199. Life need not be a zero-sum game
“Life is a positive-sum game. Everyone from the gold medallist to the last finisher can rejoice in a personal victory.” — George A. Sheehan
If your value is determined by some form of billing rate per hour, either directly (time and material) or indirectly (fixed price derived from expected T&M), there is clearly a limit on how much you can make in a month or any other time period. This is because you have only twenty-four hours in a day and you will be able to spare only a fraction of it for work. If you increase your time for work, you will have to correspondingly reduce your time for family, friends and personal hobbies. Similarly, increasing time for hobbies or for family and friends reduces time available for work. Any way you look at it, increasing focus on one priority seems to come at the cost of some other important priority of life. To top this, the number of days in one’s life (i.e., length of life itself) is limited and also uncertain. No wonder it does sometimes feel like life is a zero-sum game.
But it need not be……in small ways and big…. in superficial ways and fundamental!
Small ways…
Can we create more time out of a day? I think we surely can.
“Time is a created thing. To say ‘I don’t have time,’ is to say, ‘I don’t want to.’” — Lao Tzu
I think we waste a lot of time every day. We mindlessly scroll through twitter feeds, Insta reels, binge watch web series, party once too often, follow and discuss news bytes, trade in stock market etc. I am guilty of all of these except perhaps trading in stock markets. Can we reduce time spent on such activities without materially reducing the entertainment value we derive from them. I think yes. For example, in my experience, discussions on political matters hardly informs one’s political views — left-leaning folks tend to remain left leaning and right leaning folks, right. Just by limiting wasteful activities and living with intentionality, I think one can unlock time.
Big and fundamental ways…
“If you want to be successful, don’t seek success — seek competence, empowerment; do nothing short of the best that you can do.” — Jaggi Vasudev
I think there is another, more fundamental way to make life a positive sum game — by focusing on building capacities, capabilities and competencies. By making small, even very small gains, often and for a long period of time, we can build deep competencies. And leveraging such competencies hold potential for giving and giving without any taking. Technically, this tracks the formula for compounding. By personalizing and operationalizing “compounding formula”, one can play positive sum games. This means that the gains you make from your efforts today will be sum of the “directly attributable gains” from your efforts of the day and the “baseline” from which you started today. This baseline is nothing but the sum total of all the gains you made until today. If you ignore your baseline and make efforts in unrelated areas, your total gains of today will only be the one that you make from your efforts of the day — your baseline is rendered zero. If you ignore your baseline often, you will not deepen any competencies — you end up engaging in zero sum games, at best. The goal is to use the few hours that you have today to make progress on top of what has already been until today. This way, you will be resetting your baseline higher every day. For example, reading a number of articles on Artificial Intelligence by various authors may not be nearly as useful as first building a solid foundation on the basics of AI — like learning the basics of statistics, neural networks, network modeling, etc. A highly consequent example is investing consistently in simple long term oriented investment products such as broad market index funds as opposed to chasing “hot” products in the markets.
“Play long-term games with long-term people. All returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge come from the compound interest.” — Naval Ravikant
A relatively simple way to realize life as a positive sum game is by surrounding yourself with optimistic, progressive (ambitious?) people — at least, increase interactions with such people and reduce interactions with pessimistic folks.
This may sound simple but is hard to follow through. Living an intentional life in a world full of easy temptations is not easy. If end-results are your main motivation then it may become hard to live an “intentional” life because results generally take a long time to materialize. “Intentional” living becomes easier to follow if it is treated as the end rather than a means to some desired end. Intentional living is best achieved by incorporating it in daily habits e.g., no matter what, go for a 45-minute walk/run in the morning 5 days in a week; read and learn something new every day; eat healthy food (however you define it) 11–12 times out of my 14 meals in a week, etc.
Bottomline
“The best way to win a zero-sum game is to be good at positive-sum games.” — John Braddock
Life can be a zero sum game or a positive sum game. Transactional activities are zero sum activities — you win at the expense of the counterparty or your counterparty wins at your expense. Both generally can’t be winners simultaneously. Compounding activities are positive sum games. You invest your capital in a firm which it uses to grow its business. This increases the value of the firm leading to growth in the value of your investment. Participating in occasional untrained 5K (or 10K or HM/FM) running events may earn you medals but not health. Even if you end up not participating in the final event, training methodically for a running event can materially improve your health. Increasing compounding activities and reducing transactional activities is a sure way to make your life a positive sum game.
***************************
Thanks for taking time to read this article. In this newsletter, I share my learnings that could help you improve your decisions and make meaningful progress on your goals. I try to share stuff that I have personally experienced or experimented with. If you find this newsletter worthwhile and if you do not mind it, please do consider sharing it with others.
To follow me on LinkedIn, click here
