Play Your Own Game

Two of my friends are becoming enormously rich. One in venture capital, one in real estate.

You wouldn't know it if you met them. No flashy watches, no flexing. They both drive F-150s.

It can be hard to watch a friend build wealth. I'm mostly happy for them. But I'm also an asshole who likes to win, and they're "beating me." It makes me wonder if I should be playing their game.

I'd be an idiot to try.

They're great investors because they have talents I don't. They're both good at spotting opportunities, but their superpower is being legitimately friends with thousands of people. One of them calls, texts, or DMs 500 people a day, naturally, just for fun. If I played their game, I'd lose. I'd be the short kid playing basketball.

But I'm still jealous, because it feels like we're all playing the same game, the one called "business." And business keeps one scoreboard: money. Profits are profits, whether they come from plumbing or SaaS.

Or are they?

There's profit without honor. The cartels, presumably, have great EBITDA.

There's profit without skill. Finding oil underneath your failing cattle ranch is wonderful, but not impressive.

There's profit without flourishing. Profitable law firms have miserable partners. If you're in the wrong business for you, you're in the wrong business.

If your scoreboard can't tell the difference between Walmart and the Sinaloa Cartel, it's the wrong scoreboard. The real game is something else: flourishing by exercising your talents.

That's what my friends are doing. Even if I could match their profits, and I can't, it would still be dumb: I wouldn't be exercising my talents. I wouldn't flourish.

My game is small, white-collar service businesses. I'm good at it, I enjoy it, and with work and luck it'll get me to my financial goals. More to the point, it's the right game for me.

I'm not jealous of Monet. His talents are so obviously different from mine that there's nothing to compare. I just get to enjoy the paintings.

If I can remember that my friends and I are playing different games, I can enjoy their success the same way.

And with luck, they'll let me borrow their planes.