Playing Game One
A two-minute career manifesto for ambitious people
If you are ambitious, there are basically two games you can play with your career. Many people choose the wrong one, and end up losing at both.
Game One is optimizing for company outcome. Focus all of your energy on finding the highest leverage problems in your company and fixing them.
Game Two is optimizing for personal outcome. Seek external signals like title, scope, and team size. Make sure you’re on the right team and working on the right things.
If you’re a founder or working at a very small startup, it’s usually obvious that you should play Game One. Your outcome and the company’s outcome are close to synonymous, so if you want to succeed, you need to make the company succeed. And everyone knows who is pulling their weight, so the right people get credit.
If you work at a giant company, it’s usually in your best interest to play Game Two. It’s very hard to personally impact the outcome of the company enough that it will make a difference to you. Even if you do have an impact, it’s often not visible to the right people, so you might not get credit. As a result, everyone is looking out for themselves.
But the size of company at which it makes sense to play Game One is much larger than most people think. At almost all startups - even those with hundreds or thousands of people - it’s the right choice. It will result in a better outcome for the company, but also a better outcome for your career.
One reason is that startups are an iterated game, and the startup ecosystem is a small world. If you get a reputation for playing Game One, it will start to open doors. Conversely if you play Game Two, there will be growing dissonance between your external image and what references actually say about you when they’re asked. It can become career poison.
If you’re at a giant company now but ultimately plan to work for or found a startup, you should play Game One. It’s very hard to suddenly switch the entire way you operate, so many people who are used to Game Two have a rough time when they make the transition. They quickly get a reputation for having sharp elbows and lose trust.
But there is an even more fundamental reason to play Game One. You may think you know which title you want or which team you should lead or which projects to take, but you probably don’t.
Success is mostly about finding the intersection of what you’re great at and what the market needs. Figuring out what you’re great at takes a lot of iteration, and what the market needs is always changing. So if you sit down and try to chart out a 20, 10, or even 5-year career plan, it’s going to be wrong.
If you instead play Game One and let yourself get pulled to where you will have the greatest impact, it has a way of naturally putting your career on a good track. And as the skills and reputation you build start to compound, it will accelerate your career in ways that are very hard to predict.
The best counter-argument to Game One is simply that if you try to do it inside a not-great company or with not-great people, it often backfires. Despite all of your efforts the company might fail, or your peers or manager might take advantage of you.
There isn’t a good response to this argument. You just have to try very hard to work at great companies with great people. You should spend a lot of time thinking about which company to join and when to join it.
But once you’re there, play Game One. I think you’ll be surprised by how well it works.
I like the distinction between Games 1+2 and think you're generally right of choosing 1 over 2.
But I bristle at the premise that "ambitious people" are limited to these 2 options.
These are very small games in the grand scheme of things. Maybe this concept works well during one narrow slice of life. But there are far more ambitious games out there.