Mountains of Arizona
Sunny and Smoky 75 Degrees
7:50 a.m.
Everybody wants to be a winner.
We listen to winners, we watch winners, we try to learn what we think winners know.
“Winning” is a religion.
On the days things look like they’re working, we feel like we’re winning. On the days the journey is all uphill, then all of a sudden it feels like losing.
Stories, labels and ideas that start as nothing that we make real. We create them and then we allow them to run our lives.
Who’s winning, who’s losing, what game are we even playing?
In my early years, never once did I ask what game those “winners” were playing. I just accepted the premise of the game and did my best to compete.
But if you hook into playing the game as others have defined it, then you are playing that game. Isn’t it funny that that’s the biggest reason most people lose?
If you choose to play your own game, however, you’ve got a chance.
You choose the rules. You choose what winning and losing mean. Is winning even the point? When’s that supposed to happen? Will you even recognize it when it shows up?
On most days, we all carry some mixture of feeling lost, clueless, inadequate, scared and other warm and fuzzy emotions. It just seems to be part of the human condition.
Dig below the surface and you see that we’re basically all the same no matter WHAT our life circumstances look like.
As best as I can tell, it seems no one totally knows what they’re doing. Sometimes it works out. And then when those people tell their stories, they look like geniuses.
When other people hear those stories, they think those stories are somehow directly applicable to their situation. And so they go running off in a new direction, fueled by that “winning” feeling they just heard about.
Round and round we go chasing shiny things others set before us.
But what game do you even want to play?
That’s a question worth asking yourself.
Your answer generally tells you the 99% of everything “out there” you can ignore.