Playing the Game

I was at a seminar last night in Dublin and the trainer presented us with what he described as three of the most important keys to success in business:

Critical Thinking
Culture
My Idea + My Experience = Disaster

Whilst much of the material was not new, he did get me thinking about critical thinking time and he suggested two questions which occurred to me could be very powerful to consider.

The first was based on the idea of shifting our thinking from “How do I win this game?” to “How am I going to play this second half?”

So, if I consider that life is a game, not of chance but of skill, then it seems to me that we are far more likely to enjoy the process if we do indeed adopt a position of “How am I going to play this second half?” rather than “How do I win?”.

As Art Linkletter asked in a CD programme I listened to on the way home; “How do you make God laugh? – tell him your plans!”

The second question which got me thinking was:

“What if I was given the opportunity to have one last thought – what would it be?”

It seems to me that if we were playing the game of life for the fun of it and just enjoying the process rather than the constant striving to have more, get more, earn more, buy more, we might enjoy and appreciate the people around us more. We might be more inclined to help others around us. We might be more thankful for the gifts that we have. We might be more generous in our opinions of others. We might be less interested in our image or our clothes and more interested in being ourselves. We might be willing to make more mistakes and learn from them.

We might be more willing to play full out!

So I concluded that if were given the opportunity to have one last thought I would probably like it to be:

“Wow! That was so much fun!”




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