Of Games, Germans and Growth

For the past two months I’ve been traveling across Germany, meeting new people and having a blast!
One thing I discovered through this travel, is that many Germans really love board games, even and especially as adults. Considering the German mentality, I found it quite interesting. Why is that? Well games encourage people to adopt a special kind of mindset. This mindset is called a growth mindset, as opposed to what’s called a fixed mindset.

Both mindsets describe your attitude to learning. When people have a fixed mindset, they’re thinking that they have a specific aptitude to learn something, which they are born with. Someone with a fixed mindset, for example, would say something like “I’m just not good at maths, I can’t be”. A fixed mindset is often a result of a very common fear people in our culture have – the fear of failure. This fear often paralyses people into inaction. So in order to justify our inaction we just go ahead and tell ourselves: “I’m just not good at this, so why waste my time even trying”.

On the other hand, a person with a growth mindset, realises that it’s about, well, growing. We need to have in mind that we can become better at whatever we do and grow, even if at the beginning we are not very capable.

And why do games encourage such a mindset?
Good games create what’s called a ‘magic circle’, in which the players can be comfortable and relaxed. So what is behind this so called ‘magic circle’?
The secret is that in the game failure doesn’t feel so bad (especially if it’s a game you play on your own so no one actually knows you failed). And because we don’t associate any negative emotions to failure, we aren’t afraid of it! We just try, and fail, and learn from it, and try again… And again, and again and again, until we get it right.

So games allow people to learn the value of having high tolerance to failure.

What I find interesting though is that Germans, as a society, usually have a very fixed mindset, and one of their highest values in life is their need for certainty. Now, we all need certainty to some extent, and we all should value our safety and our security. It is one of our basic needs. However, if one wishes to start something new, to express some hidden (or not so hidden) fantasy, it usually involves taking risk. Now I don’t like to make generalisations, but in German culture, risk taking is usually better left for someone else.

Let me tell you a little story about one of the people I met in Hannover, I’ll call him Chris. Chris runs a shop, a drugstore which is a part of a franchise, and he is quite happy with it. It’s a shop which he runs, it has opportunities for promotions within the franchise and yet it still gives him the autonomy he craves for within the boundaries of the franchise.
I asked Chris, why not open his own shop? I wasn’t too surprised to hear that it felt unsafe for him, which means he wouldn’t be able to handle the uncertainty involved. I didn’t have much time to talk to him further, so I can’t go into this example any deeper, but I believe that most people are stuck because of the high value they have for certainty.

If people do something they really enjoy, if they live their lives by choice taking a safe path which fulfills them, I wouldn’t judge them at all. However, now a days we slowly (or not so slowly) recognise a trend in the world’s economy. Fortunately for the Germans, their economy is still somewhat strong and stable, but if we look at most of Europe we can see that no job, no position is really safe. Rather, we choose to maintain the illusion that it is, because it helps us keep our sanity in the face of great uncertainty.

As human beings we actually do crave and need uncertainty as well to some degree, otherwise we get so certain and know to expect everything and eventually grow bored. Imagine yourself in a relationship in which your partner always says the same things to you, were you get intimate in the same place, with the same positions and the same rhythm and interaction, day after day, for years, until you can expect what will happen in each second. Now that is very certain, but does it sound like something you would really be happy having?
My guess is you’d prefer to say you have a headache and open a book instead, preferably one you haven’t read before.

Like most things in life, we need balance and it’s better to achieve balance in small steps, so facing sudden great uncertainty is enough to send one hiding behind his mother’s apron. If we take on a small amount of uncertainty though, get used to it, and slowly take on a bigger and bigger amount, we could eventually handle that big dose that was too inconceivable for us in the past.

I end this post with a challenge!
Think of an action, a small one, which makes you uncomfortable, or frightens you a little, and commit to take it on, and set yourself a deadline too, so you won’t just procrastinate!

So will you commit and work that courage muscle? That little part of you which would allow you to live the life you deserve one day? Or will you just get a headache and open a book?