How to win the game of life

If you are reading this article soon after it is published you may well be following the World Cup of football (which is soccer, for my American friends, not the adaptation of rugby that a Yale rugby player turned into what is now called American Football).  Personally I am not the slightest bit interested in football, but I accept I am in a distinct minority in that regard.

I believe the aim in football is to score as many goals as possible (although perhaps in the case of my team, England, it is to try to avoid as many penalty kicks as possible!)  Achieve lots of goals and you win the game.

It is the same in life.  Winning the game of life is all about achieving as many goals as you can.  Or, rather, as many "right" goals as you can.  Just as in football you can have a wrong goal (please refer to the "offside rule"), so you can in life too.  Although unlike the case in football there is a wide gradation of "right" and "wrong" goals.  You cannot win the game of football by scoring lots of "wrong" goals, and nor can you win the game of life this way either.

Achieving lots of the right goals should not be regarded as putting on lots of pressure and creating lots of stress - which is the way probably most people see it.

Perhaps one good way of looking at this is by comparing it with what you might do on holiday.  What, for you, is the purpose of a holiday, and what constitutes a really good holiday?  Think about this carefully for a few minutes and answer both of those questions as honestly as you can.  Do this before reading any further if possible, as it is best if you complete this exercise before seeing what I say next.

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Many people will have answered that the purpose of a holiday is to rest, to recover so you have lots of energy to carry on with your daily life on your return.  Certainly that would be my answer to the first question.

Many of those same people will then anwer that a really good holiday allows them to see lots of new things and take part in lots of exciting activities.  If you go on a package holiday you will find that the resort is usually designed in such a way as to achieve this.  Typically on the morning after your arrival you will meet with someone whose role is to convince you to go on lots of trips, some of which will probably involve waking up really early in the morning, perhaps earlier than you would normally get up in order to go to work!  Even if you don't book many, or any, of these "exciting" tours, you will probably find the resort will organize lots of sporting and other activities and encourage you to join in them rather than laze by the pool or on the beach.

Or perhaps your idea of a good holiday is the same as the American tourists in the 1969 film "If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium".  Get to see as many countries as possible, without spending enough time to "see" any of them at all!

Now for some people perhaps having a frantically active holiday really does give them rest and recovery.  If so, they are making the right decision by signing up for all those activities that appeal.  But for many others, including me, indulging in so many activities means I don't get the rest and recovery I need.  So I try to ensure I budget plenty of time for just lying back on the beach or beside the pool, and reading some nice (and not particularly sophisticated) novels.

My main goals on holiday are to relax and rest.  If I do plenty of relaxing and resting I have achieved those goals.  As I am married, my goals are also to ensure my wife has a really good time.  Her aims are very different from mine.  She really enjoys lots of activity, seeing new things, having new experiences.  So we DO book a number of the activities the resort tries to sell us.  If we get to see lots of new and interesting things, and have lots of new and interesting experiences, she is happy - and I have then achieved the other goals of the holiday.

This can apply to daily life too.  Perhaps you suffer a lot of stress in your life.  Maybe, if so, a goal could be identifying what causes stress and eliminating as much of this as possible.  It could be removing stress-creating clutter from your life.  It could be simply taking more time out to rest and "smell the roses".  These goals are just as valid as, and perhaps more so than, the goals of people you see zipping around achieving lots of concrete, tangible goals.

Or it may be that you feel you need to earn more money so that you can plan for a future which allows you to do what you want and have less stress.  If so, perhaps starting your own business, and then achieving targets you have set yourself for that business will be the right goals.  But never lose sight of the fact that it is not the money or the business itself that is the goal, but what it will allow you to achieve once you have it.  Be aware that sometimes you can find ways of achieving those "end goals" without having to get more money.  And also be aware that none of us knows how many more years, months, weeks, days, hours of life remain for us.  If you spend your remaining years, months, weeks, days and hours just trying to get the money you need in order to achieve your end goals, then you really haven't achieved any of your goals at all!  Keep under review at all times what your goals are, whether they are real goals, and whether there might be better ways of achieving them than the ways you are currently pursuing.

Please do not take this as a diatribe against acquiring more money.  If you have read many of my articles you will know I am very much in favour of taking actions (the right actions, of course) to acquire more money.  But I am also aware that too many of us, myself included, are in danger of confusing "means" and "ends".  Acquiring more money is always only a means to an end.  If you don't achieve that end, then you haven't really achieved anything at all.

