If Life Is a Game, Learn How to Play It
In business circles you'll eventually hear someone tell you that you've just got to play the game. The phrase wears thin after the hundredth time. And on the opposite end sit the people who treat every hour of living as a grim obligation, no lightness allowed. The workable spot is somewhere between those two poles. Choosing a life pointed at self-development and personal growth is really a search for that balance, and the balance is what teaches you how to play.
Anyone who was deep into sports as a kid will tell you that football, baseball, and basketball are fun, sure, but they stop being only games fairly quickly. You play a sport by working with other people toward a shared result. You also learn to compete, and competition is the root of any free market.
None of that requires stepping on people to climb. It also doesn't mean toying with a partner because commitment scares you. Stringing someone along isn't playing the game; it's emotional immaturity, nothing more. People who operate that way usually haven't committed to any kind of growth, tend to run on whatever emotion is loudest at the moment, and often dull those emotions with alcohol or drugs.
After high school you take the basics picked up in class and on the field and start applying them to adult life. Maybe you land a job you enjoy or at least tolerate and work your way up. Maybe you learn a trade and sell that skill to the public. The field is crowded, so money is hard to come by, and you have to figure out how to share. The ones who learn to work together, or to collaborate, which is the word everyone reaches for in this century, find the game easier. The ones living by survival of the fittest and every man for himself will claw ahead by any means. That approach tends to buy a difficult life, and a lonely one.
Dave Ramsey likes to say that everyone works in sales. I dislike reducing everything to business, but it mostly holds. That isn't a grim verdict on its own, though life would do better as something closer to a nonprofit than a chase after each person's private bottom line. Still, people who can sell tend to succeed almost anywhere, college degree or not, as long as their people skills are there.
Someone grown up enough knows how to present themselves while still carrying the compassion and empathy to reach down and help the next person instead of sneering at them. That points to a higher level of awareness, the kind that spills out of years spent on personal growth, plus a working sense of what psychology is about. You don't have to enroll anywhere to pick that up. Business itself, profit or nonprofit, is a long lesson in how people behave.
The hard truth is that money runs the world, so it holds some grip on all of us. The upside: learn to make it work for you and you've already pulled ahead of most people. The mind works the same way. A lot of life's fights start between your ears. Bring both your mind and your money under control and you carry an edge almost no one has. A sudden jolt of new awareness can complicate that for a while, though even that usually leaves something useful behind.
Think of your level of consciousness as the gauge for how far you've grown. As the self-development process moves along, that awareness climbs. Part of you starts to feel cut off from the crowd you're leaving behind, including people you've known for years. Another part starts pulling new things toward you: people, work connections, opportunities, love.
So if life really is a game, the whole task is learning to play it. Winning matters less than the trip itself. The relationships with the people who actually matter to us are the thing worth holding. Getting to that idea in a way that genuinely lands is itself proof of how much ground you've covered. Congratulations on that. The road doesn't have an end; keep moving as long as you're still six feet above the dirt. - Erwin Bishop