The Game

There is nothing more important than understanding how reality works and how to
deal with it. The state of mind you bring to this process makes all the difference. I have
found it helpful to think of my life as if it were a game in which each problem I face is a
puzzle I need to solve. By solving the puzzle, I get a gem in the form of a principle that
helps me avoid the same sort of problem in the future. Collecting these gems
continually improves my decision making, so I am able to ascend to higher and higher
levels of play in which the game gets harder and the stakes become ever greater.

Coming out of my crash, I was so broke I couldn’t muster enough money to pay for an
airplane ticket to Texas to visit a prospective client, even though the fees I’d earn were
many times the cost of the fare—so I didn’t make that trip. Still, I gradually added
clients, revenue, and a new team. With time, my upswings increased in magnitude and
my downswings were both tolerable and educational. I never thought of what I was
doing as building (or rebuilding) a company; I was just getting the things I needed to
play my game.

In gaining this perspective, I began to experience painful moments in a radically

different way. Instead of feeling frustrated or overwhelmed, I saw pain as nature’s
reminder that there is something important for me to learn. Encountering pains and
figuring out the lessons they were trying to give me became sort of a game to me. The
more I played it, the better I got at it, the less painful those situations became, and the
more rewarding the process of reflecting, developing principles, and then getting
rewards for using those principles became. I learned to love my struggles, which I
suppose is a healthy perspective to have, like learning to love exercising (which I
haven’t managed to do yet).

To help you stay centered and effective, pretend that your life is a martial art or a game,
the object of which is to get around a challenge and reach a goal. Once you accept its
rules, you’ll get used to the discomfort that comes with the constant frustration. You
will never handle everything perfectly: Mistakes are inevitable and it’s important to
recognize and accept this fact of life. The good news is that every mistake you make
can teach you something, so there’s no end to learning. You’ll soon realize that
excuses like “that’s not easy” or “it doesn’t seem fair” or even “I can’t do that” are of no
value and that it pays to push through.
So what if you don’t have all the skills you need to succeed? Don’t worry about it
because that’s true for everyone. You just have to know when they are needed and
where you can go to get them. With practice, you will eventually play this game with a
calm unstoppable centeredness in the face of adversity. Your ability to get what you
want will thrill you.