WHAT IS GAME THEORY (AND WHY DOES IT MATTER)?

Game theory is the source code that runs the engine of life.

You might recognize game theory by a few names: cost-benefit analysis, opportunity cost, or goal planning among others.

Whether it's sports, banking, international diplomacy, project management, or choosing what to eat for breakfast and what to wear that day, game theory underpins everything you do.

If you’ve ever met someone who always seems lucky, chances are that game theory is the root cause (whether they know it or not). Sure, luck isa factor. If it wasn’t, life wouldn’t be as exciting. But you can create your own luck by knowing the other factors you have direct and indirect control over.

At its core, game theory has five main parts. Let’s use trying to get a promotion at your job as the current goal:

• Players: participants within the “state of play” (you, others trying to get the promotion to the same position, and any decision-makers that choose who gets the promotion).
• Outcomes: the ways a situation can play out (you get the promotion, you don’t, you do well and get a raise, or you screw up and get fired).
• Restrictions: the rules that players must be aware of and may cause penalties when broken; some of them are universal while others are applied to select players; some are permanent while others are temporary (promotions might only be available to certain players based on how long they’ve been with the company or achievements they’ve made).
• Strategies: the means to get a specific outcome (technical employees might emphasize their work quality, while charismatic employees leverage their connections).
• Variables: the factors that define the other three parts (a limited example would be each participant’s skills, relevance, seniority, and relationship to decision-makers; the rewards or penalties associated with each outcome; and the energy, resources, and time dedicated to each strategy).

If this all seems overwhelming, don’t worry. You already do all this math with everything you do and every decision you make.

Our job is to teach you how to be aware of it, understand it, and use it with greater control and intention. From there, we help you build effective strategies that you can use to create the life and career you want.

Instead of feeling powerless, adrift, or frustrated that things aren’t working out the way you want, applied game theory lets you regain a sense of power and control by knowing how to traverse life’s chaos.

HOW START 2 CONTINUE CAN HELP YOU ACCOMPLISH YOUR GOALS

While other business consultants and coaches may have a one-size-fits-all system that their clients must adhere to, we build our framework around you, your goals, and the ways you want to attain them.

Since everyone’s needs are different, we have three main ways to do this:

• TEACH YOU: if you prefer to do things yourself, we’ll train you and give you direction so you don’t have to feel adrift or stuck on your own.
• DO IT WITH YOU: if you need a little extra help, we’ll work with you side-by-side on your projects to help take some pressure off your to-do list.
• DO IT FOR YOU: if you don’t have the time or energy, we can just do the work for you (or handle certain aspects of the project on our own so you can focus on the work you want to do).

Below are some examples of how what that might look like.

NO MATTER WHAT YOU CHOOSE, YOU CAN FIND A REAL WORLD EXAMPLE OF HOW WE APPLY OUR STRATEGY AND COACHING PHILOSOPHY BELOW

“BUT WHAT’S STOPPING ME FROM DOING ANY OF THIS WITH AI?”

The short answer is nothing. With how many “life coaches,” “mindset influencers,” and “efficiency consultants” are often money pits that tell you nothing useful (or just enough useful things to do the bare minimum while getting you to pay them as much as you’re willing to), we don’t blame you if you’d prefer leaning on large-language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others.

However, LLMs are not true AI. At best, they’re mirrors that provide useful observations and insight, chewing through data much faster than a human could. At worst, they’re engines of sycophancy, agreeing when they shouldn’t and feeding you factually incorrect data that, if you’re unable to interpret it, have no means of catching those errors. And don’t get us started on AI psychosis from its misuse.

With that in mind, we have two answers to this increasingly-common question:

We’ve seen enough extractive “business and life advice” from people with high production value content and very little credentials who have manipulated well-meaning workers, entrepreneurs, and people just trying to live a better life. We believe in generating value where you can be profitable and grow your business but that success is grounded in serving your people (your community, your employees and contractors, your partners, and your customers or clients) well. If there’s one thing we’re good at, it’s practicing what we preach.

And while we have strong opinions about what LLMs and their misuse (emphasis on misuse) are doing to society and the planet, we’re not luddites either. If you’re insistent on including LLMs in your tech stack, we can at least train you on how to use them responsibly and in applications that make sense. All technological advancement (especially if it happens quickly and sloppily) can be overwhelming, but we do maintain that there are a few use cases where this technology is, indeed, a boon. But for now, the average use cases are like watching a caveman discover a computer monitor and use it to smash a rock or etch a drawing on the cave wall.

Put another way, if your mind was a kitchen and every idea you have, a delicious dish, LLMs are a blender: great for smoothies, salsas, even paté… but to make a cake (or, for instance, a video or fully coded application) with just a blender and to pass it off as “just as good” as using an oven, bowl, cake tin, spatula, measuring cups, and recipe card is as foolish as it sounds. Least we can do is acknowledge the blender for what it is and use it appropriately.

What’s more, if you feel the need to outsource the majority of your job to AI, the core of your feeling the need to do this (“work is a necessary evil, nothing I do matters, I can just use this to collect whatever money I can for the least amount of effort, etc.”) is the problem we hope to address.

Your life is worth living, your problems worth solving, your challenges worth overcoming, and you are worth experiencing it all so that you can grow and become more capable, skilled, happy, and connected with the world around you and the people living alongside you. You’re also allowed to ask for help, to be vulnerable and to find people who will handle your heart and intentions with respect and care, and to have allies in the battles you fight in your life.

If this doesn’t convince you, no worries. You’re not our target demo. But if this does resonate, we’re here to help.

Ready to start? Reach out to Tony directly.

After all, life’s a game. Play it well.