In any organization, you can play two kinds of games. Games about doing good. And games about feeling good.
Games about doing good have one currency: impact. That impact shows up as a better experience for the people you serve — and eventually, in some form, better outcomes for everyone.
Games about feeling good are games of status. Being invited to the right meetings. Having your worth recognized by the seat you have at the table. Getting the acknowledgment that soothes whatever insecurity is loudest that day.
It’s natural to want some of that. But the pull toward status games is worth watching — because I’ve seen these dynamics play out just as much in three-person organizations as in ten-thousand-person ones. The scale changes, but the game doesn’t.
The key is the ability to consistently prioritize impact over status. It’s not just that impact games drive better outcomes — though they do that. It’s that they contribute more to our happiness in the long run too.
Because status games are often stupid games.
And as the saying goes, when you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.
After being dismantled in the playoffs by the Oklahoma Thunder, LeBron James was asked whether it was time to retire. He gave a beautiful answer.
“I think for me it’s about the process. If I can commit to still being in love with the process of showing up to the arena five and a half hours before a game to start preparing… showing up to 11 o’clock practice, I’m there at 8 o’clock preparing my body, preparing my mind. So I think for me, I’ve always been in love with the process.”
I love that one of the greatest players in the history of the game still talks about getting to work 3 hours earlier than he needs to.
His talent has always been extraordinary, but it’s this love of the process, compounded over decades, that explains the longevity.
I recently started building products focused on healthcare affordability in the US. As I was ramping up on a new space, the biggest question that sparked my curiosity was: how did we get here? This question is the inspiration for this weekly series chronicling the decisions, accidents, and breakthroughs that built the US healthcare system.
In 1933, a 27-year-old doctor named Sidney Garfield borrowed money from his father, drove out to the Mojave Desert, and built a 12-bed hospital in the sand.
He had signed a contract to provide medical care for 5,000 construction workers building the Colorado River Aqueduct — the most ambitious water project in California’s history. The nearest hospital was hours away. The work was dangerous and the desert heat was unforgiving.
Garfield’s radical belief was that a doctor’s job was to keep people healthy, not just treat them when they broke down. So, he introduced safety education, hydration protocols, annual checkups. Injury rates among his workers dropped from 27 per 100 in 1934 to 3 per 100 by 1937.
The medicine was working. But the business was not.
Insurance companies paid slowly, or didn’t pay at all. Garfield kept treating workers regardless — you couldn’t turn someone away in the middle of the desert. But the hospital was quietly going broke. He was weeks from shutting the whole thing down when an insurance executive named Harold Hatch came to see him with an idea.
Hatch proposed flipping the payment model entirely. Instead of billing after treatment, the insurance company would prepay Garfield a fixed amount per worker per day in exchange for a guarantee of care. The rate: a nickel a day per worker for work-related injuries.
The revenue stabilized immediately. With predictable income, Garfield could plan ahead, hire properly, and invest heavily in prevention. And prevention was now in his direct financial interest. A healthy worker cost him nothing. A sick one cost him everything. For the first time, a doctor’s incentives were perfectly aligned with his patients’ wellbeing.
Garfield extended the offer directly to the workers: pay an extra nickel a day from your own pocket and I’ll cover everything — work injuries, illness, your whole family. About 95% of workers signed up. The hospital thrived. And Garfield quietly proved something that would take American healthcare decades to fully absorb: keeping people well was better medicine, and better economics, than waiting for them to get sick.
When the aqueduct project ended in 1938, Garfield was preparing to go into private practice when a colleague mentioned his work to a man named Henry Kaiser — the builder behind the Hoover Dam, the Grand Coulee Dam, and soon the Liberty ships that would help supply the Allied war effort. Kaiser’s Grand Coulee workers had almost no access to medical care. He invited Garfield to come north.
When Kaiser visited Garfield’s hospital, the two men spent the whole day together talking. At the end of it Kaiser told him: “If your plan achieves even half of what you claim, it should be available to every person in this country.”
Kaiser was a builder who thought in scale. In Garfield’s prepaid model he saw something that could work far beyond a desert construction site. He was right — but neither of them could have imagined just how far it would go.
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Next week: Kaiser takes Garfield’s idea to his WWII shipyards and scales it to 200,000 workers. It is a fascinating story of how a wartime health plan became the largest nonprofit health system in America.
A friend, after significant career success, found herself in rooms with some incredibly rich and successful people. She shared that the biggest learning she took away was that people are the same.
Many insecure. Many jealous. Some smart. Some thoughtful.
