A strange game

One thing I've noticed is that a lot of people, myself included, tend to have fairly particular ideas about what their game is. A programmer, say, is usually explicitly not playing the business game. A researcher is not playing the marketing game. An office worker is not playing the politics game. Indeed, in many cases that game is seen as somehow not relevant, or unworthy, or even just a mug's game - one where the only winning move is not to play.

Which would all be fine, except that you don't actually get to choose which games to play. If there are office politics and you deliberately remain ignorant about them, you're not achieving some noble victory, you're just hobbling yourself. Similarly, a researcher who avoids marketing isn't making some strategic non-move move by letting their ideas languish in obscurity. The status quo for these kinds of games isn't neutral, it's failure; you don't start at 50% and get worse as you play, you start at 0% and work your way up.

Reality doesn't care about how you've divided things up in your head. Your options for influencing it are a big bunch of levers; some shaped like engineering, some shaped like business, others shaped like people skills and politics. If you pull the right set of levers you can get the things you want, and from that perspective it's pretty hard to justify ignoring most of them because, while they might work perfectly, they're the wrong shape damnit!

Not playing may not always be a losing move, but it's putting your success in the hands of more experienced players and hoping that their victory aligns with yours. If not, the only winning move is to play.