Life Is Like Monopoly
Host: Isaac Mashman · June 28, 2021 · Episode 66 · 10 minutes
Transcribed from the episode audio and edited for names and terms. 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 and business, life and personal growth. Today, I have an absolute 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 helping you with your personal brand.
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So today, how is Monopoly like life? And how is life like the game of Monopoly? If you've never played Monopoly before, it's a game board game that is arguably, in my opinion, one of the greatest of all time.
And there's this little dude, the face of the game, is this dude who has a monocle and then a top hat. And the entire premise is to win the game by making all the other players go bankrupt. And it's to develop your properties, it's 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. And 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 or six hours. I've been in games that I've 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 term for Monopoly is a business that is way too big, it 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 out. There's an oil company, I believe it was actually Shell. I don't remember which one of those billionaires at the time owned that 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 and that's why we have a hundred different kinds of gas stations out there right now, different brands, but the chances are stemmed from that one company.
Now I'm not here to say that the government should or shouldn't split it 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 a sense of 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 wanna take a step back and look more for the symbolic meaning behind the game of Monopoly. You know, 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. And 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 it's like $1,500 in the game of Monopoly or $1,200, and you can start out with different incomes, depending on the roles that you're playing by, it's the same thing with playing Uno, right? set rules, but how many people actually paid attention to those set rules. And then you go around the game board after you roll the die and you buy at properties. And then at the end of the board, you go around go and passing go gets you $200. And that $200 can be great if you spend all your money buying up properties or you've landed on other properties and how to pay rent.
And if you've ever played the game, you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you haven't, go to YouTube and watch Watch a video or go download the app and play the app on the Game Store or the Google Player App Store.
But you pass go, you get $200 and that allows you to get up on off of your feet a little bit more, buy some more properties or maybe even pay some more rent. And then you have other players who are at the same time buying up their own properties, scaling their empire, buying utilities, buying the railroads. And then you have some people who are landing on the Get Out of Jail Free cart. Now in this example, get out of jail free does not mean that you're actually not going to jail. Like this 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. And when it comes to life, how 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. And 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. And when it comes to business and life, most people don't play to win. They play to just live. They're existing. And now the proper way to win the game is buying as many properties as you can, getting sets of three. And to 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 getting into situations that might actually put you in jail, like in real life, like let's be honest here, let's talk about tax, let's talk about, um, you know, 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. And 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 just would be huge learning curves, right? You could think of being stuck in a city or being stuck in a situation in your life for extended amount of time.
You could almost perceive that as a mental jail as like some physical jail that you're 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.
And personal development is the one way that you get out of that. And 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 like, all right, they're telling the banker to give them railroad.
They're telling the banker to go ahead and give them that utility, give them waterworks. And then the people around the, you know, in 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's like, next thing you know, he's the first one that gets a hotel. And 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, you know, maybe fair deals. He might be exchanging, you know, some of the properties here and there. But he's not out here being the loudest voice. And then by the end of the game, you have one player go bankrupt because they land on a couple hotels. And then you have another player that starts to go downhill.
And then by the end of the game, you have two different people. And normally one of the people is extremely loud. And then the other person is extremely quiet.
And the quiet person from what I've noticed is the sly guy who always wins. And I'm not saying to be sly, I'm not saying to, you know, you have to necessarily 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 off 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 attracting from your actual time that you could spend building yourself.
And that can be a difficult change for it. That can be a difficult mindset shift for some people, including myself for a long time because you're thinking to yourself and you're like, man, this guy's progressing so much quicker than me. And 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 different than the way that you were raised. And that's just you're going to lose if you start thinking like that.
And so just like the game of Monopoly, don't spend your time, you know, obsessively talking to everybody and observing everybody and, you know, 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, you know, ahead, But you're adding additional year to your birthday and to your life, you know, isn't something that's like a huge celebratory occasion.
You should be succeeding no matter the age, no matter the age that you're at, no matter the point of life that you're at, you need to be, you know, aiming to live up to your potential regardless. And remember that the you're 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.