Part one. The game.

In the spring of 2005, a man settled a $20 million question with a children's game. And the side that lost is the side that called it luck.

Takashi Hashiyama had a collection to sell. A Cézanne, a Van Gogh, a Picasso, a Sisley of the Seine swollen in flood. Tens of millions of dollars of it hanging in the offices of a Japanese electronics firm. And two houses came to take it to market. Christie's and Sotheby's, the two great auctioneers of the planet, each centuries old, each promising him the world.

He could not choose between them. As far as he could see, they were equals, equally polished, equally hungry, equally certain that they alone could ring the last dollar out of his paintings. So he gave them an instruction that the executives first took for a joke and then slowly understood was not: settle it with a game. One round, rock, paper, scissors. The winner would auction the collection and keep the fortune and commission that came with it.

Picture the two rooms on the far sides of the world, each holding the same slip of paper, each trying to decide what to write on it. So Sotheby's talked it over and concluded there was nothing to talk about. It was a game of chance. They decided a coin with three faces. You cannot study a coin. You cannot prepare for a coin. You simply show up and flip it and accept what the universe hands you. And so they did not prepare at all.

Christie's did something else. Christie's went looking for an edge in a game that by every account did not have one. The director of their impressionist department had 11-year-old twin daughters who played this game the way children do, constantly, ferociously, with the entire politics of the schoolyard riding on each throw. So the adults asked the children, and the children, who had never heard the words game theory in their lives, laid it out as plainly as weather. Everyone reaches for rock first. Rock is the fist. Rock feels strong and safe and like the start of things. So a thinking opponent expecting your rock will lay paper over it to smother it, which means you throw scissors and cut the paper before it has finished falling.

On the morning of the contest, the two houses wrote their choices down. Sotheby's, treating it as a coin, played paper. Christie's, having listened to two children, played scissors. Scissors cut paper. Christie's won the right to sell the collection and earned several million dollars for a decision that took a few seconds and cost them nothing but the willingness to take the game seriously. Somewhere in New York, an executive who had called it chance learned in the space of one syllable that it had never been chance at all.

We call this a children's game. It moved $20 million, and the people who lost are the people who believed it could not be played. That belief — that this of all things is beneath strategy, beneath study, beneath you — is the single most expensive idea you have ever been handed. And you were handed it so young you never thought to question it. This book is going to question it.