We Play Life’s Games So We Can be Free of Them
“The Reason to win the game is so that you can be free of it. — Naval Ravikant”
It was in none other than the Tim Ferriss show where I got to listen to Naval again, and where I discovered this quote. I heard that he stopped joining other people’s podcasts but made an exception with Tim. So I’m glad that he did that, otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to hear about this sick concept.
Life is a series of games.
When we think about what a game is, we often think about an activity that’s trivial or not serious. It can give you learnings along the way or improve your skill in a certain field but ultimately, the result does not really matter too much in the grand scheme of things.
This definition applies to games of all kinds whether it be a casual 5v5 of Call of Duty or playing in the NBA finals — it’s all the same.
Think about it. If LeBron James were to have lost this year against the Miami Heat, sure, he would never be able to live this one down; Stephen A. Smith and the rest of the anchors at ESPN will rave for years on how the loss was an utter disappointment. But the fact of the matter is, it won’t matter. LeBron will continue to collect millions of dollars each year, enjoy the company of his near-perfect family, and (knock on wood), won’t bite the dust or anything dark like that as a result of the loss.
Of course, we all know though that LeBron isn’t wasting his time playing basketball, neither are you if you go to your local soccer league every Sunday. We play these games for many many reasons, and a lot of these reasons make living a lot more worthwhile. But at the end of the day, they will never be good enough to deserve the #1 spot among things that matter most.
What we need to realize is that most of the things we spend a lot of our time on are in fact no more than a bunch of games, even though it’s not obvious at first.
There’s the game of making money, the game of dating, the game of school, and finding work as a young adult. There’s the game of launching a startup and gaining funding, the game of investing — we play the games to satisfy certain wants and needs but as I said earlier, they don’t matter TOO MUCH in the grand scheme of things.
If we look at them this way, it could work wonders on our performance, in playing the games themselves as well as our overall mental approach to life.
Sure, it would really suck to lose your stable job, see your business go bankrupt, or break up your relationship of 3 months. I don’t want to downplay any of these situations at all. But imagine being told you had 1 day to live. You’d be surprised that suddenly, only very few things matter to you.
I believe that what Naval wanted us to realize is that we’d be better off not giving too much value to these games compared to the real things in life — your love for your family, your spouse, your personal beliefs and values. The fact that we can still breathe and wake up to a brand new day with new opportunities. These are the things we ought to value the most.
This ties very well to what Gary Vaynerchuk has said before — “99% of the things we do don’t matter”. He’s right. Our job is to remember that 1% and keep them safe.
Once you’ve got that mentality down, in a sense, you’re now playing with house money.
So next time, when you feel that the world is ending after you lose a huge deal at your company, or when you got your thousand-dollar phone stolen from you, just remember that it’s really not. There’s still so much more to live for.
The Reason to win the game is so that you can be free of it.
On the other hand, if you think about life without the games, you’d get something pretty bland and boring. We do not want that either.
This is why we should continue to play these games, but only for one main reason — to be free of them. Remember the law of diminishing returns. The more we extract utility out of something, the marginal increase for every new unit gained decreases until your experience completely stales. Such is the result if we play a game too long.
For example, in the game of accumulating wealth, when you’ve reached the point of peak satisfaction (it could be an annual income of $100,000 or $1,000,000), you probably should shift a good chunk of your mental bandwidth elsewhere. You need to free yourself from said gamebecause every extra increase in your net worth doesn’t necessarily add to your happiness anymore.
The core advice here is to set concrete goals for yourself. For every game you’re currently playing or intend to play, set a milestone that tells you have won the game once that milestone is reached.
And as soon as you win, you simply stop playing and move on.
