How Games Make Your Company Stronger
So, we just got back from a company retreat from Vermont…although retreat seems like kind of a misnomer, it was more of an attack.
We were on the offensive from the minute we got there, spurred on by Gary’s constant urgings of “let’s do something competitive!” and a surplus of alcohol generously supplied by Wine Library.
Over the course of the two day weekend, the following competitive activities took place:
- Volleyball
- Football
- Mountain Biking
- Relay race
- One-on-one beer shotgunning competition
- “Over the Top” style arm wrestling competition
- Spontaneous “how many consecutive sweet tarts can @akopec throw from the balcony into varying distance mouths below” competition
- 4 hour argument about whether Paul Pierce is overrated
- A game invented on-the-fly involving deception, stealth, and wild-eyed chases in the dark that saw @garyvee, @shaunchapman, and @keithholjencin crawling on their stomachs through the dewy weeds and mud at the cabin’s perimeter in the pitch darkness as if they were in enemy territory in ‘Nam.
There were a few people there not used to the intensity, and seeing their raised eyebrows at all this got me thinking about the purpose of all of it.
It’s not immediately apparent what the purpose is for members of an internet startup to bat around a ball at each other when they’ll never surpass weekend warrior status.
To find meaning in these casual competitions, you have to look at the place sports have in our culture, and why it’s important for professional athletes at the peak of their game to compete against one another.
“After fighting, everything else in your life got the volume turned down”
-Fight Club
To the casual observer, any sport is a meaningless game around an arbitrary goal. Athletes’ salaries are more worthy of debate than their accomplishments on the field.
To the participants though, the games take on a meaning that is more powerful than the meanings found in everyday life.
Why? because sports tap into our competitive, animal nature. Every animal is wired for competition because of the scarcity of resources needed for survival.
The need to acquire food, air, water, mates, and sunlight at the expense of others is the primary driver of growth: stronger, better, faster, smarter, significantly more able to fly…whatever can give you an advantage.
Competition as inspired by scarcity also forms the foundation of one of the two most basic instincts: killing. The driving force that compels people to compete against one another in sports is a modified version of the instinct to survive by growing stronger and killing competition.
Sports are one of the most fascinating human inventions. They showcase our ability to re-route natural urges and re-assign reward systems. To transcend survival instincts and use them to organize a group of selfish individuals for a common goal.
“UNITY!!!”
-Dave Chapelle as Rick James
Look at how humans competed with other organisms way back in the day. We were smaller, weaker, and slower than most predators around us.
Yes, yes, we were smarter. But not as individuals. Try to outwit a grizzly bear and you’ll see what I mean. All we had going for us was collaboration.
Still to this day, nothing unites people so much as a common goal, and nothing inspires a common goal better than a common enemy.
Think about the world cup. Michigan fans and Ohio State fans, Auburn and Alabama, Texas and Oklahoma, were all rooting alongside each other as local sports allegiances gave way to a larger sentiment of our country as a whole against the other countries of the world.
World peace is an impossibility today, but imagine if tomorrow hostile aliens came down like in Independence Day. Any inter-human conflicts would immediately give way to collaboration in a larger struggle.
At our retreat this weekend, teams were formed and re-formed at random. Now think about it in the context practicing allegiances and collaboration.
Does this internal competition not make us that much stronger when play conflicts in the world of sport amongst ourselves give way to real conflicts between our entire company and another in the world of business?
It seems absurd to many that playing volleyball against each other gives us more of an ability to succeed at the game of business. I disagree. It’s all about the spirit of the game.
“You play to win the game. You don’t play to just play it. That’s the great thing about sports”
- Herm Edwards
We live in a world of scarcity, there is no question about it. Given that you’re reading this blog, I’m guessing you are lucky enough to not be experiencing scarcity of food, water, or shelter.
You’re faced with a different type of scarcity, a decidedly human scarcity: scarcity of attention. People have a limited amount of attention to give.
Let’s go back to the salaries of athletes for a second. The reason they get paid that much is simple: demand. The reason they compete is not, in the cases of the most successful, for money or any other tangible reward. They want to be considered to be the best by whomever is important to them, whether it’s the general public or a high school coach who slighted them.
The financial success of your brand depends on capturing peoples attention, and if you think you don’t measure individual success in terms of attention (and admiration), whether it’s from hundreds of thousands of like-minded strangers or just one of your parents, I call bullshit.
Whatever scarcity or competition you are facing, there are three approaches you can take to improve your position.
1. Embrace constructive competition (the Michael Jordan strategy)
You focus on winning through strength. You courageously admit that you are not complete; you learn from each contest. You seek stronger competition at all times, committing yourself 100% in every arena because you believe you have a chance to win.
2. Embrace destructive competition (the Tonya Harding strategy)
You focus on winning through injuring or otherwise discrediting others. Given a choice, you’ll gladly take a perceived victory over strengthening loss every time. For those who compete destructively, insecurity transforms hunger into greed and admiration into envy.
3. Refusal to compete (the Goth Kids strategy)
This happens far, far more often to all of us than any of us would care to admit. Right now, you’re implicitly denying competitions because it’s easy to convince yourself you’re doing alright when you decline to compare yourself to others.
I’m happy to report that if this weekend was any indication, it seems that everybody here wants to be Like Mike.
Author: Neil Sarkar
