Play win win

Play win win

November 2022

Play Win-Win 

Sujatha Rao makes a case for the necessity of the world coming together as one— where everyone is a winner! 

Last year, ‘Squid Game,’ a Korean  television series on Netflix broke  records for its viewership across the  world. It reached the number one spot in 90  countries, garnering more than 111 million  viewers in just 17 days of its release. 

While the title of the series is drawn from a  similarly named children’s game, the series  itself is woven around a contest where 456  players in deep financial debt, put their lives  at risk to play a children’s game, in which the  ultimate winner takes home 45.6 billion South  Korean won (translating approximately to  USD 38 million). The story’s creator, Hwang  Dong-hyuk, says, “It is a story about losers”  from our present competitive society where the  “winners level up.”  

Life, fortunately, is not a zero-sum game.  

If one person wins, it doesn’t mean that someone  else needs to lose. Ideally, you want everyone to  win. But can we believe that things can really  be ‘win-win’? If yes, are we to wait for things to  pan out by themselves, or are there any things  in our control that we can do to make this  happen? It appears that in addition to the luck  factor in life, there are certain things we can do  to create a conducive atmosphere for a win-win  situation. .  

Which Mental Space Are You Acting From? 

•  Despite having a very good bank balance in  her account, Sowmya finds it very difficult  to withdraw money for spending even on  daily basic items and often finds herself  stressed out about money matters. 

•  Dinesh is having sleepless nights about  his promotion at work and is constantly  worried about someone else taking credit  for the work done by him.  

In a way, these are examples of people suffering  from what we can label as ‘shortage mentality.’  These people are constantly worried about not  having enough of the things they want from  the world. Is this a trait one is born with? Or  did some incidents in their lives make them  behave this way? Either way, is there something  we can do to rid ourselves of such a mentality?  

It appears that we can. Following are a few  of the practices that can help us nurture an  ‘abundance attitude’ in ourselves. 

•  Maintaining a gratitude journal will open  the doors to abundance consciousness by  reminding us about how lucky we are by  focussing our attention on things that we  have, rather than on things that we lack. 

•  “It’s amazing what you can accomplish  when you do not care who gets the credit,”  said Harry Truman. Going a step further,  when we also praise others’ work and let  others share the credit, however small  their right to the same happens to be, we  elevate our status in the eyes of others and  strengthen our relationships with them. 

What Are You Choosing? 

•  While growing up, Ashwika had a bad  childhood. Her parents divorced after a  very long-drawn bitter fight. Many a time,  Ashwika was caught in between their fights,  impacting her growth negatively, as a result  of which she broke into her adulthood not  trusting man-woman relationships. 

•  Revanth, on the other hand, had a good  childhood. His parents loved each other,  and they both were doting parents to him.  But, while he was growing up, money was  always an issue at home due to his parent’s 

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lack of financial discipline. Revanth grew  up feeling jealous of his rich friends. To  date, he holds his parents responsible for  his having to settle for a menial job in life.  

Ashwika and Revanth have put the blame  for the problems in their lives outside of  themselves. While there is no denying the  fact that there definitely is a grain of truth in  their line of thinking, unless they take control  of their lives and own them fully, they will  continue to live with bitterness and fail to live  up to their potential.  

But is there something they can do to enable  them to do so?  

•  Freedom of choice: In his famous book,  Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl  said, “Everything can be taken from a  man but one thing: the last of the human  freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any  given set of circumstances, to choose one’s  own way.” 

It is often a choice between either playing  the victim or being the survivor of the tough  situations in our lives. When we choose the  latter, we would be able to move on, by owning  up to our present and steering it towards  whatever we want in life, without the baggage  of the past. 

As the popular writer and American  psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb beautifully said,  “We are the authors of our own lives. We get  to write our own stories. We may not always  choose the circumstance, but the response is  ours to choose.” 

•  Self-control: A lot of real improvements  in the quality of our lives are likely to be  driven more by our improved decision making rather than by medical technology.  

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But many a person laments that though  they know the right choices for themselves  and are likely to choose the same, they  lack the requisite discipline to continue  practising them.  

To improve our self-control, we have to try and  come up with strategies best suited to ourselves.  One of the best things that would help us in  this regard is to pair something that we love  with something which is good for us but we  hate doing. For instance, an obese movie lover  can decide to watch a film while sweating on a  treadmill. 

How Badly Do You Want To Realise Your  Dreams? 

•  Dheeraj is daydreaming about owning a big  house some day without planning anything  in terms of making the said dream come  true. 

•  Anvesh is a travel enthusiast. He went on  an overdrive of his credit card spends in an  attempt to visit the places he loves and is  currently struggling to pay the exorbitant  penalties and charges levied on his card.  

Both these people are unwilling to work  towards making their dreams come true  through a constructive plan. 

For that to happen, you have to want to realise  your dream bad enough to sacrifice your  present to better your future. You can spur  yourself into action, either by turning on stuff  that motivates you or turning off things that  distract you.  

For Example: 

•  You can keep pictures of well-toned-bodied  

“We are the authors of our own lives. We get to write our own  stories. We may not always choose the circumstance, but the  response is ours to choose.” 

people around you if you want to get in  shape. 

•  You can turn off notifications when you  work on important projects to avoid  distractions.  

•  You can stop buying junk food and fill your  refrigerator with healthy salads and fruits  if you are trying to lose weight.  

As the  

clichéd saying goes,  

“If you have the will,  

 you will find a way.” 

The mask Is off 

COVID-19 and the earlier pandemics have  amply demonstrated that, in life, win-win  solutions are not only possible, but, sometimes,  they are imminent for our very survival as a  race. In the interconnected world that we live  in, the  

world has truly become one true to our  Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (the world is one  family) philosophy, and there is no way the  world can win the war against the pandemics  unless all human beings are protected against  them.  

Hence, sharing the requisite resources and  knowledge with all human beings, irrespective  of their geographical or economic standings,  after carrying out thorough and irrefutable  evidence-based research about the same,  is an absolute necessity. Either we can win  collectively, or we will lose collectively.  

As the world is gradually getting out of the  pandemic and as our masks are slowly coming  off, the following words of Benedict Wells are  worth pondering over: 

“Life is not a zero‐sum game. It owes us nothing, and things just happen the way they  do. Sometimes they’re fair and everything  makes sense; sometimes they’re so unfair we  question everything. I pulled the mask off the  face of Fate, and all I found beneath it was  chance.” 

Sujatha Rao is a retired banker. She has been contributing articles to various newspapers and mag azines over the last two decades. Two of her short stories were placed third in Times of India’s national  level Write India contest (Seasons 1 and 2). Her first book titled In the Company of Stories was published  recently. Her other interests include reading, traveling, practising yoga, and mindfulness.