Everything is a Game. The Game is Growth.

I was watching a UFC match on a Sunday - a highly anticipated fight between Islam Makhachev and Renato Moicano.
For context, UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) is elite-level mixed martial arts (MMA).

While the match was on, during the mid-fight promo, a well known commentator - Joe Rogan (also a famous podcaster) said:

”Mixed Martial Arts is a game of high-level problem solving, with dire physical consequences”

For Joe, who was a fighter himself, the line isn' t just a theory, it comes with deep experience.

Fights are indeed of “dire physical consequences”, duh?
But, I found deducing MMA to “high-level problem solving” quite intriguing.

Here' s why that framing seemed harder to accept than it should be:

1. Losing “hits” you differently here.
   In a sport like cricket or football when you lose, you are left mentally and emotionally devastated. In MMA/fight games, that devastation shows up on your body as well. In the shape of bumps, lumps and lack of willingness to jump (to life).
   
   The emotional damage is complimentary.
    
2. The optics are more skewed towards physicality.
   The fight business is often seen as a sport of “guts”, “strength” and similar attributes.
   
   ”Problem solving” is not the first thing that you associate with it.
    

3. Problem solving is reserved for "serious" professions.
   High-level problem solving is often reserved for high-level complicated professions like being a scientist or space engineer (or writing this article).

   Sports and especially something as raw as fights, doesnʼt seem that cerebral in nature.

But Joe is right.

MMA and sports in general are indeed a high-level problem solving game.
The emotional and physical part is as important as the cognitive aspect.

Elite athletes train their bodies to obey strategies built on a drawing board, and that training changes as their opponents change.
This isn' t unique to fighting.

It' s why the Indian cricket team has separate batting, bowling, and fielding coaches, not just a head coach, the tactics fragment because the problems fragment.

So, yes, sports (in general) is a high-level problem-solving game.
But wait!

Arenʼt business, career, and life also a “high-level problem solving” game then? And does that mean, almost everything and anything you do, can be seen as a “game”? 

A game of GROWTH?

Not where growth is a standard metric. But where, Growth is a thing every game is secretly measuring, whether you left the round better than you entered it.

In the UFC match I was watching, Makhachev won!
He didn't win simply because he was stronger. He won because he solved more rounds than the man across from him. Each solved round made the next one cheaper.

Reducing life and its various demands to just a “game”, can seem quite trivialising.

I mean, you still have to get up on a Monday. Your business still needs more audience. You still need to pay those bills.
So, whatʼs the point?

But compare a problem, business or personal, to a game, and a structure takes shape.

Letʼs explore the four patterns that emerge once you put the game-glasses on.

Scorecard → Constraints → Opponents → Systems Thinking

You can' t grow in a direction you haven' t named.

The objective of modifying a problem into a score is to have some sort of a measure to when the problem is solved.

Ex: Strava was meant to solve health problems.
So they turned exercise into a game with a scorecard.
By transforming raw GPS data into social validation and competition, the platform skyrocketed.

Then they introduced “Segment” - a specific stretch of road or trail where everyone who passes through gets ranked automatically.

Basically, they gave a “score” to the audience. The users published it willingly.
And the “score” pulled people. It became their reason to participate in the game.

Action: If it' s a complicated, multi-stage problem, track it.
Untracked growth isn' t growth. It' s a feeling.

No constraints, no game - period.
Constraints decide what growth is even available to you.
The complexity of a problem scales directly with the complexity of its constraints. Understanding constraints is a science. Finding opportunities within constraints is an art.

Twitter' s character limit is a clean example.
By restricting the number of words in a tweet, Twitter brought out a new art-form.
Blogging became micro-blogging.
It removed the “beginnerʼs friction” associated with lengthy blogging, giving rise to n-number of micro-bloggers (who otherwise may not have viewed themselves as a “blogger”).

The constraint created a new medium, which created a new audience, and a new language by itself

Eventually, one such artist came in and forcefully overtook the platform.
The artist is called “Elon” and his pronouns are “hostile” and “takeover”.

Action: When facing a problem, go towards the constraints. Study deeply, find allies, who can help. The constraint is the map. It' s telling you where the unclaimed growth is, because everyone else reads it as a wall.

Consider opponents to be the enforcers of constraints.
Opponents are players too.

In Cricket, you donʼt score a boundary unless the ball crosses the ropes. The opposing fielders are the ones guarding it.

While solving any problem, there are living, moving organisms that are either enforcing or restricting the rules. They come with their own agenda, motivation, strengths and weaknesses.

Ex: When Rapido came into the scene, they didnʼt try to beat Uber and Ola in the car-game. They invented a new route - “bike wali taxi”. It solved the real problems commuters were facing especially in places like Bangalore.

Uber/Ola and the commuters are all players in the same game.

Rapido eventually pivoted to cars. Uber/Ola eventually incorporated bikes/2-wheelers.

The former was a strategic move keeping all the players in mind - the competitors, the audience, the investors, market, etc.
The latter was a category adaptation.

Action: Study the players. All of them.
Rapido grew fast because they picked a game Uber and Ola weren' t playing yet.
Pick your opponents and you' ve picked your growth curve.

You can win every round and still lose the game, if the system drains you faster than you fill it.

Problems never exist in silos.
They' re the residue of everyone else' s moves colliding. Which means solving one requires understanding the system it' s sitting inside, not just the symptom in front of you.

Letʼs take a page from Jio.
Jio didn' t approach the telecom problem as "How do we become a telecom operator?”.
They asked what it would take to connect a billion Indians, and built backwards.

Every incumbent was running an old voice network, which is where the money was, with data bolted on top.
Jio built no voice network at all. 4G only.
Voice rode the data pipe as just another packet.

So, technically, voice cost them almost nothing. So they gave it away.
The incumbents couldn't follow as free voice meant torching their own revenue line.

Unlike for Jio it meant giving away a by-product.
Voice was at door. Data was the room.

The JioPhone brought people in, JioTV kept them there.
Everyone else was playing the telecom game. Jio was rearranging the board.

Action: Zoom out before you zoom in.
Find your leverage.

A win inside a system is rented. A win that changes the system keeps paying you.

Humans have been solving problems for a long time.

First it was the understanding problem, so we invented language.
Then it was the food problem, agriculture came to the rescue.

The transport problem was solved with industrialization.
And productivity problems were managed by the computer era.

We solve problems for many reasons.
One common reason binds us all. Growth

The need to level-up is deep. It is an evolutionary residue.

But there’s a catch!

Humans have indeed solved a myriad of problems, until we became a problem. Deforestation, climate change, human-made viruses - just to name a few of our side quests.

When the solver becomes the problem, the problem becomes meta.
May be thatʼs why humans invented “AI”
May be thatʼs why one of them is called “Meta”

Nonetheless, it seems, solving problems is an innate part of our existence.
We need it as much as it needs us.

And thatʼs the real game!