How Not to Play “The Game of LIFE”
Stop playing, start living.
Many of you may have already seen this video — it’s been going viral on social media, with nearly a million shares in a single week:
As much as I’m deeply moved by it, I can’t help but see this video as living within an outdated framework. It’s a mindset that has us stuck continuously producing results no one wants, at every level: personal, collective, and system-based.
The exercise of this race — this “game of life” — is meant to viscerally demonstrate the realities of white privilege and how the world is structured to enforce it, but fails to explore deeper issues.
Why we are rushing through the game of life as a race?
What do we believe will happen if we don’t play the game of life?
What alternative games have begun to emerge?
Are there ways to co-create brand new, personalized games?
Let’s unpack a few of these questions. Well-intentioned though it is, the basic structure of the race serves to reinforce the negative and narrow-minded idea of life as a finite game that needs to be run individually, in pursuit of wealth — or, taken to its logical conclusion, by countries for power.
What type of success do we want to teach our children to pursue?
When we define success in black and white, and reduce every day to a race to be won or lost, we risk turning life from something to be enjoyed into something to be completed.
When you adopt this kind of mindset, when does your race “end”? A 3-bedroom apartment? A 6-bedroom house? A pied-à-terre in every major city? Chasing after material success simply isn’t the answer — our foolhardiness in doing so is already using up the planet’s resources at an unsustainable rate.
Of course, there’s a psychological component to this too, which ultimately comes down to empathy: if life is just a game, a race to win, it becomes easier to excuse away bad behavior as a means to an end. A society and a culture that breeds us to be winners and losers is one of the (many) reasons we end up with men like Harvey Weinstein.
It’s easy to see what kind of an impact this mindset can play on a national scale, too. Whoever gets to the finish line the fastest looks behind and assumes that because they’ve won, that they deserve to have won — and, likewise, that losers deserve to lose. The winners keep winning, keep believing in their right to win, holding the losers accountable for their own problems, and a crucial imbalance is created.
It creates a twisted, irrational logic amongst the privileged that undeniably impacts our policies. “We can’t give poor people better access to healthcare, because that means we’ll have less money, and if we have less money then we’ll seem/be poor, so let’s just keep things as they are.” Wealth is a story we tell ourselves. We blame minorities or immigrants for our failures, to avoid acknowledging the fact that we’ve been cheating from the very beginning — and we’re still losing.
All of this trains us to adopt a vicious it’s-me-or-them mentality; if you’re not the predator, you’re the prey.
In “ the game of life”one needs to run alone, and everyone is your enemy.
When you “play” life at the individual level, if someone “beats” you, it means you lose out on success: you won’t get the fancy cars, the multiple homes, the private jet, or the fame and celebrity you’re racing towards. Someone else will.
Life is a zero sum game. The pie is finite.
As my dear teacher and mentor, Debra Amindon, used to say, “The ultimate expression of competition is war.”
Dear readers: unless you’ve been hiding underneath a rock for the past few months, I imagine you can see how “the game” has been playing out when the people in charge believe that life is a race, a competition to be the best. We’re at the brink of nuclear war in no small part due to our headlong rush forward while playing “the game of life” — but it’s the wrong version.
The game is responsible for the social, environmental, and spiritual destruction happening all around us. It’s the reason human trafficking and slavery are at their highest point in history, why more people are dying from suicide than war, and why young people are increasingly depressed.
We have been programmed to believe that security — a basic human need — is dependent on going it alone; on making a lot of money; on competing and constantly comparing self-worth; on what we look like. We believe this to a fault, no matter the cost.
But what if we didn’t play the game? What would be the worst that could happen?
You could say we die — or rather, our ego does. Our “friends” on Facebook might see that we haven’t done much with our life, that we’re aging without the benefit of botox of plastic surgery, that we don’t go on fancy vacations. Essentially, that we’re not living a life worth sharing.
It’s not just the death of the ego. I’ve asked hundreds of people I’ve worked with what they fear most as a consequence of “giving up the race”, and the vision they unequivocally hold in their minds is the same: homelessness — ending up on the streets, alone, sick or dying without a friend in the world and nowhere to turn.
How do I get out of this old-fashioned “game of life”?
