Life Lessons I Learned Playing Monopoly

When the dice directed me to yet another vacant property on the Monopoly board, I recklessly continued to invest. Young and naïve, I thought this was a foolproof tactic for winning easily. It was a strategy that I even attempted to conceal from my friends for fear of losing my “secret weapon.” Although my parents told me that this was no way to excel, I disregarded their opinion; whenever they bested me in a family game, I always convinced myself that my defeat was attributable only to bad luck. I firmly believed that their tactic of selective yet minimum expenditures was vastly inferior to mine.

My mania for marching my silver game piece across the Monopoly board ended by first grade, but the economic strategies embodied by board games continued to fascinate me. I sought out increasingly complex economic games, which required me to come up with strategies for everything from financing armies to buying real estate. Ironically, however, my strategy remained as unenlightened as before, disguised only by my greater sophistication and maturity.

It was not until grade six that I saw the flaw in my thinking. At Simon Fraser University’s Mini-University Summer Camp, a program aimed at introducing middle school students to popular university courses, my perspective on economics was revolutionized. One of the most memorable activities during the camp was a mock investment program. During the course of ten days, we bought, kept, or sold our hypothetical shares based on their reported values. I, of course, saw this as another chance to practice my strategy. Immediately, my entire capital of fifty thousand dollars was converted into myriad stocks and bonds. I believed that the majority of my companies would grow, but to my horror, after two days of experimentation, seventy percent of my investments had failed, cutting my funds by almost half.

It was then that I learned a hard life lesson: reality does not always revolve around my ideals. That is a lesson that I have had to relearn throughout life; as an analytical and scientific individual who is attracted to a theoretical understanding of the world, I have to fight my disappointment when an experiment does not go as planned or when a theory proves untrue. As I have matured, however, I have come to recognize that these unexpected “failures” actually represent opportunities to gain new insights. In the case of my investment strategies, I bit the bullet and abided by my parents’ advice to invest in only a few prominent companies. Only then did my portfolio begin to brighten.

To conclude the essay, monopoly provided my first exposure to the strategic and analytical thinking involved in economics. Today, I burn with questions about this baffling yet intriguing field. I long to understand the mechanisms behind its impact on politics, culture, society, and my own daily life. Through Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences, I plan to gain the necessary resources to truly understand the complexities of the world economy.