When Charles Duhigg attended his Harvard Business School class’s 15-year reunion, he was surprised to discover how many of his former classmates were miserable. One of them was earning over a million dollars a year, and said to him, “If you spend 12 hours a day doing work you hate, at some point it doesn’t matter what your paycheck says.”
Charles also noticed the exceptions—the happy ones at the reunion had found jobs that were both financially and emotionally rewarding. As he gave it more thought, Charles realized that they all had something in common: they experienced early setbacks in their careers.
Because they were often passed over for prestigious jobs in finance, tech, and management consulting, they were forced to figure out their own paths and the tradeoffs they would need to make.
Charles counted himself in the happy group of people. He’d been passed over for all of the good jobs too, and so he decided to become a journalist. His classmates thought he had been courageous, but instead, he had no other options. He writes, “What they didn’t know was that those doors, in fact, had stayed shut—and that as a result, I was saved from the temptation of easy riches. I’ve been thankful ever since, grateful that my bad luck made it easier to choose a profession that I’ve loved.”
You could split the Harvard Business School class into two groups that played two different types of games. Several years ago, Naval Ravikant wrote this tweet:
Status games are multiplayer, zero-sum, hierarchical, judged socially.
Get grades, applause, titles now – emptiness later.
Natural games are single player, positive-sum, internal, judged by nature/markets.
Pay in pain now – get wealth, health, knowledge, peace, family later.
People who were offered and accepted prestigious jobs played the status game. People who weren’t offered prestigious jobs and had to carve their own path were effectively forced into playing the natural game. They had to look elsewhere for their rewards, because they couldn’t access the quick reward of the status game.
I could relate to all of this. When I was rejected from a prestigious business school, I also had to carve my own path. There were very low odds I’d get a prestigious job out of college. I was gently pushed into playing the natural game. I tried a lot of things and found the ones that were most interesting to me. Eventually, I found my natural game, and writing is a big part of it.
Status games can, sometimes, still find their ways into natural games. For example, while I get a lot of energy and fulfillment out of writing, it wasn’t too long ago that I thought that being a successful writer meant that I had to write a New York Times bestselling book. By that definition, I was an unsuccessful writer every moment until that event happened. But then I realized I had gotten caught up in a status game, and I had to find my way back to playing the natural game. It requires constant practice and adjustment.
Author Laura Huang recently shared an image visualizing this concept:

How can you tell you’re playing the natural game?
Laura wrote up a nice prompt to find your natural game, “Take a moment to step back and ask yourself: What game am I playing? Is it silly or is it meaningful? And if it’s the former, how can you shift to one that actually brings you peace, joy, and growth?”
Some other signs I’ve noticed:
- When you play the natural game, sometimes it gives you so much energy and fulfillment that you feel rich even when your bank account says otherwise.
- You would be, at least in theory, willing to work below your market rate if it meant you could spend more time playing the natural game.
- If money weren’t an object—say, you had $10 million or $1 billion—you would spend all day playing the natural game. (For example, if money weren’t an object, I would spend most of my day reading and writing.)
- The natural game also feels like an infinite game: you win when you get to play again. (Every day I write, I win.)
- The rewards of a natural game are both intrinsic and extrinsic. In the beginning, there’s enough intrinsic reward that you don’t find it difficult to keep going. The intrinsic reward also lasts longer; you feel good for a day, maybe even weeks, months, or years.
- When you play a natural game, you’re spending most of your energy doing the real thing—not working a system, creating perceptions, etc.
Perhaps the most telling sign that you’re playing a natural game is that you’ve spent more time introspecting. You need to spend a lot of time reflecting and defining what success looks like for yourself.
Status game paths are very clear cut, but a natural game requires that you identify much less obvious ladders—sometimes maybe even building your own. Most of your family and friends may not understand. But the ones that do will tend to be generous with their knowledge and happy for you. Game recognize game.
P.S., I published a related post several years ago, “You should only compete with one person: yourself.”