Playing to Win

What Hacker News says

1. thot_experimentJul 2026
   It always surprises me when people don't understand that the employee-employer relationship is an adversarial one. Unless you're in a democratic co-op or similar your employer is the enemy and you should never forget that. The correct move is to try to screw them in every legal way at every turn because that is what they are doing to you. Never divulge any information that increases your attack surface, always try to extract the most money for the least effort. This is capitalism 101.

   You must not allow them to fool you into thinking that these aren't the rules they're playing by. David Sirlin's "Playing to Win" is a good treatise on how to be good, and perhaps the most important lesson is to play the game by the rules as written, and not by some other set of rules that exists only in your head.

   (Though in this case the victim was senior enough that I suspect he was playing the game to the best of his ability, trying to humanize himself to gain the upper hand in some other manipulation game and misplayed, kicking things into the legal arena, as one does)

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2. taneqApr 2024
   Not sure if it's been linked in this thread yet (although I did see it on another post yesterday) but iirc this is one of the core messages of Playing To Win by David Sirlin (https://www.sirlin.net/ptw). To win, all you have to do is not lose.
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3. sandsparMar 2024
   Related reading:

   https://www.sirlin.net/ptw

   "David Airline's Playing to Win has been the competitive gamer's bible since the year 2000."

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4. taneqDec 2023
   If you’re interested in this, can I recommend Dave Sirlin’s excellent “Playing To Win” series? One of the few articles that I’ve read that permanently changed the way I think about games, both from the player’s and the designer’s point of view.

   Edit: https://www.sirlin.net/articles/playing-to-win This is the overview but read the whole thing start to end, seriously.

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5. eruOct 2023
   > This approach eventually sucks out the pleasure of exploration and random encounters [...]

   Oh, that depends entirely on the game and what your mood is. In something like Opus Magnum that min-maxing is the entire point. In something like Factorio or Oxygen Not Included you can have fun both with bumbling around or with min-maxing.

   Also have a look at https://www.sirlin.net/ptw for some perspective. Playing to Win can be fun and rewarding. See especially the chapter https://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/love-of-the-game-not-playing...

   > Now it’s time for what appears to be the opposite point of view: “playing to win” at all times is counter-productive. If you want to win over the long term, then you can’t play every single game as if it were a tournament finals. If you did, you wouldn’t have time for basic R&D, you’d never learn the quirky nuances that show up unexpectedly at tournaments, and you are likely to get stuck honing suboptimal tactics.

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6. bwbSep 2022
   1. Leaders Eat Last Deluxe: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't

   We gave this to every employee at the business, as it models the type of culture and leaders we wanted to grow. For me personally, it put down on paper what I had been trying to do for years. It was something I reread often to try to improve my manager/leadership skills. This type of thinking helped me become a better CEO (it wasn't instant).

   2. Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works

   Great books on tactics and strategy; it helped me improve why we did things and created a much better approach to problems.

   3. 4. Lean B2B: Build Products Businesses Want and The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

   Totally changed how I approach building solutions and testing ideas. I learn how to do customer dev interviews and go from learning to testing what problems I am hearing and so on. I’ve flipped through each of them 50+ times as I construct the next interview or so on. I particularly like the Product Playbooks method to evaluate different problems and the value individuals put on them. They have been helpful as I’ve started to learn, and I’ve got a long way to go.

   I wish I had these 10 years previous; it would have saved a lot of money.

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