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If you’ve ever played Tetris, you know that the game has a clear goal: to prevent the blocks from stacking up to the top of the screen for as long as possible.
You accomplish the goal and win, or you lose and start all over again.
Other games, like The Sims, don’t have a clear goal. Its sole purpose is to continue the play. You can build houses, find a job for your Sim, and even drown him at the pool…but the game per se never ends — only when you turn off the computer.
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As James Carse explained in his book, life also has finite games, which have a clear goal and end at some point, and infinite ones, which don’t have winners or losers and are ongoing.
And it’s important to differentiate them so you can “play” them correctly.
For example, your health is an infinite game. You have to constantly take care of it. There is no point in your life that you can be like, “Oh, I’ve reached peak health; now I can relax and not do anything else about it for the rest of my life”.
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Inside your health, however, there are many finite games. Running a marathon would be an example. It ends as soon as you cross the finish line and you can either accomplish it or not.
But what happens when you treat infinite games life finite?
Let’s focus, for example, on learning. Imagine Beth, a student who thought, “When I finish uni, I’ll never have to study and learn new things again. This phase will be over, and I’ll focus only on working”.
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But as soon as Beth got a job, she had to learn how to use specific software, and later, she had to attend seminars and watch online courses to perfect her skills.
Beth’s approach to learning was wrong. She treated it as a finite game when learning is an infinite one. Whatever you do for a living, you’ll always have to keep learning.
Finishing your bachelor’s or master’s degree is just a finite game inside the infinite game that is learning.
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Life is a game, and it’s much more fun if you play it as your own game, so stay light and loose and relaxed.
BILL MURRAY
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CURATOR'S NOTE
How To Play The Game Of Life
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