Playing by New Rules

By John Berling Hardy

If life is a great Game, we are all familiar with the Players. They are the self-assured success stories always looking out for their own interests. They do business with a slick handshake and a smooth tongue. They write the rules, and we have to live by them. For these Players, losing is not an option. Which begs the question, what about the rest of us?

It seems like the Players have absolute control over their Game. They created it, they dominate society's upper echelons, and as a result they are blessed with a permanent advantage. How can we hope to take them on?

What we need is a way to unseat them from their self-appointed thrones by playing our weaker position to greatest strength. We need to undermine them and create leverage to force them out of their complacency. The Players base their strategy on having the upper hand at all times. This allows them the luxury to rake in profits without investing much effort in their work. This smug sense of unimpeachable success is a symbol of their strength, but it is also their greatest weakness.

Cut off from the rest of us in their ivory towers they have come to depend on that power which they have always held. If there were some way to deprive them of that seemingly inbuilt advantage we might be able to turn the tables on them. Once their fall from grace begins the very tactics which have kept them at the top for so long - that slick, self-serving salesmanship, will do nothing but accelerate their demise. Since we lack their advantage to begin with, however, we must outmanoeuvre them using nothing but our wits and capacity for hard work.

Fortunately, Players are particularly susceptible to being played. The great majority of Players are nothing more than one-trick ponies. The Players never expect the sheep to use their own tactics against them. The reason for this is twofold.

The first is that the Players to a man view the rest of us as foolish and incompetent. The second is that they do not credit ordinary people with the capacity for cunning which is required to undermine their plays.

For our strategy to work we must first convince the Player to buy into a false sense of security which we will create. To do this we must study our Players, learn what makes them tick, and adjust our approach to deal more specifically with the individual or group concerned. We must then watch how they operate, basing our movements on theirs. Players are never long idle - their constant agenda to seek out more wealth and power is forever propelling them on.

Believing themselves to be infallible prevents them from learning from their mistakes. Add to this their lack of interest in anything that does not immediately benefit them, causes them to lack depth. This then severely restricts their ability to be innovative when problems do arise.

Finally, not being able to engage in any situation in which they are not guaranteed success makes the Player into a coward and further restricts their range of movement. It is little wonder that the Players need this elaborate ruse, called the Game; for without it they would have nothing, and be nothing.

About the Author:

0 comments:

Guides Complete