Their wealth and success didn’t make her any more likely to like them.
We project a lot onto success — wisdom, contentment, confidence.
But it is worth reminding ourselves that those are exactly that -> our projections.
The intent we ascribe to a person is the lens through which we view their actions.
The same behavior — a blunt comment, a last-minute change, a moment of silence — reads completely differently depending on whether we think the person means well or not.
It takes real effort to judge an action objectively. The default is to see it through the lens of the person we’ve already decided they are.
There’s a great story from the late Prof Clay Christensen that I think about from time to time.
Andy Grove, CEO of Intel, requested Prof Clay Christensen to visit Intel headquarters and explain his theory of disruptive innovation. When Clay arrived, Andy said he could only spare 10 minutes and asked Clay to explain what it means for Intel.
Clay instead showed Andy a diagram of his theory and began walking him through it.
Ten minutes in, Andy interrupted impatiently – “Look, I’ve got your model. Just tell us what it means for Intel.”
“Andy, I can’t.” Clay persisted and went on to share the story of the disruption of the steel mill industry.
When he finished the story, Andy said, “I got it.” and explained how it applied to Intel.
Prof Christensen shared the story from time to time to drive home the idea that Andy knew more than he would ever know about his business. Instead of telling him what to think, his role was to teach him how to think.
It is a fantastic example of what great coaching looks like. And it is one I do my best to remember every time I’m attempting to coach myself.
When a good friend and I were talking about the NBA recently, he turned the conversation toward the Oklahoma City Thunder — who won the championship last year — and urged me to take a deeper look at what their executive team was building. It felt, he said, like something special.
I’d been loosely following the playoffs, and the Thunder’s dominance has been hard to ignore. When ESPN published a long piece about them, I was intrigued. Four reflections:
(1) Environment as competitive advantage. GM Sam Presti has engineered chaos out of existence — perfectly aligned basketballs, identically folded towels, a lawn outside that looks trimmed blade by blade. The obsession with order isn’t aesthetic. It’s a philosophy: control what you can control, and let success be the natural byproduct.
(2) No one wants the credit. SGA or Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the reigning NBA MVP, credits the staff. Presti hides from compliments. Coach Daigneault’s nightmare is someone crediting him. In a league where ego is the default currency, the Thunder have somehow built a team where everyone is sprinting away from credit.
(3) Presti drafts humans, not players. When he visited Gonzaga to scout Chet Holmgren, the basketball evaluation was already done. He was there to watch him be a person — how he moved through a room, how he treated teammates. As Coach Daigneault puts it, he’s method acting, imagining the player walking around their building.
(4) Depth as a system, not an accident. When Jalen Williams is out injured, Ajay Mitchell steps in and averages 22.5 points against the Lakers. Mitchell’s minutes go to Jared McCain, who drops 18 points in 18 minutes. It doesn’t feel like improvisation — it feels designed. As Daigneault says, there’s a constraint on minutes and roster spots, but no constraint on the investment made in every single player every single day.
All of this means the Thunder have insane strength in depth, remarkable camaraderie, and the foundations of a sporting dynasty to likely rival the greatest.
A friend who is a lifelong New York Knicks fan has been eagerly following the New York Knicks these playoffs. Watching them sweep the 76ers and cruise back into the Eastern Conference Finals got me thinking.
Last year, the Knicks also made the Eastern Conference Finals — their deepest run in years. They lost to the Indiana Pacers. Then they fired their coach.
Their coach, Tom Thibodeau, had gotten them further than they’d been in a long time. Why change it?
But the pattern keeps showing up. The Chicago Bulls fired Doug Collins in 1989 after he’d taken them to the Eastern Conference Finals for the first time in 15 years. They replaced him with his own assistant, Phil Jackson. Phil Jackson instituted the “triangle offense”, a significant departure from the way they played. Six championships followed.
Similarly, the Golden State Warriors fired Mark Jackson in 2014 after back-to-back playoff appearances for the first time in decades. They hired Steve Kerr, who had never coached before and upset their players. Four titles followed.
In each case, the previous coach had done something real and hard. They’d built the culture, changed the trajectory, earned genuine loyalty. That’s what made the decision so difficult. And that’s also exactly why it had to be made — because what got them there wasn’t going to take them further.
The Knicks will likely not win it this year — both western conference finalists look formidable. But the decision to change already looks like the right one.
This shows up in companies and individual careers too. The skills and habits that create early success can quietly become the ceiling. Recognizing that — and doing something about it — takes a different kind of courage than just grinding harder.
A Learning a Day 