What Game Are You Playing?

It’s about alignment

I’ve said many times before that I’m a fan of personal development. I’ve done the seminars, read the books, and even trained as a coach.

But I’m as human as the next person. I get lost, frustrated, and scared by all sorts of things.

And with personal development, I sometimes find myself getting overwhelmed. But I do try to ground myself every so often with a question:

“What game am I playing?”

I switch between the above question and:

“What am I optimizing for?”

What’s this all about?

Essentially, we’re all trying to improve something in life. That’s what personal development is all about, isn’t it?

But do we always know the point of all of our efforts? Why are we doing what we’re doing?

Take money. Ask yourself: All that money I’m saving, what’s it for?

Sure, you don’t want to starve and you want to retire with a roof over your head. But deep down, do your actions match your deepest intentions? Do you really know what you’re after?

For example, I can be talking the talk about wanting financial freedom and to live in a nice, big fat house. But my “walking the walk” manifests itself in extreme couponing.

Is that clipping, or cutting out my Starbucks latte, going to get me to where I say I want to be? Certainly not in a hurry.

In many ways, it’s just another version of busy work — signaling that I’m making an effort but not genuinely moving forward.

We’ve got to stop fooling ourselves

That could also translate to writing on Medium.

You say you want to build a good passive income, but essentially your strategy is all about doing $5 work.

I touched on this in a previous piece:

You may be working hard and being efficient, but are you being effective? Are you sufficiently moving the needle with all that busyness?

So take a step back and ask yourself: “What game am I playing?”

I’m a finance guy with a career and life coaching background. And a past. My About Me page will show you that.

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