Rigged to Win

What does it look like when you rig the game so you can win it?

I am a competitive person and have been as long as I remember. 

I’ll never forget playing a flag football league with some childhood friends in middle school that was supposed to be for fun and rage crying after losing another game to my dad because I hated how many games my team was losing. 

That may or may not have been the last time I rage-cried but the disdain for losing has never subsided. 

One of the reasons I enjoy online multiplayer games is because I can constantly monitor my performance against others. 

I didn’t realize how much I did this until I recorded some of my gameplay in Call of Duty Cold War and I had to watch the scoreboard be opened obsessively to see how I was performing relative to my team and relative to the other team. 

While beating others is objectively a satisfying experience - it’s not always effective to measure your progress against theirs. 

This is especially true when you can’t see what is contributing to their outcomes. 

You can’t see the sacrifices they have made. The hours of training they have put in. All of their past failures and experiences.

You can’t control what others are doing. You can only control the actions that you take on a daily basis. 

This realization has caused me to shift my measures of success. While some of my hopeful goals are outcomes, I measure my inputs daily to ensure that I am tracking in the right direction. I know that if I can win an endurance game against myself every single day, I will ultimately start to beat others by focusing on myself. 

The more I focus on myself, the more I am able to focus on the work that I am putting in daily. The more I can feel accomplished and be proud of my efforts. 

I am working on enjoying the process more. 

I am there with lifting. It’s fun refining my technique daily. It’s fun watching my body change. It’s fun pushing myself to the point of failure. 

I’m eager to go to the gym everyday and rarely think about how long I am there (the treadmill gets me thinking more about this…). 

If I was focused on all of the guys at the gym that bench more than me or are more jacked than me, I would be less satisfied than I am by showing up and pushing myself daily. 

By competing with myself, I empower myself to be in control of the battles that I am fighting. I can more easily measure if I am setting myself up for wins. I can rig the game in my favor by seeing exactly what my opponent has been doing every single day. 

All I have to do is beat yesterday. 

Who are you competing with?