When you were a kid, if your parents wanted you to act more seriously, they might have told you that “life isn’t a game.” Actually, life is a game. At least, it’s a lot easier and more fun when you treat it like a game.
When you play a game, whether it’s hockey, Go, or Monopoly, your goal is to win. Winning is possible because you know what results you’re working for — like scoring more goals than the other team, securing more spaces on the board, or bankrupting the other players. What constitutes winning is spelled out very clearly in the instructions of a game. Before you even start, you know the end you’re trying to reach.
Would you play a game without a clearly defined goal? How much fun would it be to roll the dice turn after turn without a clue whether your actions are helping or hidering the outcome? In many games, the player with the most points wins. But not all. Golfers want to keep their points as low as possible. If you didn’t know the first thing about golf and tried to play it, you might very likely try to get the highest score, because a lot of games are like that.
It’s obvious to most people that winning at games requires clearly defined goals, but not so obvious that the same requirements apply to life. Surely you know people around you who lack real goals; maybe you lack them yourself. Vague notions of meeting someone nice, moving to a better place, or making more money don’t count. Those aren’t real goals, they’re just nebulous wishes. And yet millions of people trudge through life day to day wanting something better, never clearly defining it or asking for it, and then wonder why they never get it. These are probably the same people who will tell you that life is serious business, not some silly game. But if they treated life like a game, they would have to have clearly defined goals, which is the first step toward achieving those goals. So far, the game players have got it right. 
So you’ve decided to play a game and you have the goal in mind. What do you do next? Usually you learn the rules. Wait a minute… that sounds serious. Rules?
All games have rules. Rules are constraints that give the game its character. If a game had a goal state but no rules, nothing regulating your behavior, it would be over as soon as it started. You would immediatley move your pawns to the back row or stick up the Bank and build a five star resort on Boardwalk. It is true that some games, like hockey, have few rules and are practically a free-for-all. In that case, the physical difficulty of moving the puck past the other players while skating on metal blades at high speed is obstacle enough. Rules don’t have to be written in rulebooks to be effective; any limitation on your abilities is a constraint that defines the nature of the game.
Life has its own constraints. There are laws of nature and laws of man to learn. One of the many limits life places on you is the limit of time. You just don’t have time to do everything. It would be nice to be able to goof off for hours every day and still become a millionaire, but it’s not very likely. So you have to adapt to this limitation and be very selective about how you spend your time. If you want to win, that is.
How many people playing the game of life ignore the rules? They think they deserve special treatment or whine when they discover that they can’t just move their pawns to the back row, but have to follow rules to get there.
When you live life as though it’s a game, you learn to play by the rules, which is actually serious business. The people who say that taking life seriously means treating it like it isn’t a game are looking sillier and sillier, aren’t they?
The next step game players take is to develop a strategy. Having a goal and knowing the rules isn’t enough to win. Plenty of players know the rules to hockey and have decent skills and stamina but lose again and again. You have to discover the patterns that underlie the game to understand it well enough to win. This requires actually playing the game. Finding the strategy that’s right for you requires trial and error; you can’t just read it out of a rulebook. Unfortunately, a lot of people waste their time looking for a magic rulebook to life that will tell them which actions to take in order to be successful. They are most likely to go to college, get a job, and try to climb some corporate ladder. You might get mediocre results that way, but to truly win, you can’t follow a common path. You have to develop your own unique strategy.
There’s a famous book on Monopoly strategy by Maxine Brady. She recommends two different approaches to winning the game: playing the Prince or playing the Pauper. The Prince focuses on developing the expensive properties, like the Yellows and the Dark Greens, while the Pauper buys the cheap stuff like the Light Blues. Neither path is better than the other. The Pauper properties are cheaper to buy and cheaper to build on, but the rents are low. The Princely properties offer higher rents that could bankrupt a player in one turn, but they cost much more to buy and develop. While the Prince is building his wealth so that he can dominate Park Place and Marvin Gardens, the Pauper can quickly throw a bunch of houses on Conneticut and Oriental and start bleeding the Price a little bit at a time. And yet, if the Prince succeeds, his reward may be greater.
Often, the choice of playing the Prince or the Pauper depends on which properties one is lucky enough to land on. Or a player can blend both methods. If the rules of a game are its science, the game’s strategy is its art.
Speaking of luck, every player knows that while Chance may help or hurt you, it doesn’t determine the game. A lot of people who play the game of life are obsessed with luck, or with what seems to be the unfair good luck of other people. Maybe those others were born into more prominent families, have more prestigious pieces of sheepskin hanging on their walls, or won the genetic lottery. Doesn’t change the fact that some of the most successful men in America also had the most bankruptcies and the most failures. Even Steve Jobs. Whether you like his style or not (and I am mixed), Jobs took a company that was near bankruptcy in 1997 and in little over a decade, turned it into the second most valuable corporation on earth by market capitalization. Along the way, Apple under Steve Jobs had numerous failed products which were quietly discontinued. Does anyone remember Apple’s hopes for Quicktime TV, which was proclaimed to be the future of video on the internet long before Youtube? Or Sherlock, the Power Mac G4 Cube, the hockey puck mouse (which even I didn’t like ), desktop video (which never became the second coming of desktop publishing), and more recently, Xserve? How about the tepid reception of Apple TV and MobileMe and Ping?
You don’t need perfect luck to win a game. If you can manage to succeed, on average, 51% of the time, you will win in the long run.
Life isn’t a slot machine. Winning depends on developing a good strategy, not on wishing, hoping, or praying for better luck. It takes time playing and failing and learning to interalize the patterns of a game, similar to the way a hockey player learns the patterns of a fast sport like hockey and will in time notice and respond to those patterns in an instant, before he can consciously identify them. Treat life like a game, and you’ll have to learn its patterns and strategize a way to the goal. This is yet another reason why you would be better off treating life like the game it really is.
Another characteristic of winning game players is that they fail often and don’t get beaten down by their failures. They know, explicitly or implicitly, that the house of success is made of bricks of failure. Nobody picks up a hockey stick and plays anywhere close to his potential the first time, or even the thousandth time.
The people who think life is too serious to be a game are usually the same ones who get upset by their problems and can’t tolerate failure. Often, the fear of failure keeps a person from trying anything new at all. For every new business, there are at least ten others that would have been started, could have been started… but someone was reluctant to bet his savings, afraid to lose his house, unwilling to upset his spouse. Losing is painful when emotions and pride are tied to an image of instant success, which is a popular fantasy. Rare is the man who will gleefully tell you of the blind alleys he went down, the years he wasted, the money he lost reaching his success. Ask why a good hockey player is so amazingly talented and he or others are more likely to say he was born with it, than admit that it took years of hard work. We have a bad tendency to think of ability as something inborn, something genetic, even if we ourselves are aware of the long struggle it took to develop our own ability. Nobody was born amazing, not even Mozart or Gretzky. Don’t believe such lies.
If the people who can’t handle the inevitable disappointments and failures of life treated life like a game, they would mimic the successful players and detach themselves from their emotions to the extent that they can fall down and get up again the thousands of times necessary to learn the patterns of the game. There is no other way.
So as it turns out, life really is a game. Your token is on GO. The Banker just handed you fifteen hundred dollars. You’re about to roll the dice. Will you spend more time complaining that other players bought the properties you wanted, rather than learning how to turn what you do have into a rent collecting empire? Will you play as often as it takes to figure out a way to win? Or will you damn the vagaries of Chance and Community Chest and the dice?
Just like a game, in life you need to define a goal, learn the rules, and tolerate failure as you develop a strategy to win.
If you think life isn’t a game, you’re not winning.