How can political intentions concerning adult learning be realized when adults seem to have intentions and outcomes that go in many directions? This paper highlights some tensions and discrepancies between adult education policy goals, referred to as promoters for lifelong learning, and adults' outcomes from participation in learning. While some adults experience a mismatch between their own expressed outcomes and some of the political intentions of lifelong learning, others have great accordance between their outcomes and the education policy goals and intentions. The results of this study highlight Bourdieu's expression: "the sense of the game"--(Bourdieu 1990) as a key competence in order to soften certain tensions and thereby recruit more adults into learning and optimize the political achievement goal.