Two Ways to Win

To my daughters, a slightly embarrassing life lecture

You are now entering Lecture Mode. Sighing is permitted. Full eye-rolls must wait until at least halfway.

You have probably met people whose entire personality is built around one thing they did once in their life. The race they won. The exam they aced. That one glorious moment in high school, or that one competition that somehow justifies another decade of talking about it. And then some people quietly keep doing difficult things that almost nobody sees. They get better at it. But they do not get louder. They do not collect applause; they focus on collecting skills.

What I want to talk about is this split. Let us give the two patterns names, because naming things is what nerds like me do:

• Ego-mode, which feeds on trophies and attention.
• Craft-mode, which feeds on practice and improvement.

They are both in you. They are both in me. The trick is noticing which one is driving at any given moment.

Ego-mode vs Craft-mode

Ego-mode is obsessed with how things look. Ego asks, “Do I seem impressive?” and “What can I show/tell people?” and “How does this make my story sound?” It lights up when there are medals, scores, grades, and social-media likes. It shines with competitions and leaderboards. It does not particularly care whether the thing underneath is solid, as long as it looks shiny from the outside.

Craft-mode cares about how things are. Craft-mode asks, “Am I actually learning something?” and “Can I do this better than last month?” and “Is this clean, safe, and real?” It lights up when you finally nail something hard, even if nobody else notices. It cares more about the experience of doing the thing itself rather than about the story you tell afterwards.

Psychologists have names for this split. They talk about performance goals versus mastery goals. Performance goals are about proving you are good. Especially compared to others. Mastery goals are about actually getting better at the thing. They also talk about extrinsic motivation: doing things for rewards, status, grades, versus intrinsic motivation: doing things because they are interesting or meaningful to you.

Ego-mode is basically “performance + extrinsic”: prove you’re good and get the cookie/medal/score. Craft-mode is “mastery + intrinsic”: become good and enjoy the process.

The same person can switch between these two modes in seconds. You can sit your exam in craft-mode and then post the result in ego-mode. You can train a sport in craft-mode and then brag about a competition result or great achievement in ego-mode. That is all normal.

The important question is not “Do I have an ego?” You do; welcome to being human, lol! The question is:

Who is allowed to drive when the stakes are high: Ego-mode or Craft-mode?

To explain why that matters, I need to talk about paragliding, death, and drums.

Paragliding: flying for numbers or for the love of adventure

You know I love paragliding. After 30 years, I still vividly remember the very first time my feet left the ground. I zoomed through the air 2meters above the ground down the tiny training slope. This was, and continues to be, magic. I also vividly remember, long, very long time later, when for the first time I got to the base of a cloud. It is something impossible to imagine. Being literally at the cloud base, on a comfortable hammock-like seat with a piece of cloth above your head, flying like a bird and watching the earth from above. Free thermal flying, exactly like soaring birds, is a magical activity. Using thermals, one can travel long distances, visit hard-to-reach mountain peaks, and see the world from angles that seem impossible from the ground. You meet people, you discover your limits, you learn about physics, psychology, reading the terrain, weather patterns and most importantly, how to manage risk. You collect adventures that almost nobody else will ever quite understand. Paragliding offers infinite opportunities for learning and self-improvement.

You know I lost very close friends to paragliding. With one, we were in what we call “a friendly competition” on XContest. That is an online scoreboard for paragliding flights. You upload your GPS track and get points for distance, triangles, and other nerdy geometric masochism. It is like Strava, except instead of running shoes, you are conducting pre-defined tasks (distance or triangle) to score points. There are two ways to relate to that scoreboard.

In one version, the ego is at the controls. You look at the map and think: If I just push a bit further into that valley, I’ll get a bigger triangle. If I take that risky traverse or fly closer to those rocks, I will be faster, and I’ll beat yesterday’s score. If I land early, I have “wasted” the flight or day. If I do not hurry, I will be too late to score a longer flight.

