Settlers of Catan is a fantastic board game that is extremely popular with ages that range from high school students to young adults. The game is simple. Build two initial settlements by certain commodities mines, each with a number on it. You receive a resource when the dice roll the number on one of our resource mines. You then use those commodities to build road, additional settlements, trading, etc. Obviously, this game involves a lot of strategy.

My particular group of friends are highly competitive when it comes to board games, so naturally we used to play Settlers of Catan a lot. Playing with them could be quite difficult at times and when I said competitive I meant SUPER COMPETITIVE.  My friends would look up game strategies, use probability formulas, and much more just to get an edge. Needless to say, they are very frustrating to play with and I rarely win.

One day, on a family vacation I met a group of people my age. We started hanging out and one night they decided to bring out Settlers of Catan. I played as I regularly did with my friends. I tried to anticipate moves, deduce what resource was the most likely to be most beneficial, and nerdy stuff like that. With in a few turns I was leading the game and I ended up winning the game fairly quickly. The new friends I made were surprised and said I was lucky.

We started another game and this time my opponents teamed up on me and placed a trade embargo on me. No way they were going to let the new guy win twice. Despite their efforts I became self sufficient and won again. After that game, they decided that they didn’t want to play Settlers of Catan anymore.

The reason of I’m telling this story isn’t because I’m trying to show off my board game skills. The only reason I was good was because I played people who took the game seriously and originally better than me. I learned from losing again and again. I kept losing to them continuously until I learned their tricks and developed my own. After a while I was on their level. I didn’t realize it at the time but I was slowly learning to get better and better. Once, I played with people who weren’t as good as my friends winning was easy.

The point is that that putting yourself in competitive environments could only be in you benefit. When you pit yourself against someone who is better than you, you probably won’t win but you will learn. You’ll keep losing but you’ll learn from your mistakes and after enough failures you’ll start winning. I hate losing a lot but you won’t improve if you pit yourself against someone you know you could beat.

Don’t just pick on someone your own size, pick on someone bigger. This is something that I’ve done in many areas whether it’s been in boardgames, school, or even work. Every challenge is a way to improve yourself.