The Game of Life

Who remembers The Game of Life? A popular board game in the 1970s you got to choose a car, an identity and pick a career. You then spun the magical plastic wheel of life to move ‘through life’.  

You got to stop off at major life spaces to get married, buy a house, or grow a family. The winner was whoever at retirement had paid off all their debts, counted their cash and was the richest!

Look where that game got us! Riddled with social expectation and pressure. We speed through life trying to get to the end, putting off fun so we can save for a rainy day, and then most of us die without ever enjoying the rain, exhausted and bitter! We blame others for the state of our lives, we procrastinate and overthink. Treat ourselves badly and can be often found being ungrateful for the incredible opportunity to have a chance to play the game of life!

I was talking to a friend about ‘the game of life’ (real life!) on the weekend and I feel like so many of us are playing it all wrong!

Imagine a game. Your job is to only last one day. In that day, you had to play four cards.

The first one is Responsibility. 

The rules force you to start here as it's the card people naturally like to avoid the longest! Responsibility - pure ownership. Acknowledging that it is my life, loaded with choices, based on my energy, and nobody else is coming to move my piece for me. The moment you pick that card up, everything shifts. You stop waiting for the game to be fair and start playing the board you actually have.

The second card is Action.

Action turns intention into something real. You can hold responsibility in your hand forever and never play it. Action is the move that costs you something. It’s a decision, a conversation, a step you've been pondering for months. Small moves count. A board game isn't won in one giant leap; it's won turn by turn, square by square.

The third card is Kindness. 

Kindness has to always move in two directions. To the people around you, the stranger, the colleague, the person who's having a worse day than you are. But also to yourself, which is the hardest one. Treating ourselves with kindness makes responsibility and action much easier. It's a game-changer.

Then the final card is Gratitude. 

This card changes how the whole board looks. Not as a performance, not a list you tick off before bed because someone told you to. Real gratitude, offered in the middle of a hard square, is what keeps you playing instead of tipping the board over and walking away. It doesn't deny how difficult the game is. It just refuses to let the difficulty be the only thing you see. The amount of wonderful things that happen to us in a day depends on our ability to notice them! 

Welcome to the first day of the rest of your life.  

You have four moves.

Take responsibility. Take action. Offer kindness. Offer gratitude. 

That's it. That's the whole game.