I went down a Bernard Suits rabbithole after a Malcolm Gladwell reference earwormed its way into my head.

The basic idea is in this quote:

Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.

If you think about it in terms of sports, it’s how to understand the rule book. These are the details that make the game the game. It’s why you can’t use your hands in soccer and why the marathon is the exact amount of miles they measure it is.

These rules, in the end, are arbitrary. But they’re also the reason the game itself exists at all.

The longer idea, from Suits, goes:

To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by rules, where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favor of less efficient means, and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity.

All the games in life, at least a little, have echoes of this idea.

You want to be sensitive to the rules. You want to be aware of how they prohibit the use of more efficient paths in favor of less efficient, and perhaps more entertaining, means.

The hard part is that in most of life, the rules of the game are muddled, if not downright dynamic.

We’ve all experienced relationships or jobs where someone of status or influence seems to keep rewriting the rules as you go and you just can’t ever seem to catch a break let alone get ahead.

The trick is knowing, as quickly as possible, if someone's playing a game with rules you never agreed to.

And it’s why sport is the least important most important thing.

Sports are a relatively pure version of the rest of the games we play in life. They entertain us because the rules are the rules and the outcomes make the event.

A game is a question of an obstacle to be overcome with some rules or constraints, to arrive at a conclusion AND a winner.

If you can reduce everything to this framework and remember why you actually care to play in the first place, you can stick to playing the right games well.

Look for the games. Look for the rules. Know your advantages. Know your disadvantages. And pick who you play with.

It’s all, always, going to be about the people you’re choosing to play with.

From there, whoever shows up to watch, shows up to watch.