Member-only story
Win The War, Not the Battles
Barking Up The Wrong Tree: Part II
2 min readJan 14, 2021
Win The War, Not the Battles
- Life is a series of events, it’s not just one big event
- This is why you should care about maximizing your overall running total or accumulation of wins, not one particular win or lose
- If every event gives us a prisoner's dilemma, we can cooperate or antagonize, and our outcome will be decided by the combination of our and the other player's decision
- A singular situation like this is well studied, but what happens when we do this again and again with people you know and new people you just met?
- It turns out, the best strategy here is, is to be cooperative once, and then after that reciprocate what the other player does exactly. Maybe occasionally forgive bad behaviour from others and randomly cooperate.
- This looks like you’re never winning any individual event, or deal or whatever, but in the end, you accumulate the most winnings
Be a T Shaped Person
- This just means, try and experiment with a lot of things
- But when you find your passion or calling, focus on it with most of your resources: time, money, energy…
