Aside from learning the rules of a game, I believe that the second most important rule of winning is to know your opponent. If you can quickly figure out your opponent’s style of play, you can adapt accordingly and neutralize him before he (or she) has a chance to disrupt your style of play.
When I started my career in business I was daunted by the ruthless and intimidating nature of corporate politics. It wasn’t until I realized that I could apply the same game mentality to my career as I had to my school life that I began to excel. Now I keep this ethos with me, treating each day as a series of challenges to be met and each person I encounter as a player whose style I need to quickly read and adapt to

When it comes to success, there are no rules. No one in the world can dictate what is going to make you feel successful. Everyone has their own definition of success, The only thing that matters is that you figure out exactly what it’s going to take to walk away feeling like a winner. What is it going to take to make you feel like a success? That’s the only question you ever have to ask yourself in your career.

Thinking of school as a game was just the hook I needed to make each test and homework assignment a challenging and rewarding experience.
The roots of this lay in the fact that I was part of a game- playing family. Each week my mother, father, and I would sit down and play the classic games: Clue, Risk, Scrabble, Boggle— anything we could get our hands on. We were a very competitive family and enjoyed challenging our minds and improving our strategies each and every week. More importantly, the games were a chance to learn about each other. The games themselves were incidental.
No matter what, when I sat down at that table, I was gunning for my mother and she was gunning for me (in a loving way, of course). There was nothing mean-spirited about it; we simply enjoyed playing against each other and competing each week to see who would come out on top. I would study her playing style, anticipate her next move, and adapt my playing style to disarm her— and she would do the same to me