How do you know if you're playing the wrong game?

Godin uses "game" for any situation with boundaries, rules and scarcity, where "there's a chance to make a difference, and there's also a chance that you won't." Choosing the game means deciding what you set out to play before working on how to win it. He says we have been trained to compete hard and try hard "but not questioning the boundaries that are in front of us." The line Nick read to him from the book is that we spend more time figuring out how to win the game we're in than choosing which game to play in the first place.

Godin offers two tests. The first is whether the other person only comes out ahead if you lose — if so, he says it doesn't pay to play. The second is crowding: go where there is abundance rather than where everyone already is. He also allows one exception worth remembering: "Don't buy lottery tickets. That's a dumb game to play unless the feeling of buying the ticket is worth more than it costs."

In his words: "Strategy is a philosophy of becoming. It is the work we do today to have something important happen tomorrow." He says it is not taught in elementary school and was not taught in most of the jobs he has had, because the industrial economy wants compliance instead. He describes the actual work of strategy as asking why you are doing a particular interaction, what game you set out to play, who it's for and what it's for.

Godin thinks so, and he is specific about why: the number of people who get a job that changes every time their passions change is, in his phrase, close to zero. His alternative is to commit to loving what you do — choosing to work indoors, to work with your mind, to solve interesting problems, and learning to love that. Nick adds a story from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Good Work Project about a successful sculptor, whose name he could not recall on air, who said that 99% of her day she feels like a carpenter grinding away at the project.

Godin's answer is to get into a different line rather than compete harder in the long one. He told a friend's kid who wanted Yale that the standard line is soccer, student council, grades and SAT scores, and that an alternative was to borrow 500 bucks, fly to India and earn his way home. The kid wrote a book called How to Get into Yale instead, and that book got him in. This is one anecdote from about thirty years ago, not a method Godin claims will repeat.

Nick describes changing what counts as winning. Rather than scoring the day on whether his daughter got a competitive internship, they made a list of everything she could do to prepare and judged her on that the day before — a game she could actually win. He says the nervousness went away, and that she did get the internship, though he thinks she only got it because it no longer mattered to her. Godin's caution is that this is still not proof the approach works: good decisions and good outcomes are, he says, completely unrelated.

Asked what he would change, Godin said the most important thing he would do is change it from education to learning, and that they are not the same thing. "Education is compliance, it's perseverance, it's proving you got a badge." He traces it to the Prussian paramilitary system of the 1800s, when factories arrived, and says school should be about only two things: solving interesting problems and learning to lead.

He describes a feedback loop rather than a cost. For 30 years, he says, the most famous colleges succeeded when they spent more money and when they raised their prices, because they were selling a luxury good and the system responded to what people were buying. His conclusion is that the cost of a place like Princeton is huge for no reason except that "the system got into a feedback loop which pushed it forward." He makes the same point about SAT prep: parents push back not because they analysed whether the SAT is sensible, but because the system they live in runs on ranking.