"You ever heard the expression 'don't hate the player, hate the game', well don't hate the game, love the game because you're in it mate." - Guy Ritchie
"Play the game. Never let the game play you." -Tupac Shakur
"Life is a game, where either you lose or you learn." - Robert Kiyosaki
These are just a few of the “life is a game” quotes I've heard over the years. I'm sure you've also heard the expression “life is game” in some sort of iteration as well. There are so many metaphors alluding to the game of life. Too many even. You hear it so often that you become numb to it. It's the cliché effect. Despite this, it's an idea I've found myself pondering again recently.
As I gain life experience, more & more things are starting to make sense to me. How money works. How people work. How I work. How the world works. I'm not saying I've got all this figured out, far from it in fact. But I'm slowly getting a clearer picture of the crazy, messy puzzle that is life. This has got me pondering the age-old adage that life is in fact a game. And armed with the right tools & information can be mastered. The whole society that we live in today is man-made. There are rules, processes & systems that we as human beings have created, agreed on & now blindly live by. Once you start challenging them & understand how & why they exist, you can begin to own the game & your life.
All there is is the outside world & your inside world & everything is subject to these rules. There are essentially 2 worlds trying to tell us who we are. Our lives are premised on this dynamic. Our struggle between navigating other people's perception of us, versus our own perception of our desires, abilities & understanding of our true self. Those are the 2 identities. 1 is real & 1 is fake. This is part of the game & there needs to be some sort of resolution. Are you going to allow the world to tell you who you are, or are you going to tell yourself who you are?
We can get to that resolution in different ways. Looking to resolve this externally involves seeking who you are from external entities. There was a time when I was still trying to discover who I was. I would look for guidance on this matter from people around me that I thought were cool. People that I looked up to. Characters on TV that looked like me, that I could aspire to be like. I was taking all these cues from external sources & meshing them together. This resulted in me creating a caricature of myself. A manufactured version of the person that I believed I was supposed to be. In reality, it was actually who society wanted me to be.
I believe the answer to this lies in gaining enough security & confidence to reassure ourselves that we are enough the way we are. I did this through ownership. Taking possession of my own life. I took ownership of who I was & more importantly who I wanted to become. Once you start taking responsibility for everything about your life, all your actions, all your flaws, all your mistakes... you stop pretending. You stop entertaining the ideas of the external world when it comes to who or what you should be or do. To get to this point in my life, I first had to prostitute myself to the external world.
The world outside is very noisy & very tempting. It seems like it has all the answers, but that's only because you don't think you're enough in the first place. If you don't think you're enough in the first place, you will look outside of yourself to feel full. All the world wants to do is sell you stuff as a way of profiting from your search of self. And I don't just mean physical things but also ideas & belief systems. From novelty diets to novelty short-lived trends like virtual raves, the world is constantly trying to sell you something to add to your identity. In order to do that first, it makes you feel bad about yourself. Less than, in some way. It preys on your insecurities. I'm aware of this now & still fall victim to the sell from time to time.
“If you are playing the game without wounds, you are not playing the game, you are watching the game. If you are playing the game with wounds, you are not playing the game, you are mastering the game” - Dr.P.S. Jagadeesh Kumar
Unfortunately, to discover my true value, I brought what the world was selling. I put value on material things & false belief systems. I dressed in a certain way to impress other people. I chased girls to improve my social status with my mates. I did drugs, again mostly to fit into the social norms of the people around me. These vices only acted as a means to escape from myself.
After years of chasing transitory things in the material world, my level of fulfilment hadn't changed in any way. I had no other choice but to return to myself. I had exhausted all the external options & decided to look inward for fulfilment. Which in turn led me to start challenging every single belief & idea I thought to be true. I went through this process of deconstructing my identity, stripping back all these false layers until I was naked. Impressing other people didn't serve me. Neither did chasing girls or money or abusing drugs. Once I challenged the beliefs of the world around me, I realised they only served to make me subservient. They were of no use to me. This process empowered me to replace the old beliefs that didn't serve me with new ones that did. By serve me I mean allow me to become the person I wanted to be. Rather than the person society wanted me to believe I was.
“Life is a game and you are the player. As you master the game, so you also create it.” - Jay Woodman
The most important belief I've adopted is another cliché but it changed my life. It's the belief that I can do anything I set my mind to. It felt weird & self-indulgent to think this at first. Especially when I was trying new things & sucking at them. We all suck at things at first though. One of these new things that I persisted with was cutting my own hair. It made me realise that all my skills are malleable. For the longest time, external influences had me convinced that I needed to rely on a barber to achieve fresh trim status. The first haircut I gave myself didn't help to dispel that theory either. The more I cut my own hair, the more comfortable I became with having bad haircuts... until I gained the skills to actually give myself half decent haircuts. Practice makes you better & your mind defines your possibilities. Your mind allows you to practice until you get good rather than throw the towel in at the sucky stage.
Your mind is essentially the game & once you master your mind you’re no longer limited by the realm of possibility. You're no longer limited by the beliefs of the external world. You’re only limited by your own beliefs & the skills you possess as a result of those beliefs.
"You glean what you can glean, when you're ready to glean what you're ready to glean" - Guy Ritchie
I had to indulge the outside world to fully grasp the value of looking internally for fulfilment. I let the world tell me who I was until I was ready to take authority & tell myself who I was. This journey gave me the confidence & security to stop asking what I'm capable of. Instead, I now ask myself what I want to accomplish and what I need to learn in order to be successful at it. I hope anyone that reads this is able to reclaim their identity. Once you stop looking for your sense of self outside of yourself you can dictate who you are. You can identify the gaps in your skillset that stands between who you are today & who you need to be to accomplish whatever your mission is in life. As far as I'm concerned that is the key to mastering game.
"Life is a challenge, meet it! Life is a dream, realize it! Life is a game, play it! Life is love, enjoy it!" ~ Sathya Sai Baba