That voice is very persuasive. It talks in numbers: more kilometres, more points, bigger triangle, longer distance, better ranking.

Our brains are wired to love this. Numbers and rankings plug straight into two very old mental systems: comparison and reward. Comparison says, “How am I doing relative to the others?” Reward says, “Did I get more today than yesterday?” When you chase scores, each small success gives you a little hit of “nice, I’m winning”. And when you take a stupid risk and still get the points, your brain quietly learns: See? That wasn’t so bad. You survived. You got rewarded. That is how the trap tightens: the behaviour that should scare you (pushing into worse conditions) is the behaviour that gets you the cookie (better scores). Psychology calls this reinforcement. It is a dangerous trap observed in alpinism, winter backcountry skiing, rock climbing, paragliding or other high-risk adventure sports.

In normal life, it just makes people addicted to short-term rewards: for example, social-media likes and notifications. In high-risk sports, it can slowly drag you outside your real safety margins. My climbing and mountaineering instructor confirms that the most avalanche deaths happen to experienced and advanced mountaineers whose risk judgment has eroded over many years of trips, with the reinforcement: See? That wasn’t so bad. You survived. You got rewarded. The risk was smaller than you thought.

The problem is that it can be so loud that it drowns out another voice. The quieter, but much more important inner voice. The voice that says, The wind looks off today. This cloud base is lower than you think. Something feels wrong. Maybe we should stop. Perhaps we should just call it a day.

In the quiet-voice version, the craft mode is making the decisions. You are flying because of the craft, not because of the ego.

Craft-mode does not worship the scoreboard. It likes nice flights and good distances too, but what it really respects is the quality of your decisions. It is proud of choosing the right moment to turn back, even if that ruins the triangle. It is proud of landing early because the air feels strange. It is proud of saying “not today” and going for a coffee instead of launching in marginal conditions. It is proud of flying squares or circles instead of triangles. It is proud of staying next to the hill and practising wing control. Proud of flying acro manoeuvres for building up skills instead of always pushing longer and longer cross-country flights.

My friend was very talented, smart, and a genuinely good pilot. He was an awesome friend. As time went on, the pull of the scoreboard got stronger. Each good result became a new baseline to beat. The friendly competition stopped being so friendly inside his own head. He kept pushing further. He kept pushing in conditions and places where the margin for error shrinks. Every flight was an opportunity to push. Every flight was an attempt to have the next personal best flight. He pushed and pushed and was lucky enough to escape multiple close calls over the years we flew together. Unfortunately, one day, the risk caught up with him. There is no need to autopsy the flight here; you already know the ending. The uncomfortable truth is simple:

In high-risk sports, letting ego-mode drive you can literally kill you.

I still like closing nice FAI triangles. It is satisfying when the GPS track draws a big geometric shape over the mountains. Or flying long, difficult flights, beating my personal best records. But the flights I am most proud of are not always the ones that look impressive on the map, or on the XContest scoring boards. They are the ones where I made good decisions. The times I decided not to launch. The times I turned back when others pushed on. The “boring” safe flights I can repeat for years.

That is craft-mode: flying for the love of flying and long-term mastery, not for numbers on a website, or approval of others.

To be honest, the flights that stick in my memory are the ones which were not the longest or scored the most points. I remember flights with low-safes, that is, when you get back to the cloud from really low in your journey. Or flights done in a new terrain for the first time. Or flights where I have picked an unusual or not often-travelled path. When I judged the conditions, risks and margin of error, the best — that is, where I did not feel exceeding my skill-to-risk level throughout the flight. Flights where I felt “in the flow” the entire time. Flow is where your skill and challenge levels are perfectly in balance. Where you feel you are acting at the very best level of your current mastery, without being bored or anxious: in perfect flow.

