Play the Metagame

There are 2 ways to go through life: you can either play the game, or you can play the metagame. The game is 1-dimensional chess, and the metagame is N-dimensional chess.

You can apply this idea to just about everything in life. The easiest way to move from playing the game to the metagame is to think about every interaction in terms of incentives. Examining incentives is the easiest way to figure out what people want and how to turn win/lose or lose/lose transactions into win/win.

Playing the game is about following rules. Playing the metagame is about figuring out how you can use the rules to your advantage. Playing the game is when you rent out your time for income to survive, and the metagame is where you find ways to generate income while you sleep.

In software engineering, the game is writing software. The metagame is creating systems that write your software.

In marketing, it’s said that no publicity is bad publicity. The game is trying to market your product through traditional means (ads). The metagame is making people do the advertising for you, perhaps by acting quirky on Twitter to amass a following, or constructing scandals to generate attention for whatever it is you’re selling, or using so-called “growth hacks” like spamming your product on various websites.

Whatever you say on the Internet will probably offend someone somewhere, but the important thing is having your name in the news as much as possible (if that’s what you’re trying to do). You may not like it, but that’s how the world works.

People who go farthest in life are experts at the metagame. They’ve realized that most of the self-help platitudes are written to benefit the person writing them, not their target audience. In other words: everyone is selfish and acts according to their own best interests at all times, and once you understand that and act accordingly, you can start to use it to your advantage.

Career Development #

Playing the game: Working hard at your job, meeting all expectations, and hoping someone notices your contributions. Playing the metagame: Realizing promotion decisions usually happen before the formal process starts, so you make sure the people making them already know what you’ve done.

Education #

Playing the game: Studying hard to get good grades and absorb knowledge. Playing the metagame: Knowing the diploma and the people attached to it can carry more weight than what you learned in class. Sometimes the alumni network is the real product.

Finance #

Playing the game: Saving money from your paycheck and being frugal. Playing the metagame: Buying things that keep paying you after you bought them, and structuring it so the IRS doesn’t take more than it has to.

Entrepreneurship #

Playing the game: Creating a better product than competitors. Playing the metagame: Building something that gets harder to compete with every time another user shows up.

Content Creation #

Playing the game: Creating high-quality content consistently. Playing the metagame: Making things the algorithm will shove in other people’s faces, even if that matters more than whether the thing is any good.

It keeps going. Once everyone starts playing at one level of meta, a new one shows up above it. Consider cryptocurrency: Bitcoin was meta to traditional finance, then Ethereum created a meta layer above Bitcoin by enabling programmable money, then various DeFi protocols created yet another meta layer.

The cleanest version is when people get what they want and you still get what you want. That’s just incentives lining up. Think of how the best tech companies create platforms where third-party developers can thrive while strengthening the core platform.

You also have to notice what people actually respond to. They say one thing, then chase status, money, attention, safety, or whatever else is really driving them. If you can see that clearly, you can build around it.

Some practical ways to start playing the metagame:

1. For any system you participate in, ask: “Who designed this system, and what are they optimizing for?”
2. Look for misaligned incentives in organizations or relationships—these are opportunities.
3. When making decisions, consider not just the immediate payoff but how it positions you for future opportunities.
4. Study the people who seem to effortlessly succeed—they’re likely playing a different game than everyone else.
5. Create systems that work for you rather than you working within systems designed by others.

Sometimes the right move is to quit playing and go build something else. The most innovative companies didn’t just outcompete existing players; they created entirely new markets where the old rules didn’t apply.

So while other people are busy trying to win the current game, keep an eye out for chances to change the board.