In turn based strategy games, there are two fundamental “styles” of play: tall, or, broad. Playing tall refers to having a strategy based on maximizing the value from a few cities/tiles/resource centres; think the Netherlands or the Swiss. Broad refers to a strategy wherein one builds many different cities, but only develops each to a limited extent; think Russia or maybe China. Balancing the two different styles against each other is an inherent aspect of design for this type of game. Now, why am I mentioning this?
Because these two styles are an easy metaphor for the two different modes of human achievement, big fish people and many fish people. Big fish people are fundamentally oriented around achieving success with a single, or at least low number of projects; however, the projects they create are often of astonishingly high quality. Many fish people are oriented around consistent success; they don’t have the individual home runs of a big fish person, but they have many more total hits. Now, most people are somewhere in between on the big-many spectrum; and while this tends to be a general personality trend, there are areas in someone’s life where they might be the opposite type, say: a prolific salesman who’s a mama’s boy and only ever has one long term partner. Weird exceptions like this crop up if you scrutinize someone closely enough, but for the person as a whole there tends to be a distinct leaning towards one end of the spectrum or the other. You yourself undoubtedly have a preference in terms of these two factors, even if it’s not a concept you’ve ever considered directly. Would you rather have the memory of a few delicious meals or consistent frozen dinners? (When sheer survival is the concern, the latter seems to make more sense; but when it’s not…)
This concept is linked to the discussion re: high variance versus low variance performers in different fields. Both types can occupy roles at the highest level, but to take a current example, a low variance player like Nikola Jokic will almost always play at least well, without tallying too many absurd scoring performances; Giannis Antetkoumpo has more bad games but also more 50+ point games. Now, what about people who are both consistent and high variance? For whatever reason, such traits tend to work against one another in real life; in the same way it’s rare for someone seven feet tall to have muscles like a bodybuilder, it’s rare for someone “explosive” to also have a high floor. But, they do exist; Leonel Messi is arguably an example from the world’s most popular sport, as his individual best year is miles ahead of his nearest competitors, but he also relentlessly scored 50+ goals many seasons in a row. But these people are very, very rare and it might be more fair to say they succeed despite this type of basic human dynamic and not because of it (being “balanced” isn’t all that’s going on).
How to tell which type you are? Well, answer this question: would you rather sleep with/date many decent looking partners or a few gorgeous ones? Most guys will answer “both” and not want to look at themselves in the mirror at all; the realty is that everyone will point more toward one end of the spectrum than the other. I find this question is very fundamental and sheds a lot of light on the “overall” orientation a person has of many versus big. One thing that stands out from this test is that more girls want big while more boys want many; this likely reflects some set of fundamental mate selection criteria; girls win by picking well while boys win by being profligate (no commentary on the relative moral standing of these practices).
Career achievements are another good indicator of a person’s overall orientation; does the idea of doing your job well for a long period of time suit you, or are you more interested in climbing the ranks, making a big splash, and maybe not being around for that long. In my experience most people of both genders are more along the lines of the first scenario; you have to be somewhat abnormally combative to develop the second viewpoint, which again has a potential allegory within the realm of dating/relationships. Stable partners last a long time and are consistent while unstable mates are perhaps more inherently “attractive”, while also being more prone to relationship burnout. Over their lifetime one individual can move from one end of the spectrum to the other, and indeed this generally happens as one “settles down”; you go from being a more attractive temporary romantic partner to registering more on the “stable” end of the spectrum. People who want to make a big splash are demonstrating the same psychological urge underlying wanting to remain on the unstable/attractive end of the mate spectrum; namely, the desire to capitalize on resource gain (whether it be money, social prestige, access to members of the opposite sex, etc…) in an immediate way, because those same resources might not be there tomorrow.
And, truthfully, they might not be; important opportunities rarely have a long expiration date attached to them, whether they be economic or romantic. In light of this fact it’s perhaps all the more remarkable that the opposite set of social conclusions has been employed so successfully. Rather than focusing on maximizing resource exploration, this group aims to “do the right thing” and achieve social prestige via being a “good person” or member of the group. While it can be hard to define exactly what the right thing to do is, particularly in a complicated interpersonal scenario, it’s usually fairly the opposite of cashing in on whatever resources you’ve accumulated up to that point, and the two behaviours are easy to point out. Again, as a young person one might be more interested in general attractiveness than long term competency, but most people end up settling on the latter when they realize they must finally settle down. In this way things tend to roughly balance out over one’s lifetime, with more attractive mates early on and then more stable mates later.
Thus, those who tend more towards stability tend to win out “in the long run”; tortoise beating the hare and all that. I think this also has something to do with the small accrual of advantages that the person taking the “tortoise” end of the strategy gets to use; hare people tend to burn out rather spectacularly and then have to rebuild themselves, while tortoise people just keep getting consistently better at the things that matter. Neither strategy is really better, but there is a definite shift of emphasis as a person reaches maturity which favours tortoise style; hare style is best employed as a youngster, mostly for the aim of having fun. Thus the above points are applicable within the individual as well as to explain one’s behaviour in groups; the same general journey is made in both cases, with youth tending towards talent while old age tends towards work ethic and consistency. Overall, it’s good to go in the direction which your age/life stage dictates, even if it is the opposite of you’re overall inclination. Being young rewards the traits that go the the hare approach and young people should be allowed to fully utilize their gift, while the experienced have had their fun and can now settle in more dependable roles, in which aversion to failure is important (Conversely being unafraid of failing is highly important during the hare stage). It can be hard for an old hare to settle down and young tortoise’s might sometimes feel like they can’t open up as much as their friends, but resisting the call of age and trying to live in a mismatched era of your life is ultimately pointless; if one can be spared the bitterness of having to uncover this once it is too late to change, with a little effort, it is well worth it.
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