Life Is Like Monopoly
Host: Isaac Mashman · June 28, 2021 · Episode 66 · 10 minutes
Transcribed from the episode audio and edited to read cleanly: names and terms corrected, grammar fixed, filler words and false starts removed, punctuation added. Words in [brackets] could not be made out with certainty. Wording can differ slightly from what was said; the episode itself is the record.
Yo, what is going on everybody? Isaac Mashman here, and welcome back to another episode of Chase the Vision with Isaac Mashman, the show that is all about helping you become a more capable individual through sharing my experiences and knowledge in business, life and personal growth. Today, I have an absolutely amazing episode for you, but before I dive in and talk about what I want to talk about, I do ask that you pay the fee. Now, if you've ever listened to my podcast and you've gotten any ounce of value, any mindset shift, maybe anything that I've ever been able to give you in a strategy or in helping you with your personal brand, I ask that you share the show and share every single podcast episode with a friend or family member or business partner, somebody in your life who you think will also get the same amount of value.
I am not here sacrificing my brand equity. I am not here promoting cheap products from all around the world. I am here to talk about business.
I'm here to give you the real truth. I'm here to give you value and help you scale and grow. I'm not here to waste your time talking about something that I truly don't believe in. Any time that I am going to talk about something, it's either going to be my own product, my own service, or it's going to be interview style, where I bring on people who I do believe in, but I'm not here to talk about their products. I'm here to talk about them. I'm here to talk about their stories. I'm here to talk about the process and the things that people are scared to discuss.
So today, how is Monopoly like life? How is life like the game of Monopoly? If you've never played Monopoly before, it's a board game that is arguably, in my opinion, one of the greatest of all time.
There's this little dude who's the face of the game, and he has a monocle and a top hat. The entire premise is to win the game by making all the other players go bankrupt. It's to develop your properties, to go around the board and buy up Park Ave, to buy Boardwalk, which is one of the most expensive properties in the entire game. It's one of the funnest games too, and if you have the right people playing with you, those games can go on for literally four to six hours. I've been in games that went from early in the evening all the way to early in the morning, and that was one of the best experiences of my life, just sitting down with some friends and enjoying life.
But regardless, there's a hidden message in that game. Now, the technical meaning of monopoly is a business that is way too big and controls too much of the vertical market. One decision with that company is able to entirely change the face of a country. Back in the 1900s, you had these various different businesses owned by Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, and during the Industrial Revolution a lot of these businesses were actually split up. There's an oil company, I believe it was actually Shell. I don't remember which one of those billionaires at the time owned it, it might have been Carnegie or one of them, but regardless, they got too big and the government stepped in and said, we're splitting you up.
That's why we have a hundred different kinds of gas stations out there right now, different brands, but chances are they stemmed from that one company.
Now, I'm not here to say that the government should or shouldn't split them up, because I really don't have an opinion on that. But what I am here to say is I'm not talking about that in this episode in the sense that you need to aim to be a monopoly that gets split up. I mean, that's a great goal to have, because that means that you're hitting some massive, massive levels. But I want to take a step back and look more for the symbolic meaning behind the game of Monopoly, looking at the imagery, looking at the symbolism. And I'm not doing this in a cheesy way, but this makes me think about some of the classes I used to take, where people are like, look at the meaning, and they're giving meaning to something that doesn't have meaning. But this game does.
So you start out with, I believe, $1,500 in the game of Monopoly, or $1,200, and you can start out with different incomes depending on the rules that you're playing by. It's the same thing with playing Uno: set rules, but how many people actually paid attention to those set rules? Then you go around the game board after you roll the die, and you buy up properties. Then at the end of the board, you go around Go, and passing Go gets you $200. That $200 can be great if you spent all your money buying up properties or you've landed on other properties and had to pay rent.
If you've ever played the game, you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you haven't, go to YouTube and watch a video, or go download the app and play the game from the [App Store] or the Google Play store.
But you pass Go, you get $200, and that allows you to get up on your feet a little bit more, buy some more properties, or maybe even pay some more rent. Then you have other players who are at the same time buying up their own properties, scaling their empire, buying utilities, buying the railroads. Then you have some people who are landing on the get out of jail free card. Now, in this example, get out of jail free does not mean that you're actually not going to jail. That isn't what we're talking about, so don't misperceive this meaning. But going around Go and playing to go around Go is not what you do.
