We are ranked in schools. And then competition tightens since there are only certain coveted spots for that college and program you want to go to. In class your “bell curved”. And then the internship you didn’t get but someone from your class did. And then the entry-level job you got but it’s not what you envisioned but you have to take.
Everything in our formative years from grade school to our early working years pushes us to understand that the game we play is there will always been more demand than supply for the roles we want to vie for. I’m not here to say it isn’t true, it’s the rules of the games of supply and demand. But it has second order effects in that it makes one believe that all games in life are played with the same fundamentals — that is where it is a ZERO-SUM GAME.
A zero-sum game describes a situation where one person’s gain is exactly equal to another’s loss, perfectly illustrated by multiple candidates competing for a single job opening where only one person can win the role and everyone else automatically loses.
I remember getting the endless rejections. The return-on-investment from the time spent prepping my STAR stories or the diverse subjects that I should be well versed for in Tech were low. But we all knew the job because it was potentially a high payoff so it was worth it. But remember that every single job you are vying for is a zero-sum game. You are a player in the game. So your only option — mine as well at the time — was to be the best player.
But remember that you are not a player in the larger scheme. When you take a step back and look at the totality of your career — whether you are looking to move up to a Lead role, Managerial role or make a lateral change to a role that has more actual responsibilities because you are ready — the game you are playing is far from zero-sum.
Playing A Different Game
POSITIVE-SUM GAMES are what you want to play, where it’s win-win-win for as far as the eye can see. When you find a role that fits, in a team that gels, in a company that is going in the direction of impact and you have the satisfaction, success, delight and impact that you want, then it’s a win-win-win-win.
In fact, the whole hiring process, the company, your hiring manager, you future potential team members — in fact the whole cottage industry of HR professionals (for the most part) — are tying to shot for the moon in trying to find positive-sum games. It’s just that at times, bureaucracy gets in the way along with a whole slew of other things that we’re not gonna get into right now. But the goal and intention is there, but it’s so very hard to recreate lightning strikes and cultivate that in every part of the organization hence all the employee benefits, endless off-sites to attempt to draw that out.
But remember that your ultimate goal — in fact every single person in your organizations past, present and future — are all attempting to create a POSITIVE-SUM GAME (PSG).
PSG is a very abstract concept, but here are some heuristics to shortcut your way to thinking more positive-sum, particularly in your mid-career:
Compounding vs. Benchmarking
Alignment vs. Climbing
Pie vs. Slice
Compounding vs. Benchmarking
Benchmarking your career against someone else’s is a bit like using a competitor’s roadmap to plan your own product. You’re measuring your progress against a trajectory that was never yours to begin with, their title, their comp, their speed of promotion, and what ends up getting measured is the gap between where you are and where you think you should be. That gap never closes. There’s always a new benchmark.
Compounding asks a narrower question: what can you do now that you couldn’t six months ago? That kind of progress is quiet, nearly invisible on LinkedIn, impossible to surface in a performance review. But it’s the only kind that actually belongs to you.
Alignment vs. Climbing
The ladder implies one direction counts as up, that every rung is the same width, that the person behind you is competition and the person ahead is a target. Most people I know who spent a decade climbing the wrong ladder will tell you the view from up there was not worth it.
BG5, which is the career and business application of Human Design, asks a different question entirely: what kind of worker are you actually? How are you built to decide, to operate, to contribute? Not every person is built to initiate. Some are wired to respond, to advise, to evaluate. The title at the top of the ladder might look the same for all of them. The path to it, and whether it’s actually worth having, is not.
Pie vs. Slice
The slice mindset creeps in mid-career, when you’ve been around long enough to see how promotions actually happen (or don’t). It starts to feel fixed-sum. What’s interesting is that the mindset tends to be self-defeating: hoarding information, shielding your domain, keeping junior talent at arm’s length, all of that makes your actual value harder to see, because what you’re most associated with is what you’re protecting rather than what you’re generating.
The reframe is less about optimism and more about how value actually accumulates. If you mentor someone who becomes excellent, you’re associated with that excellence. If you share what you know, you become someone people want to bring into things. The pie doesn’t have to stay fixed. And growing it tends to be more profitable than defending your slice of it.
I’m Eugene, a former Engineer, Entrepreneur and Tech Worker like yourself. I navigated some of the ups and down of working in large and smaller organizations sometimes with flying colours with my share of challenges. I’m not a full-time Career Transition Coach and Consultant focused on mid-career Tech professionals finding alignment and empowerment to accelerate their careers.
If you’re ready to understand how to play a POSITIVE-SUM GAME in the best way possible by learning about your CAREER-TYPE you can do so here for a very very quick short report:
I’m also giving a 30-minute one-on-one free consults. If you’re interested, find a time slot below: