The Game of Life

The Game of Life

Think about life as a game. What is this game all about? At its core, the game is about discovering who you truly are. When you’re born, you come through the birth canal with your memory wiped. You can’t recall anything from before that moment. From the very beginning, you are shaped by the external environment you find yourself in. You inherit a level of thinking created by everything you’ve learned up to this point—or rather, everything that has been taught to you.

By the age of eight, 75% of your personality has already been formed. This happens without your consent, understanding, or input. You’re given programs shaped by your society, religion, and schooling. These programs define what’s important, how you should behave, and what you should value. These early lessons build the operating system that runs your day-to-day life.

The game is designed to condition you to fit in, to be average, to be normal. It’s not designed to make you excellent, extraordinary, or a force to be reckoned with. Only a rare few manage to rise above the conditioning, to understand the rules, and to play the game at a higher level. If you want to rise to the top and play the game well, there is only one thing you must do: upgrade the program you were given. You need a program specifically tailored to the game you’re playing, whether it’s the game of sport, business, or relationships.

The ultimate game is the game of life. It’s about understanding who you are and comparing what you’ve learned with the results you’ve achieved. The only thing stopping you from advancing to the next level is your ability to cope with the external circumstances you’re facing right now. Coping means maintaining a calm, centered, and positive state most of the time, with short, manageable bouts of negative emotions that you move through quickly.

What stops you from leveling up? It’s your brain’s survival mechanism. Your brain is wired to protect you, but in doing so, it often reacts to situations as though they are life-threatening when they’re not. If the game requires good decision-making, communication, and relationships, you must minimize the moments when your brain shifts into a stress state (sympathetic nervous system activation). Good decisions come from a calm, regulated state (parasympathetic physiology), not from fear or stress.

Negative emotions aren’t inherently bad. They’re feedback from your brain, predictions based on past experiences. When you feel negative emotions in non-threatening situations, it’s a sign that your brain is operating on outdated programming. The key to leveling up is awareness. You need to notice these emotions, understand that they’re predictions, and decide whether they serve you in the present moment.

Here’s the principle: Any negative emotion outside of a life-threatening situation is a waste of energy. Once you become aware of this, you can start to control the predictions your brain makes and rewrite your responses. The past is done. You can’t change what’s happened, but you can change how you move forward.

Living life the standard way—the average way—means growth is slow and reactive. This is why most people lead lives of frustration, regret, and missed opportunities. Consider the lessons from Bronnie Ware’s book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. The biggest regrets come from not living authentically, not pursuing dreams, and not creating a life of purpose. If you want to avoid these regrets, you must play the game differently.

To win at the game of life, you need to increase your learning velocity. This means creating a better system of education and training, one that accelerates your growth and equips you with the tools to thrive. By focusing on rapid experiential learning, you can maximize the best years of your life instead of wasting them with underdeveloped mental and emotional skills.

When you learn to regulate your nervous system, you take control of your life. You—not your brain—become the master. The choice is yours: Will you upgrade your system and play the game at a high level, or will you remain trapped within the limitations of the existing system, where only 1-3% of people achieve greatness while the rest settle for average? The game is yours to play. Make it count.

?