Life is not just a game, according to Jordan Peterson, it is a set of games, and the rule is never sacrifice victory across a set of games for victory in a single game.
It’s simple. Our lives are made up of series of events, and while all these events and our responses to them define the kind of life we have, no single event is our life.
The important thing is, while we are doing everything we can to make each event as successful as possible in order to richly fortify our life as a whole, there are some times when victory in a single game would significantly alter our life negatively. And such an impact might be very hard to recover from.