One of my buddies,
a skilled business developer,
once worked
at a company
that didn’t value women.
The company
deliberately
set up roadblocks
that prohibited women
from advancing.
One of the (many) roadblocks
was they wouldn’t share
key yet confidential news
with female associates.
My buddy couldn’t succeed
by playing
by those rules.
So she cheated.
She made friends
with the executive assistant
to the company’s President.
My buddy not only
received the information.
She received it FIRST.
And she acted upon
that information.
Eventually,
she got tired
of figuring out ways
to ‘cheat’ the system
and she left
to start a rival company.
She created her own system,
somewhere people like her
had a chance of winning.
“Sophisticated competitors,
the ones who really want to win,
understand that
cheating destroys
the very thing they set out to do.
Because once
cheating is normalized,
the winner is the person
who had the guts
to cheat the most
and destroy the system,
not the one
who deserved to win.”
Sometimes
those who supposedly ‘deserve’
to win
don’t truly warrant that success.
Sometimes the system deserves
to be destroyed.
And sometimes
it is easier
to create
an entirely new system.