Growing up, I didn’t have some of the normal entertainment sources that other kids did. I never had a video game console and I never watched cartoons or really TV of any sort. Our family had a movie night once a week and sometimes had a documentary night. But most of the time, we would play some kind of card game.

What you might be thinking is, “Oh, how cute. A little family playing card games together. How peaceful and nice.” This was not how we played card games. When you sat down to play cards, there were three necessary things: A deck of cards, paper, and a pen to keep score. No one ever hinted at playing “without keeping score.” That would border on sacrilege. If there was no score being kept, there would be no game.

My dad was in the AirForce (where the best and brightest in the military are, of course), and I had five older sisters, no brothers. Competition was practically bred into me. There was no mercy. Whether you were 6 years old or 60 years old, you were there to win and everyone else was too. The “he’s little, let him try again” thing was non-existent. I was forced to try and keep up, so I did what it took to do that.

How did I do this? How any other sensible person would do it. By cheating.

A lot.

I started out cheating like any other kid. Where everyone knows and sees that you’re cheating and calls you out. I got in big trouble for this, so I quickly realized I was going to have to get more creative and sneaky. I started drawing two cards when I should have been drawing one, I learned how to put cards perfectly behind other sets of cards so that I could play them underneath the legal ones, I began learning how to stack the deck quickly when I was given a deck of cards to shuffle.

I learned a lot about how to cheat and I got pretty good at it. One of my finer (or worse, depending on how you see it) moments was when we had completely finished a game. The game consisted of 7 rounds where the goal was to have the fewest cards at the end of each round. It became clear that there were some cards missing in some of the decks, so they began looking for the cards. To my distress, they lifted up the table cloth of the table we were playing at and found a pile of about 10 cards that I had gotten rid of in order to win certain rounds.

Needless to say, they were not very happy with me.

As I grew up though, I understood the importance of winning for real. Cheating and winning didn’t satisfy me. I wanted to win fairly. I wanted to actually know I was the best, I no longer only cared that other people thought I was the best. This was driven by a very narcissistic mindset in life (still something I hate and am always working on). However, because of this mindset, I became really good at a lot of things during this time.

Some people talk about having this competitive environment growing up and how it turned them into this work machine that doesn’t care about anyone. Just works and works and pays no attention to the feelings of others. However, this couldn’t be further from the truth for me.

Maybe because my competitive environment growing up was mostly females, but I didn’t ever gain the more aggressive competitive side. That is to say, I did have an aggressive side, but it seems like it went away at such a young age that it wasn’t a big deal.

I became the kind of person that doesn’t want to give a kid an extra swing at bat because he’s gotta make it on his own, but I would also be the first person to cheer my head off when they hit the ball. I would be the most encouraging person you could possibly have for a little kid. I love watching them succeed, but I hated giving them extra shots. If they didn’t get it, too bad.

I’ll teach them as much as possible, but when the game comes around, there was no mercy. I was there to win.

This is not always a healthy mindset, and its something I often have to double check myself on, but it also has some huge pros. One of which is that you will never see me “take it easy” in a pickup basketball game.” You’ll never see me, “take a longer lunch break” when work could be done. Competitiveness infiltrates every part of my life. When everyone else says “let’s play a card game,” I hear, “let’s make a serious competitive endeavor.”

Because something that is trivial to most people was such a competitive area of my life, I turned every area of my life into a competition.

As I said, this competitive mindset can have its consequences. When left to itself, all it does is feed on peoples pride and make them worse off than it found them. However, I have channeled it in a different way. My favorite verse in the Bible: Col. 3:23 – Whatever you do work heartily, as for the Lord, and not for man.

I’m still one of the most competitive people you will ever meet. And to be honest, some of it still is because I’m a prideful, selfish human. But every day, I strive for this verse. To continue working hard at literally every single thing I do, but to work hard at it for the right reasons. Not to please men or even myself, but to please God.

Always keep score during your card games. The mindset it will instill in your children will encourage them to aim for the best at everything they do.

If you don’t think that keeping track of score during a card game is important, not to worry! You will never have to worry about playing a card game with me!