The analogy I would use:

In card games like Magic or Hearthstone, there's a lot of randomness. Sometimes you don't draw the cards you expect. A common problem for new players is that they'll focus specifically on these scenarios, and they'll say, "well, the game is just luck."

But the point of games like these are to increase your win percentage. Variance is expected. A good deck is not one that wins 100% of the time but one that, over time, increases its win percentage.

Now, whether or not a game has elements of luck, there will still be scenarios outside of your immediate control where you lose. You may not know enough to win, you may not have enough practice or discipline to win. Even in this scenario, your goal is (often) not to win every single game you play - it's over time to increase your win percentage.

Or in other words, in both a luck and skill-based world it might still be worthwhile to lose a 'game' if it means you can win two in the future. In particular, this comes up a lot in entrepreneurship - a good entrepreneur is one who harnesses variance to their advantage, rather than focusing on just the immediate challenge or project in front of them.

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Note that I don't believe this is universally true. It's true for some games, and it's an important point to learn if you're trying to deal with variance. However, there are certain scenarios where failure is incredibly costly, and you can't focus on the long-term in those scenarios. So, overall it's good advice, but you should still take it with a grain of salt.

I would argue that "winning" here in general would be to play games where there is less randomness and more skill, where you will have a larger edge over someone who hasn't done their studying.

It doesn't make a lot of sense to apply yourself to areas where 90% of the result is determined by luck (unless you truly enjoy it).

Sometimes. It sort of depends.

I mentioned above that there are scenarios where failure is incredibly costly, but the opposite is sometimes also true. Job hunting comes to mind.

I use luck to describe anything with variance that I can't control. So by that measure, job hunting has a ton of luck involved. But I don't need to have a good win rate for job applications - I just need one job application to succeed.

That's something I can play the odds with - if I have a 10% chance of getting hired at any given company, I can send out 10 applications and have... what, a 60% chance of getting hired? I'm bad at math, but you get the point.

In Hearthstone terms, aggressive decks also used to use this strategy as well. I don't know if this still works, but at one point at least all a deck needed was a >50% win rate and enough games to hit legend because wins gave you more points than losses removed. Something like that, I forget the exact mechanic.

People would play decks that won or lost based on randomness very early - their overall percentage was pretty bad, but because they were just effective enough, and because their games were incredibly fast, players could take advantage of the fact that (at least at the time) wins were more valuable than losses.

Again, take that with a grain of salt. This wouldn't hold true for games where you get limited tries, or where losses matter a lot more than wins, etc. You have to figure out whether or not it makes sense for the specific 'game' you're playing.

> but at one point at least all a deck needed was a >50% win rate and enough games to hit legend because wins gave you more points than losses removed. Something like that, I forget the exact mechanic.

For anyone interested, it's that you gain/lose 1 "star" with each win/loss. And if you're on a "win streak", you gain extra stars, but never lose extra stars for being in a losing streak. So a win on average is slightly more than 1 star when you consider streak bonuses.

So you get a deck with roughly 50% winrate that can play matches as fast as possible. And then hope that in your 50/50 coin flip of a game, you end up getting "heads,heads,heads,tails,tails,tails" instead of "heads,tails,heads,tails,heads,tails". And it turns out doing this quickly can rank you up faster than slow games with a much higher winrate.

But also to your point, in Hearthstone terms reducing your randomness is also a significant part of strategy. For example a deck I run now has a card "Draw the lowest cost minion from your deck".

This card is valuable not just because it instantly puts a monster in my hand, but because it also gets it out of my deck. Reducing the chance that I will draw a low-cost minion in the late game, increasing my odds of drawing the high-cost cards I do want.

Like if you were playing Blackjack and had the option to "remove a 2 from the deck". Super useful when you want a face card. Not useful at all when you're holding a 17.

Interesting insight with the Job hunting scenario. I haven't really thought about it that way.

There is indeed a good book's worth of depth: https://www.amazon.com/Finite-Infinite-Games-James-Carse/dp/...

I wish I'd read this book when I was in my teens. It's transformative even now; but I'm now so firmly entrenched in exigencies, attitudes, and ancient habits that I feel like I need near-daily reminders and affirmations to begin to turn the ship around.

What a strange statement, as though life is a thing that can be won. Life is lived, and then you die. There is no victory condition. Even the universe is ultimately doomed.

"Meaning" and "winning" are two different things. Even presupposing that the world is meaningless, some states may be preferable to the individual actors inside of it.

Those actors might take steps to maximize those states, and their success or failure in the short term (ie. the duration of their own life) can easily be considered "winning".

That's one way to look at it, sure, my problem with the term "winning" is that it implies an inflexible, omni-important, and universal metric. We're all clear who "won" a given event or game, but that's not how life works, and if you try to gamify life you're prone to justifying just about anything in the name of "winning" by whatever metric you choose. And if you make the world a worse place because of it? Well, what were you supposed to do, lose?

In the context of life, it is ok to lose. It is ok to not be the best, to not ever find your niche, to never really feel like you've succeeded, be lazy, or make mistakes. It's even ok not to give it your all. You don't have to be the winner, it's ok just to be.

Better than being good at any singular game, you want to be good at the meta-game, ie, across the set of all games. Because then it doesn't matter what gets thrown at you, you have a way of looking at it and dealing with it. This could be thought of as specializing in being a generalist.

I see it as a suggestion to try to give the best of yourself in everything you do: use the same passion/positive attitude that you put in something you appreciate (your work for example) for all the aspect of your life, and you will get a better control of yourself.

Jordan Peterson sums it up so that to win many sets of games you're supposed to be play in a manner that you're invited to play again and again. To win one game at all costs may not be the smartest thing in the long run..

https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/82497106398146150...