Are you playing someone else’s game?

Recently I read C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score, and I absolutely loved it. I mean, I hated how the concepts are being used to control us, but I loved how it pulled a billion little threads together I’ve been thinking about into one place.

His book is about scoring, specifically when it comes to games and gamification. More specifically, why we love games but hate gamification. Really, though, it’s a book about how you lose your values without noticing.

It turns out this loss happens slowly, through a process so ordinary it barely registers, by a bureaucracy dedicated to capturing your attention and making you play by their rules.

I talk about this in my article There is no competition:

When people struggle, they are almost always relying on another company’s positioning to define their own. You might think they define the market, but they don’t.

They only define their market. And they define it so well that anyone who buys into their definition will obviously buy from them, not you. By framing yourself in their terms, you’re essentially selling their product for them.

Nguyen’s book revolves around what he calls the Four Horsemen of Bureaucracy:

• Scale: Aggregate metrics into sterile containers that are both easy to compare and devoid of context.
• Mechanical Rules: Clear guidelines anyone can follow even if they have never touched the material before.
• Replaceable Parts: Make everything a cog that can be easily interchanged with other cogs.
• Centralized Control: Consolidate the power to make decisions and decide what's important under one bureaucratic entity.

These are the qualities every bureaucracy relies on to function. For our purposes, we’re not only talking about government bureaucracies, but any organization trying to make you play by their rules to govern how you behave.

Each one of these horsemen is a trade. You get something real and give up something equally real. This trade happens automatically, is hidden by the way we define the axis, and what you give up is usually more important than the thing you get.

Horseman One: Scale

Scale makes things comprehensible quickly while losing any context of what the numbers mean.

Joseph Stalin is widely credited with the phrase "One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." While horrific, it's impossible for the human brain to conceive of a million deaths.

Similarly, your subscriber count travels very easily between people as a convenient way to convey clout. So do those little checkmarks next to your name. Your open rate can be benchmarked against every other newsletter on the planet.

That portability is genuinely useful...

...until you scratch even a little bit below the surface.

Those metrics tell one story of your newsletter, but the thing that makes your newsletter worth reading isn’t portable. It’s the specific texture of your voice, your particular way of connecting dots, and the accumulated trust with people who’ve been with you long enough to get the jokes.

All of that is lost with scale.

Scale says if it can’t be aggregated, then it doesn’t count. Since almost everything that actually matters about your work can’t be aggregated, scale is quietly telling you that almost everything that matters doesn’t actually matter, which makes you feel hollow inside.

Just because something has scale doesn’t mean it has substance. In fact, it’s often the opposite.

Horseman Two: Mechanical Rules

Mechanical Rules give everyone clear guidelines to follow, like a recipe in a modern cookbook. Everyone can use the same system as long as they have the same ingredients, even if they have no experience with them.

The cost is that everyone has to do it the same way. You trade adaptability for accessibility, without the ability to create context or adapt.

In the book, Nguyen uses the example of pasta sauces all calling for San Marzano tomatoes. It's the bedrock ingredient of almost every recipe.

What happens if you have other tomatoes? Everything else falls apart...

...unless you can improvise.

Mechanical rules don’t teach us to do that. They only teach us to do it the “right” way.

These mechanical rules are all around us as business owners. It's people telling you to post on Tuesdays, use a hook in the first line, and keep subject lines under 50 characters. These rules exist because they’ve worked in aggregate, for some people, at some point.

They travel well, they’re scalable, and they’re easily digestible. That doesn't make them right, and it definitely doesn't make them right for you.

Whenever somebody tells me I can’t write long posts, I say “Maybe you can’t, but I’m a great writer. So, I can do whatever I want and people will read it.”

(that line hasn't made me many friends, btw).

The mechanical rule doesn’t know that your audience actually loves your long, wandering intros. It doesn’t know that your weirdest, least-optimized posts are the ones that get forwarded.

It doesn’t care.

It’s a recipe, and the recipe is the same for everyone.