Finally, for anyone reading this who views what I am saying as coming from a very selfish position, achieving goals is not simply about achieving pleasure, gaining things and experiences for yourself without any concern for the happiness or well-being of others.  A good, rounded life plan should have both "self-centred" and "other-centred" goals.  What exactly is meant by "other-centred" is very individual.  In fact, I would go so far as to say it is completely unique to you.  It may include making your family and friends happy in various ways.  In fact it should.  It may also go beyond just making friends and family happy, but making others, including complete strangers, happy as well.  Again, in fact it should.  You may achieve those "non-centred" goals by spending more of your time, more of your money, or perhaps both.

So, to win the game of life you need to score the right goals.  And to score those goals you need to find our where the goal posts are.  Get going now by checking you have the right goals and finding the right ways to achieve them!

Do It Yourself

No, this is not a blog about home improvements.  Just self improvements!

"If you want something done right, do it yourself!"

Has anyone ever said this to you?  Do you sometimes say it to yourself?  This is one of those half truths that can be so helpful at times, but so dangerous at other times.

It is probably often true that you will put more care and attention into doing properly something that will affect you, especially if you are the only or main person it affects.  The original phrase is a rather liberal translation of a line in a French play written in 1809 by Charles-Guillaume Étienne.  A closer translation of this line would be "One is never served so well as by oneself".

Where I feel this particularly applies is when you are planning what exactly you want to do with the rest of your life.  This is not something restricted to a young person deciding what he or she wants to do as a career, although it also applies there of course.  But notice I have said "with the rest of your life".  We all have a "rest" of our lives.  We don't know how long that "rest" is, but we all have it.  Maybe it is 50 years (and even though I am over 60 I could still have another 50 years remaining), maybe it is 1 year, maybe it is only 1 day.  For any of us, today could be the last day of our lives.  So plan it well!  But also there could be many years remaining - you could achieve a great deal in those remaining years, so plan that well too.  Make sure you HAVE a plan!  Plan your day, each and every day, to get the best you can out of it for you and your family.  Plan your coming year (perhaps broken down by quarter) to achieve one or more of your short term goals.  Approach it the other way around, too - do some work on finding out exactly what it is you want to achieve, and then fit this into an appropriate timescale, rather than only looking at a day, week, year etc and deciding what you can achieve within this.  At the risk of having one quote too many for a short article, remember (as Jim Rohn told us) that "If you don't design your own life plan, chances are you'll fall into someone else's plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much."

Don't fall into the trap, though, of believing that nobody wants you to be happier, be more successful, and that nobody can help you achieve what you want to achieve.  There are plenty of people who will not want to help, and may even wish to hinder you, and some of those people may be hiding in the group of people you call your "friends".  This group of "negative" people will grow as you begin to become happier and more successful.  But there are also many people who genuinely want you to be happier and want you to be more successful.  Time spent finding out which group the people around you fall into is time well spent.  Keep your distance from the "negatives" and try to spend more time with the "positives".  Learn to take advice and help from those positive people.  Never let pride stand in the way of getting help.  Draw on that help properly and it will be like supercharging your journey to your goals.  Spend time searching out those who can and will help you in this way.  Including those who do it as a profession - for example good coaches.  Gratefully receive any free help that is available, but also be prepared to spend good money getting really good professional help.  Paradoxically, this particularly applies to your efforts to create the right plans for yourself, despite what I have said in the last paragraph.  Yes, you need to take the steps yourself to create the plans, and not expect anybody to do it for you, but certainly be ready to accept all the help you can get in doing so.  This will create tremendous leverage in your efforts to achieve whatever it is you really want to achieve.

Finally, don't fall into the other trap of thinking that if you are better at doing something then only you should do it.  This particularly applies in business, but it also applies in your personal life.  Learn to delegate.  Accept that you may have done the job better than the person you delegated it to, but also recognize that the benefits of the way you were able to use the time you saved by delegating it more than compensated for this.  Also, we generally get better and better at tasks the more we do them.  So even though you may now be better at doing it than the person to whom you delegate, eventually they may well become far better at it than you ever were.  This can be a hard lesson to learn, but it is a very important one.

For help in finding a good, licensed, professional therapist, try this page:

https://www.betterhelp.com/