Here’s How To Stop Playing The Wrong Game
I was playing a game out of 10
I look down at my trainers as they flash across the dark road. Despite the other 10,000 participants all I can hear is the sound of our trainers scratching over the tarmac. It’s warm, but 10 degrees cooler than expected. A cold snap hit this morning and dumped a ton of rain onto this 900-year-old site. What the hell am I doing? I think to myself. I feel tears begin to creep into the corners of my eyes. My life is a joke. Thousands of people died building this place, and here I am, living in a world where we can run around it like it’s Disneyland.
I never used to think: my life is a joke. I always thought: my life is perfectly normal. It was normal to go to a good school. Normal to go on amazing holidays. Normal to go through $70,000 of higher education. Normal to think the only two career paths out of business school were investment banking and management consulting. Normal to move to Thailand on an amazing salary. Normal to be told you could be the company’s zone president. Normal, normal, normal.
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Normal to be in Angkor Wat, Cambodia, running the half marathon. The noise of the crowd swells as the bridge funnels runners through the south gate. The sun is rising, casting long shadows over the runners and carved demons alike. As it gets lighter, I can make out more of the intricacy of the carvings. I marvel at how many people must have lived and died building this, never seeing anything outside this forest. Yet here I am, having flown in from Bangkok to run around the old city streets. I wonder if the kings or slaves ever thought one big game would be played here?
As the kilometres continued to scratch away, I thought more about what I was doing. I first had the thought which I now have so often:
I feel like my life is one big cheat code.
Everyone else is busy optimising their life to get to 10/10 in London, yet here I am using motherlode (a world-famous-money-printing cheat code from The Sims.) I am not using motherlode to print money, far from it, I have started a business and take no salary. I am using motherlode to play a game out of 100.
History’s entrepreneurs have always played out of 100
Playing a different game to your opponents has been the timeless pursuit of history’s inventors and entrepreneurs. Henry Ford is attributed to saying:
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
Whilst it is under debate whether Henry Ford said this or not, the point still stands tall. If you want to move from a 8/10 to a 9/10, then please go and ask your neighbour what they need. If you want to play a game out of 100, then you need to redefine the playbook. Steve Jobs famously redefined playbook after playbook. He did this by not using market research. How can you do market research for an iPhone, an iPod, or an iPad when the product doesn’t exist? Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, they never used language like optimise and efficiency when they were redefining industries. Of course, they did when they built their factories, but that was to get them from 99/100 to 100/100.
That is exactly what we are trying to do with Wildest Dream. We are not using other professional services firms as inspiration. We are using Netflix for its technology, Apple for its design and sales strategy and Tesla for its critical thinking. We won’t get anywhere by saying, what have other people in our industry done, and how can we do that better?
Ask yourself these questions
After I had that insight on the half marathon in Cambodia, I started asking myself questions like:
“Forget making it 10% better, what would you have to change to make it 100x better?”
“If you had 100 years to build this, what would you do differently?”
“If you had unlimited financial resources to guarantee a 100% success rate, what would you do?”
Let’s take the first question and apply it to what Patrick and I are doing at Wildest Dream. We are in Portugal right now planning a leadership retreat for the autumn of next year. For our inaugural trip, I imagine we will have challenges to get people onto the trip. It’s a tough sell, “part with some hard-earned cash and annual leave to come away with us to Portugal for a long weekend to discuss your wildest dream.” For this first trip, we will have to push hard to get it full. Even though we know it is going to be the best thing people have ever done, they don’t know that yet. It will go to the wire and we’ll have to call in a few favours.
How could we improve it by 10%? We could send a bunch more WhatsApp’s; we could go to a networking drink; we could do a few LinkedIn posts – we could work 10% harder.
But what should we do if we want to make it 100x better? What if we wanted to have the trip running every month of the year. Suddenly that seems like an awful lot of WhatsApp messages and networking drinks. We need to rip up the playbook. For us, ripping up the playbook means starting one year in advance to build our social media engagement, to pull, rather than to push. To invest heavily in crafting a beautiful narrative about why the trip is perfect for you rather than investing in the number of WhatsApp’s we send.
Change your playbook
So, as you head into November, have a think about what you want to achieve in 2026. The world won’t change if you play a small game. You might feel good and get to 10/10 by copying what someone else is doing, but you’ll get to play a whole new game - a game out of 100 - by going your own way. Sure, you might get stuck at 10/100 for a while, but start thinking, what would I have to do to get to 90/100? Once you have dreamt about that, then you can start thinking about 11/100, then 12/100. Like I was on the bridge into Angkor Wat last year, you’ll feel liberated by realising you’re playing a very different game to everyone else.
Deepen Your Curiosity
Cambodia’s Curse by Joel Brinkley is an amazing book about the troubled history of such a beautiful country. The leaders there are not playing to 100.
Henry Ford is often attributed as saying ‘if I asked people what they wanted, they’d say faster horses.’ There isn’t any reliable evidence that he did say it.
Steve Jobs spoke many times about consumer research helping you go from 9 to 10, but not from 9 to 90 - check out this video.
