Structured and Unstructured Games

[This idea was first introduced to me by Daniel Gross's article of the same name. You should give it a read. Its very good. This post is a summation of my personal interpretation as a university student.]

There are two types of games in life: structured and unstructured games.

Structured games have clearly defined rules and outcomes. Highschool is a good example. It has a clear win-condition (get into a prestigious university) and specific objectives (get good grades, join the right clubs, etc). This type of environment makes it easy to measure progress and identify next steps.

Unstructured games are much harder and more frustrating to play. Winning is often poorly defined and it's often unclear how to make progress. It becomes easy to adopt arbitrary rulesets to give yourself a sense of momentum and inertia. This is really dangerous, as you can end up spending a lot of time optimizing for things that ultimately don't matter.

In many ways, university is an unstructured game. If you're not following a established pre-professional or academic path, progress is hard to define and its extremely difficult to figure out what you actually want.

But how do you find your personal win condition? How do you create your own set of rules and metrics? For young people, figuring out the answer to these questions is the most important thing.

Note however, that it is unnecessary to actually find these answers while you are young. Long term vision can be blinding and often leads us to chase goals that we don't actually want. Instead, it is much more valuable to develop the courage to try (and fail) many things and hone the ability to be very good at self assessment.

Get really good at being honest with yourself and filtering quickly for the things and people who genuinely make your life better or more exciting. Remember, the days are long but the decades are short. Be bold, be brave and be truthful.

You're doing all the right things.