When I was a young child, I played the various video games available at that time. I played Donkey Kong®, Mario Brothers®, Dragon Warrior®, etc. I’ll be honest and admit that the 6- or 7-year-old me would get nervous when I had to confront the scary final foe in each game. Over time, I learned to conquer my fear, those creatures, and win the games.
My father would play Nintendo with me on occasion. But he had grown up playing board games, as there were no electronic games when he was young. Since I would always win the video games when he played with me, he decided that I needed to play against him in games he was familiar with, and in particular a game, that is over 60 years old, called RISK!®
For anyone who has played the game, it has many twists and turns and it has various styles of rules (e.g., a “short game”). Each time a person plays, they have to start from different positions on the board. The staring positions, who goes first, and what advantages one player has over the others is all determined by luck, i.e., ‘the role of the dice’. As the game progresses, all the moves are heavily influenced by ‘the role of dice’.
There is certainly strategy required, but again, this is heavily augmented by ‘the role of the dice’. In addition to luck and strategy, there is the frequent table talk between players as they try to convince other players to either support or block other players in their own quest to win the game.
As the name of the game implies, one can take risks or not, depending on one’s approach in an individual game. Sometimes a player who ‘waits in the wings’ wins the game, while say two other players spend all their resources against each other. Sometimes a player gets lucky. They get a great starting position and then they have what seems to be uncanny luck when they role their dice, which again, are used to determine who wins each specific encounter.
Unlike chess, where the pieces have specific starting positions and specific movements, this game’s starting positions are rarely duplicated and the requires each player to ‘think on their feet’ and ‘make the best’ of the situation they’ve been dealt. Sometimes the best starting position, doesn’t pan out. Sometimes the worst starting position wins the game.
Recently, my father introduced his pre-teen grandchildren (including my children) to the game. The results were as expected. Some of them took unreasonable risks. Some played the game cautiously. Some cried when they lost and others were excited when they won.
They best part was seeing them learn how to approach the game each time they started a new game. Helping them understand how to assess their and their opponents’ positions on the board. Helping them understand the risks of taking one action available to them versus another. Helping them understand that even with a great strategy and position in their favor, that the luck of the role could prove unfavorable to their plans.
Of course, the point of this is that it helps children understand, through the vehicle of game playing, what awaits them as they grow up, and games like this one are an invaluable tools for them as life is very much about risk taking. While there are many things that are reasonably predictable in life, they don’t always turn out they way we plan and hope. Losing the game also affords the child to learn that even if they lost this round, they can play again and win a future game. This may be the most important lesson of all.
After one game, one of the children was crying after they had lost. My father gently told them that if they wished to play again, they would have to not get overwhelmed if they lost. People don’t want to play with people who are only happy if they win. He told them part of growing up was to play your best and know you did, no matter what you were given as a starting position on the board, and even if you had bad throws of the dice. He said that this was something everyone has to learn about life, if they want to grow up and not remain as a child. This one child said they understood and agreed to try to not get so upset. They played the next game and won. My father then asked them to think about how different they felt between crying at losing to smiling at winning. You could almost see the wheels turning in their young head as they compared the two emotions that were so fresh on their mind. It allowed them to explore their feelings that are so important to understand about how to manage one’s emotions as one matures into adulthood.
Learning from mistakes usually teaches us more about how to fix things than winning does. Talk to any designer, engineer, entrepreneur, or anyone who is responsible for creating something and they all have a similar story. If we think those people who create for a living don’t make mistakes, we are living in a dream world. The curtain behind successful people is usually hiding all their failures. The biggest difference between winners and losers is that the losers stop after losing. They give up like the crying child. The winners continue on, after all their failures, until they’ve won. Taking responsibility for their decisions helps them learn that they have to accept their good decisions as well as their bad ones.
All of this is not easily accomplished. It doesn’t take one round of winning and losing to help a child grow up. It is like sedimentary rock which forms over time, one layer at a time. Helping children understand how life presents a series of situations upon which one has to assess and takes risks to journey through is one of the most valuable lessons we can teach our children. When younger, after I had made some mistake, yes, I got punished, but my father always would ask what I learned from the mistake. Once I had to pay him back for an unintended expense, I incurred upon him. After I’d paid, he told me I had just paid for that lesson as if I had gone to a seminar to learn it. That lesson stuck with me more than any I’d received for ‘free’.
Our country was founded by risk takers. The business community, which provides the bedrock of opportunity for improvement to our lives, is all about taking risks. Go talk to anyone who has started their own business and you’ll find out about all the risks they took. We encourage the risk takers. They create the jobs, services and products that allow the consumer to live in the incredible country, state, and metroplex in which we live today.
It’s important that we teach the young to explore and understand risk taking, even if means starting simply by playing a timeless board game. Because no matter where your starting position is on the board, you always have an opportunity to win. You may not win every game, but you get better the more you play, and when you don’t give up, that is when you learn.
So, ask yourself, are you a Risk® taker?