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Built for solo competitive number games
He assumed it was ordinary founder burnout, since the company brought in roughly $6 million a year. Then he went through a very fancy version of a personality test, in which the testers talked to him, his coworkers, his parents, and others in his life. The results told him it was no surprise he was miserable. He was running a multiplayer, competitive game with little math in it, and he liked competitive games played alone and built on numbers.
He started investing on the side and did far better as a solo investor in the stock market than he ever did running the company. He also got kicked out of casinos for winning too much, because he had found a system that worked. Financially, spending thousands of hours figuring it out was a poor decision, but nothing matched the thrill of beating the house.
Why do casinos ban players who win?
Casinos are private property, and in most places they can refuse service to a player they choose to exclude. The problem players are usually skilled ones, such as blackjack card counters who track which cards have left the deck. Mathematician Edward Thorp showed in his 1962 book Beat the Dealer that blackjack could be beaten by tracking cards. Casinos responded with multiple decks, shuffling machines, and bans on suspected counters.
Why does beating the odds feel so thrilling?
The brain's dopamine system responds most strongly to rewards that are better than expected. Neuroscientist Wolfram Schultz recorded this in monkeys in the 1990s, showing that dopamine neurons fire when a reward arrives unexpectedly. A win against a system built to win produces a large surprise each time. That signal helps explain why a skilled competitor may value the contest itself over the money.
How do personality types match people to work?
Psychologist John Holland proposed in 1959 that people and jobs both fall into six types: realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising, and conventional. His theory says satisfaction is highest when a person's type matches the type of the work. Vocational counselors still use his model in interest inventories. Mismatches between temperament and daily tasks are a classic source of dissatisfaction at work.
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