My family loves games, and we’re competitive about them.

We’re not game nerds per se. We don’t buy new games every month, we’re not into complex strategy games, we don’t collectively attend game meetups and wipe the floor with the competition*.

*Although that sounds awesome…

We mostly play cards and classic board games that you’re probably familiar with to some extent.

And while we may not be extremists, we have our favourites and we take them seriously.

At any family gathering, game playing is almost the default activity over which to catch up, eat, and spend time with each other.

So when my mom recently visited my girlfriend and me, it was just a matter of hours before the deck of cards came out.

After running through some family favourites, my girlfriend suggested a family classic of her own, Spades, which I had never played before.

Now Spades is similar in concept to a number of the trick-taking card games I’m familiar with, and yet the feeling and strategy of the game are quite different.

Being a competitor, I was of course, interested in winning out of the gate.

Every Game Is Different

A few hands in, however, I realized that while the rules were similar to other games I was familiar with, the same strategies and mindsets didn’t necessarily work.

When learning many games, not only is there a process of learning the hard and fast rules that contain and guide the flow of play, but also a more abstract “feeling out” process required to gain a level of proficiency.

This feeling out process relates both to the game as a whole, as it would be played with any other players, as well as the individual players with whom you are playing in the moment.

A game with one or more aggressive, risk-taking players will have a drastically different feel than one with generally conservative players, and those variables will change how you show up and play the cards you’re dealt.

On top of learning how to compete at a basic level, a game often doesn’t begin to feel fun until you’ve really gained the feel for it.

This means that sometimes when you’re new to a game or new to your fellow players, the correct strategy is to put aside your competitive nature and just gather data.

Test The Boundaries

Commit to losing every hand, but testing different modes of play until you develop your feel for it.

Play aggressively, conservatively, randomly, trust your gut, trust a system, play based on your opponents, play based on your hand, try anything that comes to mind. Push the boundaries of how someone might play a given hand and note the outcome.

Note how your opponents alter their play in response.

Note what’s most fun for you personally. It’s a game after all, and games should be fun.

Then once you’ve gathered sufficient data and developed your feel, you can enter the next round with an intentional strategy that you have some confidence in being effective for the given situation with the given players.

Always Be Testing

The same is true for so many aspects of our work and lives.

We want to jump into different areas of our businesses, be that marketing, management, our product or service itself, or maybe even the business we want to start but haven’t yet and have every action we take be successful the first time through.

Life rarely works like that.

Instead, we should commit to relentlessly experiment and test the boundaries in ways both big and small, and always be gathering and analyzing the data we get back from those tests.

Some tests might fail. Some tests might cost us money. Some tests might cost us relationships and even clients or customers.

Testing can be scary.

But we can’t begin to build and grow intentional businesses until we develop our feel for our business, our clients, our customers, our teams until we know where the boundaries for each are, and how the various inputs affect the outputs.

And my guess is that if you do enough tests you’ll realize that the boundaries of your potential are a lot bigger than you had thought, and you might just hit on something truly special you never would have known was possible otherwise.

So make a list of possible tests to run and start collecting data. Put your ego aside, be prepared for many of your tests to fail, or even commit to it if you’re really brave.

Note how your leads, clients, and customers respond.

Note how your team responds.

Note what’s most fun for you personally.

It’s a business after all, and business should be fun.