Winning bigger

Monopoli --> Animosità. (Image by Gianni Crestani from Pixabay)

Monopoly is an awful game.

It takes forever to get going and forever to end. It involves too much luck, even without “Free Parking” jackpots.

And once someone starts winning, their victory is irreversible. This makes the game miserable for everyone, even the winner. It feels icky to be the greedy landlord, riding high on your ill-gotten gains, relentlessly collecting rents in some dystopian Atlantic City where you’ve already bled your tenants dry and sent your own siblings to jail.

Once I discovered Eurostyle games, in which it’s possible to have fun even if you don’t end up the winner, I lost my taste for classic American board games. In Catan, for instance, one person’s growing wealth can help all of the players to be more wealthy. Competition is balanced by mutual benefit, which is actually a lot more like life. In addition, a player can come from behind to overtake the front-runner, meaning that the players can actually enjoy staying engaged until the very last moment instead of flipping the board in frustration at the onset of the endgame.

Perhaps due to early experiences with games like Monopoly and Sorry!, I tend to feel uncomfortable when I’m winning. When the opportunity arises, I will actually choose a more moderate approach rather than make choices that significantly strengthen my position.

And of course this translates to life. In ninth grade biology class, I learned that the “anonymous” test scores posted on the wall by student ID number weren’t actually anonymous. My classmates quickly figured out who this #644 was that was getting all the good scores. During tests, nearby students would ask me for answers; others would try to “beat me” on subsequent tests. The attention was unwelcome, to say the least. I didn’t sabotage myself, but I always felt a sense of relief when my number wasn’t at the very top of the list.

As a business owner, I have tended to keep a low profile, growing slowly and rarely advertising my services.

And when people have tried to take advantage of me or violated my trust, I have attempted to help them save face instead of calling them out.

However, something has shifted. Perhaps it is the momentum and confidence I’ve gained from consistently sharing my work with you every day. It could be the investment I’ve made in working with professional mentors. Perhaps I absorbed an essential lesson when I watched Serena Williams leap into a higher gear earlier this week after losing her second set to Alison Riske in their Wimbledon quarterfinal match. Or maybe I’m learning that my work isn’t about me anyway — it’s about the people I am serving.

Whatever the cause, I did something differently this week. Yesterday, after publishing a piece about my experience starting out with no talent whatsoever as a knitter, I started to get more traffic than usual to my blog. I discovered that my friend Rob had shared my post on social media, and it had gotten multiple shares from there. That would usually be it, but this time I said to myself, “People are getting something out of this. Where else can I share it?” So I posted a link to the piece on one of my own social media channels and in a professional group I belong to. The article gained immediate traction, resulting in several conversations and new connections (and plenty of additional traffic). It is far and away my most successful post in twelve years of blogging.

That’s it — that’s the whole story. I’m not going to be on The Today Show or anything. But for me, it was a big step to take a win and turn it into a bigger win. For me, that is a reversal of a lifelong pattern of downplaying or even sabotaging my successes. In the past, “pretty good” was good enough, and to step out and try for “even better” was too scary.

I had always scoffed at the idea of "fear of success” — who’s afraid of winning? Me, it turns out. I can see now how it makes sense. More attention (with the risk of negative attention), new peers, new standards — lying low is safer.

Now that I can clearly see this pattern in my own life, I can more easily spot it in the behavior of my students and the people I coach. The girl who doesn’t raise her hand even though she knows the answer…the teacher who is hesitant to step up and lead newer colleagues…the gifted young musician who keeps switching instruments instead of investing heavily in one…the third-grader who refuses to learn Algebra because he doesn’t want to be “ahead” of his classmates.

There are legitimate reasons behind all of these choices, and it’s okay if these people aren’t ready to push to the next level. But a different kind of growth is waiting there. When we stretch ourselves to win bigger, we’ll find opportunities to serve others more deeply, reach new thresholds of skill and knowledge, and become more of who we are. That’s a game that will never be over, and everyone can win it, regardless of how the dice fall.