I’m currently in the midst of a Korean variety show. The premise of the show is simple: a team of celebrities plays games to win prizes for a guest who applied to be on the show.
Three stages, with the prizes getting progressively better from a nice coffee maker all the way up to air purifiers.
The games mirrored the stakes. Stage 1 might be bouncing one ball into one cup. Stage 2, three balls into three cups. Stage 3? Five balls into five cups, all within 30 seconds.
Here’s the kicker: The team gets a total of ten tries for the entire game. Fail Stage 1 once? That’s one try down. Fail again? Another try gone. Every single retry in an earlier round eats into their buffer for the tougher later rounds.
So, what did I learn after 16 episodes of binge?
The greatest joy often comes from the narrowest escape
As expected, the biggest disappointments are episodes where the team breezed through Stages 1 and 2 (using up only two chances) only to spectacularly fail at Stage 3 with eight chances.
On the flip side, in episodes where the team passed Stage 1/2 on their very last chance – that single, precious chance left out of ten – they were visibly, undeniably, ecstatically happier than episodes where they reached the same round with five or six chances still in their pocket.
Think about that for a moment. They achieved the same outcome – passing the earlier stage(s) and having a shot at the bigger prizes. But the emotional payoff was dramatically different.
Why?
Achieving your goals when you felt you had nothing left, when you truly had to dig deep and make every single effort count, provides a level of satisfaction that nothing can ever match.
And that’s why in competitions, the 3rd placer will often be happier and more relieved than the 2nd placer. One escaped the abyss, the other just missed the top.
Losses loom larger than gains
Another catch of the game? If you fail Round 2 or Round 3 after ten tries, all the prizes collected from the previous rounds will be forfeited.
It boiled down to three scenarios:
- Best case: The guest sweeps all prizes by completing up to Stage 3.
- Conservative case: The guest, content with their winnings so far, chooses to stop at Stage 1 or 2 and keeps the prizes.
- Worst case: The guest pushes for Stage 2 or 3, runs out of chances, and loses everything.
In most cases when the guest wished to continue to Stage 3, they used up all their chances and lost all their prizes.
Too often, the allure of the big win blinds us to the pain of losing we’ve already secured. We get so fixated on the potential upside – that washing machine, huge return, or big leverage – that we often gloss over the catastrophic downside.
This is a classic illustration of what behavioral economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky called “Prospect Theory.”
It suggests that we feel the pain of a loss far more intensely than the pleasure of an equivalent gain, and this often leads us to take greater risks when facing potential losses than we would when pursuing gains.
For instance, let’s play MY game.
Imagine you have $1,000 in your pocket right now. I offer you two choices:
- Choice 1: I simply hand you an extra $500.
- Choice 2: We flip a coin. If it’s heads, I give you $1,000. If it’s tails, you get nothing.
What’s your choice?
Now, let’s play again, but the starting point is different. You now have $2,000.
- Choice 1: You give me $500.
- Choice 2: We flip a coin. If it’s heads, you give me $1,000. If it’s tails, you give me nothing.
What’s your pick this time?
Spoiler alert – both games feature the exact same dollar amounts involved, but the framing relative to your starting point makes all the difference in how you perceive the choice.
In the first game, with $1,000, getting $500 is a gain. In the second game, with $2,000, paying $500 is a loss.
Back to the Korean variety show, the rule that all prizes are lost if they fail Stage 2 or 3 is a direct trigger for risk-seeking behavior in the domain of losses.
Guests, faced with the prospect of losing all their current winnings, become more willing to take big, uncertain gambles (pushing to Stage 3) rather than accepting a guaranteed smaller gain (stopping early).
The pain of forfeiting everything is so strong that they’d rather risk that outcome for the chance to avoid any loss.
Take the shot, but be prepared to lose everything
Then again, some guests pushed their luck all the way to Stage 3 and victoriously earned the top prize.
This shows that big success often comes from these moments where you put something meaningful on the line. Sticking to what’s safe guarantees you’ll never lose what you have, but it also guarantees you’ll never achieve what you could have.
The illusion of infinite resources can be a silent killer of good decisions
Next lesson learned: Don’t confuse a surplus of resources with a guarantee of success.
Many times, the team had five chances left but still couldn’t win the game with those chances. During other times, they had two chances left and managed to win by the skin of their teeth.
When we believe we have endless chances, whether it’s money in the bank, time on the clock, or opportunities in a career, we tend to become sloppy.
We might experiment more freely (which isn’t always bad), but we also tolerate more failure, procrastinate more readily, and take bigger, less calculated risks.
The fear of loss gets dulled.
We convince ourselves there will always be another chance, another opportunity, another bailout.
And then, suddenly, there isn’t. The washing machine is gone.
Conversely, scarcity, when managed well, can be a potent catalyst for focus and innovation. When you know you have limited chances, every single one becomes precious.
It just boils down to luck
After all the analysis of chances, strategies, and psychological biases, there’s this most humbling one: sometimes, it just boils down to luck.
You can plan perfectly, manage your risks, understand every behavioral quirk, but the ball still bounces oddly, the coin lands on tails, or the unexpected happens.
In the show, no matter how skilled the team was, there were always moments where pure chance dictated the outcome.
That single, impossible shot that goes in, or the easy one that somehow misses despite all logic.
Life, in many ways, is no different. We make our best decisions with the information we have, navigating our biases, but external forces – a market crash, a new technology, a random encounter – can shift everything.
So if you’re in a bad place right now, don’t beat yourself too hard.
It’s easy to internalise every setback as a personal failing.
Maybe if you just worked harder, prepared better for that interview, or had thought of that business idea sooner, you could have averted the problems you face now.
But the truth, as this variety show showed, is that life has an undeniable element of randomness.
Let go of the illusion that every outcome is solely a result of your personal choices.
You’re worth much more than that 🙂
Cheers,
Val