Where to play & how to play well

Here’s a simple idea you can practice in various contexts you find yourself in:

• Asking “Where to play?” & “How to play well?”

Some examples

Career

In the context of your professional growth:

• Where are you playing2 now?
• What are the areas that you’re active in?
• What are some adjacent areas that you might explore?
• What are some completely different areas that you might want to try?
• Based on the above: Where would you want to play next?

Now that you’ve decided on where to play, you could ask:

• Who are some of the best players (people active) in these areas?
• What does it mean to play well?
• How could you play well?
• How could you play better?

Being part of a team

Each team usually has multiple areas of interaction and activity.

At a minimum, for a team with a limited set of activities, you might find there is an internal area (e.g. interacting with other team members) and an external area (e.g. interacting with the beneficiaries of the team’s work).

For teams that do a wider range of activities, there are many more areas at play. For example, your team might not interact externally only with the beneficiaries of the team’s work, but also with other people that (can) help. Another example is taking into account specific activity areas of the team, like planning the work of the team or applying advanced expertise to what needs to be done.

Point is that in any team there are multiple areas in which a team member could be more active or not.

• Where are you playing now?
• Where do you want to play next?
• What does it mean to play well?
• What are you going to do next, to play well in the areas where you want to play?

Physical activities

An important part of our lives is being physically active. Where to play in this situation means asking yourself:

• How do I want to be physically active?

The “areas” at play here might be: walking, running, going to a gym, playing physical sports and so on. Once you decide where you want to play, what kind of activities you want to pursue, you might ask yourself:

• What does it mean to play well? and
• How do I want to play well in this areas?

Finances

Another important part in our current society is making money so that we can sustain ourselves and our close ones. There are multiple ways (or areas) of making the amount of money that you need or want.

In which areas are you currently active? Having a salary? Owning a business and getting dividends? Renting real estate? Making investments in the stock market? Doing paid side-projects? Monetizing content? (etc.)

• Where do you want to play next?
• What other areas are available and you want to be active in?
• What does it mean to play well in these areas?
• How could you play well?
• How could you play better?

One critical point to be made: the answers to all of the questions above are profoundly personal, as you might imagine. Of course, in the process of deciding — each of us might consult or consent with partners, look at what happens around, what others are doing, what is recommended, what is not, what are the societal and cultural norms and so on.

In my view, it’s valuable to actually make conscious decisions and not go about living on autopilot.

Also, for the brevity of the essay, I’ve shown the links between “Where to Play?” and “How to Play Well?” only from left to right (former to latter). Food for thought: How would answering “How to Play Well?” provide insights to “Where to Play?”

Wish you lots of inspiration,
Bülent

Footnotes:

• “Where to play?” & “How to play well?” is inspired from paraphrasing Roger Martin’s Where to Play? & How to Win? strategy framework.
• “Playing” and “being active” are used interchangeably in this short essay. Similarly: “player” and “someone active in an area”.

Follow the updates by subscribing to the Personal Strategy newsletter.