My father frequently claimed that he could tell a lot about other people’s personalities by playing golf with them. “When you’re out on the green”, he’d say, “the ‘real you’ comes out.” I have no reason to doubt what he said, but because my own experience at playing golf lasted barely the length of a grade school summer break, I never got a chance to figure out what he really meant.
However, I have recently been learning a lot about my own personality by playing the board game Go. There are no draws when playing a game of Go: in each game someone wins, and someone loses. I was thinking about this topic the other day while quickly rereading a popular manga entitled Hikaru no Go, which is an excellent story about a young boy who learns to play Go through a rather unusual set of circumstances.
In the story, the protagonist, named Hikaru, develops an intense (and mutual) rivalry with a prodigious young Go player of the same age named Akira. Throughout the story, there are times when their playing is completely overwhelmed by the intensity of the emotion that they feel about this rivalry. (In inset, above, Hikaru is reminded of his rivalry by one of his teachers.)
Reading this, I immediately though about my own experience playing Go and my own thoughts about the relative importance of winning and losing. And also about how my own personality must come through to others when I win or lose against them.
What I want is to learn from playing games. To learn about the game. To learn about my opponent. But I don’t want the winning of the game to be the focus of my playing.
Yet, about half the time, I find that either my desire to win or, sometimes, just having a bad day can really affect my playing style. I can become frustrated because I don’t understand more advanced strategy and tactics, and I sometimes get frustrated for playing outright incorrect moves, even though I knew the correct tactic to use. Of course, these mistakes are merely a sign of inexperience, and they will change as I play the game more.
Fortunately, I recognize that the more selfish side of my personality comes out at times like this. With this in mind, I am able, at least, to use this chance to keep my egocentric behaviour in check. In this fashion I’ll be much more able to focus on the ‘fun’ part of playing games.
As the old saying goes, “it’s not whether you win or lose that counts; it’s how you play the game.”
Interestingly, I came across an article on how goal setting can inadvertently set you up for failure. But the psychology is quite interesting. Focusing on a goal rather than the means to achieve said goal generally proves to put a barrier between you and actually doing what you need to do. Much like in randori, in fact.
The more time you spend thinking about what techniques you think might apply, the less time you have to actually do them. Similarly, if you worry about your own success or failure of a single game, you’re not thinking about the wider picture. So as you say, you can use it as a basis to understand yourself, and others.
Similarly, another monk quoted by Ajahn Brahm in one of his recent YouTube talks said: “Thinking about it is difficult, doing it is easy”. Admittedly, that was in the context of shoveling large amounts of soil around for 6 days; so quite a seemingly unpleasant task.