In a red ocean, where everybody’s fighting over the same customers, slashing prices, and clawing for attention, you win by offering unique value that feels obvious once people see it, but invisible to everyone else still stuck brawling for scraps.

Mechanical rules are what keep you in the red ocean. They standardize your behavior until you’re indistinguishable from every other creator following the same playbook.

Horseman Three: Replaceable Parts

Replaceable Parts make everything a cog in the same machine, including the people being measured. You get interchangeability at the cost of individual sensitivity and specificity.

If you want to know why people are so excited about AI, one big reason is because it does your job the same way every time, no matter what, while you, as a human, have the downside of having human variability.

You also have the advantage of human insight, but cogs don't need insight. They just need to put a widget in a hole.

The twenty years of experience, specific failures you’ve metabolized, or hard-won perspective that makes your take different from everyone else’s…

…none of that is a predictable variable in the equation.

What’s measurable to them is your posting frequency, your engagement rate, and in your click-through, none of which have anything to do with you, really. You are just the current avatar of success that they can trumpet this week, but avatars can change, and do all the time.

When you modify your work to hit those metrics, you are literally changing yourself to fit the machine, making you less valuable in the process.

The scoring system is telling you, implicitly and constantly, that the most irreplaceable things about you don’t matter…and we’re letting them.

Hapitalist teaches soul resonance selling, which revolves around building work that vibrates on the right weird frequency so customers who’ve been hungry for what you offer can easily find you.

Soul resonance is, by definition, what the Replaceable Parts horseman cannot measure.

It’s the thing that makes someone forward your work to a friend with the message “you need to check out this person.” It doesn’t show up in a dashboard. It shows up in your business three years later, compounded by all the people you've attracted.

The market leader always leaves people unsatisfied, because no one product, brand, business, or platform can serve everybody equally well. For every customer that adores a business, there are others who can’t stand them. That’s your crack in the dam. The Replaceable Parts horseman can’t find it, but you can.

Horseman Four: Centralized Control

All metrics operate under the facade of objectivity. In reality, they’re always at the behest of whoever made them. A city is not controllable when the streets are chaotic. It’s only controllable when it works like a grid, making it easily understandable to soldiers from all over the world.

Someone designed every score by which we dictate success. Someone decided that follower count matters more than community depth, that algorithmic reach matters more than direct relationships, and that conversion rate matters more than lifetime trust. That someone is not you.

Their incentives are not yours. Their definition of winning is not yours.

Before a bureaucracy measures anything, it has already decided what categories matter to them and what counts as success within that category to them.

• The follower count metric classifies you as an audience-builder.
• The sales rank metric classifies you as a volume competitor.
• The engagement rate metric classifies you as an attention merchant.

Once you’re classified, the system evaluates you entirely within that box as if the box is the only one that exists, as if you chose it, as if it fits.

It doesn’t fit and was never designed to fit. So, when you encounter any metric, the first question isn’t “how do I improve this number?” The first question is: what is this actually classifying, and who benefits from that classification?

A bestseller list classifies books by units sold in a specific window through specific channels. It tells you nothing about longevity, reader transformation, or whether the book found the people who needed it most.

An Amazon ranking classifies you against every other seller competing for the same search term on the same day.

A social media algorithm classifies your content by how well it keeps people on the platform.

None of them measure anything real.

Sometimes your goals align with a platform, but more often than not, their metric has nothing to do with your goal. By framing yourself in their terms, you’re essentially selling their product for them.

The classification system doesn’t just measure you. It tells you who you are to them, what game you’re in, and what winning looks like to the people controlling it. If you accept that classification without questioning it, you’ve handed control to whoever built the metric.

And yet, if you play their game long enough, you start to internalize their definition. You start to feel successful when the number goes up and like a failure when it goes down, regardless of what’s actually happening in your business.

Value Capture

Why is this so dangerous? A metric starts as a proxy for something you actually care about in your business. Open rates stand in as a proxy for genuine engagement, sales rank as a proxy for resonance, and follower count as a proxy for reach.