Getting Back in the Game
Sunday, September 27th, 2009
We’ve all met them, those well-dressed, well-appointed smoothed-tongued manipulators who can get away with anything and make astronomical profits from it while the rest of us are stressed to breaking point by the conflicting demands on our time. These are the winners in our society, and the system makes it remarkably difficult for them to lose. What can you or I do when faced with these self-serving individuals who will stop at nothing to have their way?
The task of beating the Players at their own Game seems at first impossibly daunting. They know the rules inside out, have risen to positions of great power and authority, and are far more experienced than we are. How can someone like you or I hope to prevail in a showdown against them?
What we need is a way to unseat them from their self-appointed thrones by playing our weaker position to greatest strength. We need to undermine them and create leverage to force them out of their complacency. The Players base their strategy on having the upper hand at all times. This allows them the luxury to rake in profits without investing much effort in their work. This smug sense of unimpeachable success is a symbol of their strength, but it is also their greatest weakness.
Cut off from the rest of us in their ivory towers they have come to depend on that power which they have always held. If there were some way to deprive them of that seemingly inbuilt advantage we might be able to turn the tables on them. Once their fall from grace begins the very tactics which have kept them at the top for so long – that slick, self-serving salesmanship, will do nothing but accelerate their demise. Since we lack their advantage to begin with, however, we must outmanoeuvre them using nothing but our wits and capacity for hard work.
The good news for us is that most Players have only one strategy, and once it has failed they are left paddleless up the proverbial creak. The Players never imagine that they might be played, and therein lies our advantage. The reasons for this are twofold:
First, the average Player views the rest of us as fools, incapable of thinking tactically. Second, they see themselves as gifted with a shrewdness which the rest of us simply do not have.
On the surface, we seduce the Player, lulling them into a false sense of security while we go about their undoing. To do this, we must first develop ways of identifying them. Next, we must learn to understand their nuances, so that we may differentiate between various types of Players and thereby better attune our movements to theirs. Next, we observe their movements to discern the underlying pattern hidden beneath. Players are always ‘on their game’. That is to say, they never let up in pursuing their hidden agenda.
Because a Player thinks of himself as supreme he takes no notice of his own mistakes, believing himself incapable of making any. In addition, his unwillingness to take an interest in anything which will not benefit him materially makes him remarkably shallow. If problems do arise he will have no way of thinking creatively in order to address them, and will therefore be reduced to a state of panic, and so the downward spiral begins.
It is also important to observe that Players will only take action if their success is assured – they are, essentially, lacking in courage. By forcing them into a corner we can undermine them completely. So weak is the Player cut off from his advantage in The Game that his cowardice will shine through and he will be destroyed.
