of what I found was by refocusing my perspective on relationships, with customers at first then with my own staff it gave me more motivation to continue playing that game.

I still actually have a lot of passion for that game, however I realised over time that what I missed wasn’t necessarily the industry itself, but the people.

In thinking about that, I realised I could be focused on people in any industry, hence why I put so much emphasis on sharing other people’s stories, promoting them and exchanging ideas and perspectives to continue to grow myself as a person.

So I had to ask myself that question as well - Do I still want to play that game? Or was I only wanting to play it because I’m good at it?

I think everyone has to ask themselves this question, whether it’s continuing to compete and fight, whether to change careers and do something different, whether to move to a new city, country or place - there’s so many examples of people having to ask themselves this question.

It’s kind of funny that I think about it - that we spend a lot of our lives trying to find this ‘purpose’ in life and some of us are lucky to find it early. Others haven’t found it yet and some of us hang onto it when it’s time to grow and move on with a new purpose.

We’d all love to do the things we love to do forever, however when we pass that life checkpoint sometimes it’s better to learn a new game to play than to keep trying to recapture something that is in our past.

Are you playing the game because you love it? Or only because you love to win?