Your Career Isn’t A Game Of Hungry Hungry Hippos

Something I notice from working with many people at the start of their careers is a tendency to prioritize money today over the long-term potential for earnings. They are likely to be persuaded or motivated (both positively and negatively) by financial factors today, without judging the likely impact financially down the road.

This isn’t a groundbreaking insight—many people talk about the importance of deferred enjoyment and have pointed to this exact thing over and over again— and it isn’t unique to young people as many people in all sorts of different places in their careers do the same thing. They take jobs with higher pay, but lower learning opportunities. They quit jobs because they don’t get raises, even though there is still great potential to learn in their roles.

The fundamental problem is something like viewing a career and playing the game of earning a living as if you are playing a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos.

Hungry Hippos is a game of scarcity—there is a finite amount of balls and there will never be more. You therefore desperately try to munch down as many of the balls as possible before they all run out. Earning a living is not a game of scarcity.

Another way to think of the difference is to use the analogy of Finite and Infinite games from Carse. Hungry Hippos and the short-term money play in your career is an approach to a finite game. Once the balls run out there will be a winner. If you don’t get as many as you can, you will be a loser. If you don’t get a 10% raise this year, you will be a loser.

But earning a living is an infinite game. There is no end. You can always find a way to do something of value for others, and as long as you keep creating value for others, you stay in the game.

In a Hungry Hippos world, you should focus on maximizing your salary, before all the resources are gone, but in the world, we live in today the first part of your thinking about career opportunities should be “how do I maximize my potential to continue playing the game.” With a focus on maximizing your potential to continue being able to create unique value for others instead of “how do I maximize my potential to earn a higher salary today.”