Shuffling into strategy
Involving other people in your game opens up a lot more variables. (Image by Igor Ovsyannykov)
When I was a kid, my cousin's girlfriend taught me how to play solitaire at a family gathering.
That Christmas, I received a book of solitaire games and a whole world opened up. There wasn’t just one kind of solitaire—there were many! (That seven-pile game on every Windows computer is called Klondike).
For each game, the authors listed the chance of winning, the level of strategy involved (as opposed to pure chance), the time to play, and so on.
As I learned the different games, I strongly favored the strategy-based ones. I found that I enjoyed staring at the cards and thinking several moves ahead from each of my possible choices in order to find the best option.
A turning point came when I discovered a game called Gaps. In this game, you lay out an entire deck of cards in 4 rows of 13 and remove the aces. In the gaps left by the aces, you can play the next card up in suit from the card to the left of the gap. Any gap in the leftmost column can be filled by a deuce of any suit. You win the game when all of the cards are laid out in suit and sequence in each row; you lose the game when all gaps appear to the right of kings before you've had a chance to arrange the cards by suit and sequence.
Gaps was considered by the authors to be a game of chance. But I discovered that, whenever there is a choice, there is an opportunity to affect the outcome of the game.
Therefore, I adopted a strategy in which I examined the leftmost column and worked backward mentally to see if I could move one of the those cards. In doing this, I significantly increased the likelihood of winning a given deal.
Of course, winning on the first deal is still highly unlikely. The rules of the game allow for two redeals in which you gather all of the cards that have not yet been placed in their final location, shuffle them, and deal them out again, this time leaving the gaps at the end of each sequence of cards that is already arranged by suit.
Honestly, though, I didn't care too much about winning Gaps. In fact, winning most solitaire games is kind of annoying because it means you'll need to shuffle a lot to restore randomness. My favorite part of each game was always the thinking part: surveying the options, making the decisions, and seeing what would happen next.
From these childhood experiences, I accidentally derived a few basic guidelines for life:
1. A better strategy will help you get better results (and you might have more control than you think you do).
For someone who, at a young age, taught myself the skill of carefully thinking through the options in a card game, I've made a lot of very stupid choices in life. But I did learn how not to take "the way it is" for granted. There is often another approach that will improve our process or results.
Some of these possibilities are invisible at first, but once we find them and own them, they allow us to subvert the status quo and assert more control over our own destiny.
2. Shuffle what's not working (and keep what is!)
I've worked with lots of people, from piano students to entrepreneurs, who are so frustrated and burnt out that they want to throw everything away and start over. While the temptation is understandable, it is wiser to identify what's working and make the most of it, even if you jettison everything else.
Meanwhile, some of us want to cling to everything we've tried, even if it's not working. For those of us in this category, we need to learn to let go of these dead ends and failed attempts and reallocate our resources—i.e., shuffle the remaining deck.
3. What matters is the process, not whether you win.
I took this one too far. I was so bought into a commitment to process that I had to deliberately teach myself how to win when I was in a competitive situation, even when it made the process less fun (like going into a third set when it's 90 degrees on the tennis court and you've already chugged two Gatorades).
I've had to shift my patterns to acknowledge that there are some circumstances in which literally winning—being in first place—is important.
However, a focus on process has been extremely useful. I play solitaire games because I like playing, not winning. I write because I like writing, I play music because I like playing music, I work because I like working. I don't need it to be perfect on the first try, and I don't need anyone's validation for the most part. While that has sometimes meant a long, lonely path where I've labored in unnecessary obscurity or poverty, it's been a pleasant one without a lot of negative self-talk.
Even if you weren't a huge nerd like me, you might be able to benefit from a focus on strategy, a willingness to iterate, and an embrace of the process. These things make the work less fraught and more like a game. Moreover, metacognition yields unexpected rewards. The more we understand about the way we think, the more we can harness our mental patterns to achieve our goals.
What lessons have you learned from your childhood play? How might you apply them in your life and work?
