But this is silly. You don’t want to place restrictions on yourself for no reason at all.
There’s an old Buffett quote that goes ‘I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.’
I think about this a lot.
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In Judo, as in life, you want to play the ACTUAL game. Not some made up game where things are harder than they need to be.
(Within ethical constraints, of course.)
has a good way of thinking about this: she calls it ‘are you playing with the REAL rules?’
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Her favourite example (that I can’t get out of my head) is that of speedrunners.
Speedrunners compete to finish video games in the shortest possible time, by exploiting quirks of the game that nobody thinks of exploiting.
You could say that they’re playing the minimum rule set.
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Of course, the example isn’t perfect, because their goals (speed) is an orthogonal goal to the main goals of the game.
But the property of ‘looking for quirks in the game environment that nobody else thinks of using’ maps pretty well to business and life.
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In business and life, you want to play the actual game that reality forces you to play, not some made up version of the game that society makes you think you have to play.
You don’t get extra points for playing a facsimile.
You only get points for achieving your stated goals.
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So ask yourself: am I playing the actual game that reality forces me to play? Am I playing the minimum rule set?
TBH, I don’t really know if I am, because societal narratives are hard to ignore.
But thanks to my Judo experience, I can’t get this idea out of my head.
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Anyway, congratulations to Takato, that was a well-deserved win.
If you spend any time watching Judo over the next couple of days, and you see two competitors grappling and not getting any of their throws to work, know that it’s because they’re denying each other a usable grip.
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At that level of competition, they’ve studied each and every competitor on the field and know all their techniques, and therefore all the grips they have to deny.
At that level of the competition, they’re playing the actual game.
And what a game that is. The end.
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New subtitle: “don’t be a scrub”. Love it LOLOL