To get out, we need somewhere to go — so it’s time we build something new. It needs to be a game of co-creation, of mutual understanding that it isn’t a win/lose race. Luckily for all of us, there are new, non-exclusive infinite“games” already emerging.
Let’s call the first “the millennial game of life.” I work with several large corporations whose majority workforce are millennials. They’re failing to keep them engaged — guess why? That’s right: younger generations don’t want to play “the game” anymore. They want meaning beyond houses and boats and money, and they want it now. For my generation, the game was make money first, donate later; now people want to find ways to give and receive simultaneously.
The second is “the movement and network game of life.” More and more movements, networks, business leaders, business models, intrapreneurs, innovators, entrepreneurs, ruckus-makers believe that, as Simon Sinek says, “together is better.” We need to move away from a competition based economy to one that rewards co-creation. Some of the organizations that I think excel in this regard are U. Lab, altMBA, the League of Intrapreneurs, B-Corp, ImpactHub, and the BMW Responsible Leaders Network.
Then there’s “the shared transparent economy game of life.” This is all about approaching problems collaboratively, through crowdfunding and crowdsourcing, blockchain…it’s all about “ making abundance out of scarcity”(Robin Chase), giving more power to more people, in pursuit of one goal. Think Zipcar, Airbnb, Kickstarter, Uber, TaskRabbit, InstaCart, and all of the other startups that are taking advantage of networks of people to make efficient connections and harness excess capacity.
The last is what I call “the conscious design and new diversity in the workplace game of life” — it’s a mouthful, but it’s probably the most important. When we’ve talked about diversity in the workplace in the past, we usually mean more women or more people of color. That definition is expanding to include people with disabilities, anyone who identifies as LGBTQ, people with different creeds and nationalities.
Likewise, we’re broadening our perspective to consider people functionally outside of organizations all together, people who’ve been “left behind” and don’t have the right high school or college degree. These are, for example, some of the people left standing at the starting line in the race. The WEF has predicted that in 2020, the top 10 life skills for success will be exactly these sort of “born” skills, so — to this video’s point — we need to consciously bridge that gap ourselves, whenever and wherever we can.
Part of this needs to involve reconsidering how we view people from less privileged circumstances. Often those who grow up in these environments are incredibly resilient, and as my dear friend, Alexa Clay, Founder of the Misfit Economy and Co-founder of the League of Intrapreneurs, says — we have a lot to learn from people in the fringes. Rather than thinking of them as drains on resources or purely as beneficiaries, we need to invite them to the table to actively co-create. Corporations should invest in their training, not as part of their CSR models but as part of their innovation strategies.
The rules of the game are changing; the race of life is no longer linear….in fact what if there is no real race?
A young, curious person — of any race — with access to a laptop can hack elections without having to attend MIT. 45% of white collar jobs will be lost over the next few years. Lawyers, bankers, and scientists will find their jobs more and more automated, replaced by efficient machines. The emblem of while privilege, Wall Street, is at greater risk than other professions.
At the core of these new games is the understanding that truly meeting our basic need of survival requires that we all win — together.
So where do I begin? With yourself. Co-create your new, conscious, personal “game of life.”
At the core of all of the new, alternative “games” I’ve mentioned is the most important thing of all: your new, personal “game of life.” This one is the most important game you will ever design. I will expand on suggestions on how to do this in my next blog. And here are some initial questions for you to go deep inside and ask:
How much is enough? How much money and how many possessions do I really need to live the life that I want? Come up with a number. If you already have more than you need, invest it, donate it, or help others still trapped in the old “game of life.”
Who is the best version of myself? The kindest, most empathic and supportive version? The wise giver at work and at home? Look at your relationships. Which ones need nurturing , strengthening, healing?
What are the differences between need and want? Next time you are about to do compulsive shopping, ask yourself if you need that thing or want it. It’s okay to want; just notice if your want will end up in the trash, polluting the environment in a month’s time.
For those that are ready to make a profound shift, I have designed an online course called the One4One Personal Accelerator, around ways to innovate your life and make positive impact in the world. You can find more information in here.
The change we make in ourselves reflects the change we want to see in the world. Stop living your life in pursuit of the finish line or the prize, and start living it how you want to. It’s time we show this video to our children and teenagers and ask them — what game do you want to be playing? and what do you need to co-create that game?