Make Room For Learning The Rules
I grew up in a family that rarely turned on the TV. And mostly only to watch Texas Rangers baseball and Wheel of Fortune.
We rented a VHS player along with the movie at Blockbuster every couple of weeks for a movie night.
We were a family who played cards and board games. We had a "game closet" and could handle ourselves against our grandparents and their friends.
As we got older, my siblings and I realized that the best way to understand how to gain an advantage was to read and then reread the rules when playing a game - especially when playing a new game.
In theory, rules exist to tell you what not to do, but if read correctly, they also tell you where the advantages are. Breaking the rules would give you an unfair advantage, but directionally, rules point out where advantages can be found.
Several times, my parents forced us to take turns reading the rules because we were all trying to find the edge and the advantage. And mind you, this is in a nice, polite, Christian conservative home in Texas.
This past Tuesday, I was summoned by a government agency to appear at a courthouse in New York City, and I was not given any information about what they expected from me when I arrived.
It was an incredibly nerve-wracking experience, especially because this occurred on Election Day, a day that was fraught with its own levels of uncertainty. I appeared before the investigators and learned what the inquiries were about. Then the federal officer explained their expectations, and I began to understand the rules of the game they were asking me to play, and everything got a little bit better. Everything became much less scary. I didn't want to be playing the game they were asking me to play, but at least I knew and how I could put points on the board and win. I understood the rules.
This past Wednesday, America woke up to learn whose rules we would be playing by for the next four years. And despite half the country not wanting to play the games by these rules, the quickness and decisiveness of the victory left no room for what-ifs or other interpretations of the outcome.
Regardless of your feelings about that, now we know what game we are playing.
And we'd be well served to learn the rules quickly.
In our pursuit of those rules, we might just find advantages for this round of gameplay and the next. Find the edge and push it.
Constraints are the greatest gift to creativity.
To achieve great things, you need two things: a plan and not quite enough time. - Leonard Bernstein
No matter how you voted or how you feel about the outcome, there is a lot to learn in the next few months about what winning means going forward, and each new rule that is understood is another directional indicator of what advantages can be created and what wins can be captured.
Stay curious, my friends.
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