You play the game of Monopoly to buy properties and to scale. When it comes to life, the way a lot of people play is to go around Go, and every single time you go around Go, you add an additional year to your life.
It's your birthday. Hitting Go is your birthday. You cannot win the game of Monopoly only playing to go around and get older and live life. You have to play the game to win. When it comes to business and life, most people don't play to win. They play to just live. They're existing. Now, the proper way to win the game is buying as many properties as you can, getting sets of three. The get out of jail free card is actually personal development. I believe that personal development and improving yourself as an individual is the number one way for you to prevent yourself from getting into situations that might actually put you in jail, like in real life.
Let's be honest here, let's talk about taxes, let's talk about regulations. The way that you get and follow those guidelines and regulations is you learn from a mentor.
You do personal development. You improve your knowledge. You increase how much you know about a particular subject, especially when you're doing something that you've never done before, when you're experiencing new things. So instead of having that card that gets you out of jail, this is the card that prevents you from going to jail and also allows you to mitigate some of those situations that you would otherwise be putting yourself in, that wouldn't even put you in jail but would just be huge learning curves. You could think of being stuck in a city or being stuck in a situation in your life for an extended amount of time.
You could almost perceive that as a mental jail, like some physical jail where you're not behind bars, but you are somewhere that you really do not want to be, which means that you're not happy and you feel controlled.
Personal development is the one way that you get out of that. So life is very similar to a game of Monopoly, because you have other people playing the game. Now, not everybody's trying to make you go bankrupt. But I've noticed, out of all the times that I've played Monopoly, the person who wins the game is the person who is not focusing on everybody else's properties, but is the person who is focused on their own empire. They're the ones buying up quietly. They're the ones talking to the banker. They're not talking to everybody else who's playing. They're telling the banker to give them a railroad. They're telling the banker to go ahead and give them that utility, give them Water Works. And the people around the game board, they're talking with one another.
They don't even realize that you have this one subtle guy who is building everything. He's the one who, next thing you know, is the first one that gets a hotel. Then, as the game progresses, he's not beefing with these other players. He's not trying to tax them a lot. He's giving them maybe fair deals. He might be exchanging some of the properties here and there, but he's not out here being the loudest voice. Then you have one player go bankrupt because they land on a couple of hotels, and then you have another player that starts to go downhill. By the end of the game, you have two different people. Normally one of the people is extremely loud, and the other person is extremely quiet.
The quiet person, from what I've noticed, is the sly guy who always wins. I'm not saying to be sly, I'm not saying you necessarily have to be quiet, but competition does not exist in the marketplace. Competition exists in your head, and I believe in that firmly. There's a level of, yes, okay, you have people who are competing, you have better products, you have products out there that you should pay attention to, to a degree. But you shouldn't be obsessing and basing all of your moves off of what they're doing. You have to be in your own lane, and you have to be determining what you need to do to progress, because every single moment in life that you focus on another person, that's detracting from your actual time that you could spend building yourself.
That can be a difficult mindset shift for some people, including myself for a long time, because you're thinking to yourself, man, this guy's progressing so much quicker than me. Then you get the shiny object syndrome, and you're looking at how they have the shiny objects and you don't. Or you see how they're maybe farther ahead, but you don't account for the age gap. You don't account for the difference in life. You don't account for the way that they were raised differently than the way that you were raised. You're just going to lose if you start thinking like that. So just like the game of Monopoly, don't spend your time obsessively talking to everybody and observing everybody and thinking about what they have going on versus what you have going on.
Focus on developing the properties, focus on buying the utilities, focus on getting the four railroads, and focus on not just going around Go. You understand that going around Go is going to put you a little bit ahead, but adding an additional year to your birthday and to your life isn't something that's a huge celebratory occasion.
You should be succeeding no matter the age that you're at, no matter the point of life that you're at. You need to be aiming to live up to your potential regardless. Remember that your get out of jail free card is personal development. At the center of all achievement is personal growth, and I live by that. That's how you cut time frames, and that is how you win the game of Monopoly.