Flow

There is a whole chunk of psychology called flow theory. If the challenge is too low for your skills, you get bored; if it is too high, you get anxiety and panic. Flow lives in that middle band where it is hard but not impossible. Craft-mode tries to keep you in that band. Ego-mode is the one that whispers, “Go on, just a bit more, ignore the anxiety, ignore the risks, push more”. It pushes you over the edge of the flow zone.

Drums: starting late, playing for the right scoreboard

Now, less extreme sports: me, noise and drumsticks. I started learning drums at an age when the world mostly expected me to buy earplugs and a walking cane, not a practice pad. Drumming is just an example — I know people who start paragliding over 50 — I just want to applaud you and relate. Realistically, I will never be a good drummer or the next YouTube prodigy. There will always be a 7-year-old drummer who is faster, tighter, and can play polyrhythms that make my brain melt. Ego-mode looks at that and says, “Why even start? You are too late. You will never learn it, not to mention be really good. There is no trophy in this for you. Why bother?” That is one way to think. It is also a very efficient way to kill any new interest! If you cannot be good at something, do not bother.

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But I did buy a practice pad and the drumsticks. And I loved it.

Craft-mode has a much smaller, much more honest scoreboard. It does not compare me to anyone. It only compares me to myself from last month. Craft-mode is happy with small miracles: the first time a pattern that felt impossible suddenly clicks, the moment you realise you stayed in time through a whole song, the day your hands just do something your brain previously filed under impossible. That quiet shift from No way, impossible to Yes, I can. I have mastered it.

I couldn’t do this. Now I can. Nobody else has to care. I care.

That is craft-mode in a nutshell. You both know this mode from your gymnastics practice. The feel of mastery when you nailed a hard combination for the first time after endless hours of practice. You got this!

If I measured drumming in ego-mode, I would have quit already. If I measure it in craft mode, I am rich and enjoy every second of it. Every practice session, there is always a little thing that gets smoother, cleaner, and more controlled. The reward is internal, not public. The rewards are mine to collect and cherish, not to brag about and compare to others.

How the world is rigged for Ego-mode

Now we need to talk about how the Life Game is set up out there. The world is not fair, and it is definitely not neutral. It is heavily biased toward ego-mode, because Ego-mode is easier to see, measure, and monetise. Loud, confident people get more attention than quiet, careful ones. People who are good at self-promotion often get more credit than people who are simply good.

Our brains like shortcuts. Instead of patiently checking and validating who is actually competent, we grab easy signals: who looks confident, who has many followers, who other people seem to trust, and which video has the most views. Psychologists call this social proof and prestige bias: if someone looks important and other people pay attention to them, we assume they must know what they are doing. On top of that, we fall in love with numbers because they feel very objective. Follower counts, scores, grades, XContest points. These all are easy to compare, so our brain quietly treats them as The Truth. Even though they are only crude proxies for real skills, achievements, or wisdom.

Platforms reward whatever generates clicks, not necessarily whatever is true or deep. It is very easy to display Ego-mode success. You can post a photo with a medal or a screenshot of XContest scores. You can show your follower count. You can drop the name of a big achievement into every conversation.

It is much harder to display Craft-mode success. You cannot show a photo of better judgment. You cannot screenshot “I take fewer stupid risks than last year”. There is no trending hashtag for “secretly less of an idiot now than a year ago”.

So yes, you will see people who surf the surface very skillfully, collecting attention and rewards, while people doing quieter, more solid work get less recognition. This is not a conspiracy; it’s just how human attention works. The temptation is to respond by going full Ego-mode yourself. “If the system rewards noise, I’ll get noisy.” Sometimes you do need to turn the volume up. But before that, there is another choice: Do I want to optimise my life for looking good, or for actually being good?

Swimming against the current

Choosing craft-mode, in a world wired for ego-mode, feels like swimming upstream. It means taking the harder project at school, the one where you learn something real but maybe do not get the easy A. It means ending a climb or a flight early because something feels off, then watching others brag about “sending it” or “nailing it” while you sit there with your annoyingly intact bones. It means posting work you are genuinely proud of, even if it does not generate the same numbers as whatever trend is currently screaming on the algorithm.

