Other Games Worth Playing

After enough years inside systems like universities, government agencies, and corporations, you start to see the pattern. The same problems surface again and again. The same negotiations. The same cycles of effort, compromise, and leverage.

Winning, in this world, has a specific meaning. More responsibility. More influence. A bigger seat at the table. The assumption is that if you can climb high enough inside the system, you’ll finally have the leverage to make the kind of impact you imagined.

But large systems don’t work that way. The higher you climb, the more influence seems to spread outward instead of concentrating. Every decision runs through layers of negotiation, competing priorities, bureaucratic inertia, and a surprising amount of institutional chaos.

The job isn’t really about changing the system. It’s about keeping it running.

The climb itself is shaped by forces we’re rarely allowed to talk about openly—bias and prejudice, institutional pedigrees, professional hierarchies, geography. Who trained where. Which networks you belong to. Which voices are assumed to carry authority.

And somewhere along the way another question starts to creep in—not whether you can win the game, but whether the game is still the most interesting place to spend your energy.

Once you see the pattern, something shifts. The arguments inside the system start to feel less urgent. The leverage you once chased begins to look smaller than it did before.

You begin to wonder whether there might be other games worth playing.

Games where I control the rules. Where the distance between an idea and an action is shorter. Where the energy I spend building something new isn’t immediately absorbed by the machinery of a large system.

Large systems will always need people willing to play their game.

And for a long time, I was happy to play it. I believed the path to real impact ran straight through those systems—through influence, credibility, and the slow accumulation of responsibility.

The most interesting work might lie somewhere else. Not in rejecting what those systems do, or the people who continue to work inside them. But in taking what years inside them have taught me and applying it outside their machinery.

Because outside the system, the distance between an idea and an action is shorter. The work is more direct. Honest in a way that large organizations sometimes struggle to be.

One project at a time, building outward instead of negotiating inward.

Perhaps most importantly, the energy shifts. Instead of spending most of my effort maintaining the system, I get to spend it building something real.

At some point you stop asking how to win the game and wonder whether it’s the game you want to play.

I’ve stopped wondering. I think I know.