In complex systems, participation trophies actually exist.
But they only matter if you encash them
If you engage seriously in a system, you end up with something valuable.
You end up with know-how.
You end up with insight into how that system behaves.
You end up knowing where the actual bottlenecks are.
And you start to understand what makes someone excel within it.
That is the trophy.
And it can be turned into a business.
Let’s look at what’s happening online.
There are many gurus who haven’t built a business in the usual sense.
They didn’t scale a startup.
They didn’t raise capital.
They didn’t build large teams.
But they did participate.
They entered the game, learned how it works, and turned that experience into coaching.
That coaching became a product.
And that product helped someone else.
There’s nothing wrong with that.
If it genuinely helps someone, then it carries value.
It is no different from someone building a software tool for a business.
In both cases, the creator noticed a pain point.
And then created something useful.
That is how experience becomes leverage.
The lessons alone don’t matter.
The resources don’t guarantee success.
What matters is how you use what you’ve seen.
When you take part in a complex system like business or writing or trading you get inside information.
You understand things people outside the system can’t see.
That understanding can be packaged.
You can turn it into a guide, a tool, or a service.
You can make software that removes friction.
You can create content that explains something clearly.
You can build utilities that solve repeated issues.
None of this depends on success inside the system.
It depends only on participation.
That’s what makes this idea powerful.
Because even if your original goal doesn’t work out
Even if your business fails
You can still use what you’ve learned to build something new.
So your success doesn’t have just one path.
There are many divergent paths from the same experience.
You might start with a startup.
But you might end up building tools for startups.
Or you might end up teaching what blocked you.
Or you might spot something completely unrelated but sparked by that journey.
The business doesn’t always come from the thing you built.
Sometimes, it comes from the act of trying to build it.
So the best thing you can do is to participate.
Seriously. Fully. With attention.
Because if the system is rich and layered, it will reveal things to you.
And if you take note of those things, you can turn them into something useful.
That’s the participation trophy.
That’s why you should put yourself in complex and valuable environments.
Because even if the result isn’t what you imagined, the experience can still be monetized.
That’s a path worth taking.
That’s why you should participate.
Because participation results in embodied cognition
And that type of rich input helps you gain insights that people really desire.
You should participate in valuable systems, get insights
And either help your own business or teach others, or create tools for others.
But you must participate.
And you can see that this phenomena is prevalent everywhere
You can see ex FAANG employees creating guides on how to join big tech
You can see people with good scores creating courses for GMAT, LSAT or SAT
You see B-school students writing playbooks for cracking interviews or breaking into fields like consulting and investment banking.
You even see people sharing reflections about the systems they were part of—
Like someone from a business school comparing Wharton and Harvard on YouTube.
Participation in system gives you inside information that people find appealing, even if it is not packaged.
You gotta walk into rooms.
You gotta talk with people.
You gotta do actions in a system.
All of these are valuable things that provide rewards beyond just mere obvious compensation they give.