You will not always be rewarded immediately for these choices. In fact, you will sometimes feel punished. You will see classmates cut corners and still get the grade. You will see pilots take stupid risks and still get away with it, bragging about their new records. You will see people bluffing in confidence and getting positions they are not ready for.

In those moments, it is easy to feel naive for caring about craft. But swimming with the current has its own price. If you let ego-mode set all your priorities, you end up living for other people’s reactions. Your sense of worth starts to fluctuate with external metrics: last exam result, last project, last photo, last race, last performance, last entries on XContest or Strava. It is exhausting. And in high-risk situations, it can literally be deadly.

The problem is not just that this is tiring. It also makes your motivation very fragile. When your drive comes mostly from outside: from grades, likes, rankings, you are in what psychologists call an externally controlled mode. As long as the rewards keep coming, you are fine. The moment they dip, you crash. The opposite is building your drive around a few internal things: having some autonomy (I chose this), building real competence (I am actually good at this), and finding good people to do it with. That mix creates a kind of motivation that does not evaporate just because one exam, one season, or one project goes badly. That is exactly what craft-mode is quietly building over the years.

Swimming against the current is slower, quieter, and sometimes lonely. What you get in return is something extremely expensive and extremely rare: self-respect that is not for sale.

The ego is not evil; it is just a tool.

Let me be clear: I’m not preaching some saintly ideal where you never take credit, never show anything, and never feel proud in public. Too little ego can also be a problem. If you never stick your hand up, you do not get opportunities. If you never say “I did this, and it is good”, others with less to offer but more confidence will happily occupy that space. The solution is not to kill Ego-mode. The solution is to demote it. Let craft-mode decide what you do, how far you push, what risks you accept, and what standards you keep. Let ego-mode handle distribution: showing the work, applying for the thing, asking for the raise, saying, “I’m proud of this.”

Let craft set the content. Let ego do the marketing.

When ego dictates the content, you get nonsense: risky flights, fake expertise, chasing trends and scores on scoreboards, and shallow work. When craft dictates the content and ego just helps it get seen, you get something more honest: quality first, visibility second.

A small inner compass

Ask yourself:

If nobody ever knew I did this, would I still want to do it?

Am I more excited about the story of this, or the experience of it?

Am I trading long-term safety or skill for short-term applause?

If your answers consistently lean toward I would do it anyway; the experience matters; I am not doing it for five minutes of glory, then you are mostly in craft-mode. Keep that.

Why am I boring you with this?

I do not care whether you end up as scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, nurses, climbers, teachers, or something completely different. I care about how you move through the world. I would rather see you master a “small” skill that nobody outside your circle even understands than become famous for something hollow. I would rather see you start new things “too late” and enjoy the process than never start because you cannot be the best. And I would rather see my friends fly small triangles for decades than chase a single big record and burn out, literally or metaphorically.

I have not always lived in craft mode perfectly. I have let ego-mode grab the steering wheel more than once, in the air, in academia, in life. I have felt the pull of scoreboards and rankings. I have cared too much about how things look. Losing a friend in the mountains forced me to look harder at that. Sitting at the drum kit, failing and slowly improving, keeps teaching me the same lesson in a kinder way. If you can internalise this earlier than I did, you will be way ahead of the game. And yes, I am aware that part of me is proud of that idea. That is ego-mode again, popping up to say hi. That is fine. Just remember: let the noisy part help you show your work. Do not let it decide what is worth doing, or what is worth risking for, in the first place.

Mastery, competence, and skill should always come first. The rewards, competition, comparisons, and bragging can come later or not at all. Optional.

Over time, this is how your solid identity will form: not from a few loud moments everyone claps for, but from thousands of quiet moments and choices where you kept building who you are, even when nobody was watching.

Be always who you are when no one is watching, and try to be a slightly better version of yourself tomorrow than you were yesterday.