The Game of Life
You don’t have to be one of those people that goes through your life feeling stuck, not sure what to do, and not knowing if you ever make the right choices. That’s way too much pressure to put on yourself. Life can be like a game that you get to enjoy on your own terms. Today you’re going to understand the secret to life and how to play it.
Firstly, you might be wondering who am I to tell you what a good life is and how to live your life… But, it's not about me. You have all of the answers within you and I’m just here to guide you and share a process that will help you find your perfect path.
Without further ado, let’s jump into it.
Watch video version:
Examine Your Life
We’re going to explore an exercise where you can go over experiences and memories from your past. Specifically, we’re looking for moments of inspiration, motivation, joy, and any positive experience that stands strong in your memory.
Doing this will help you identify the things that have been/are important to you. Once you’re clear on those things, you can begin to align your life up to do more of the things that make you happy and less of everything else.
Step 1
Firstly, open up a Google Sheets or Excel document. Name the document whatever you want. I call it ‘moments of inspiration’, but it doesn’t matter. Next, you’re going to copy the three columns that I have here.
- Specific memory
- Thoughts and feelings
- The best-perceived thing about this memory
Step 2
Begin listing out as many specific memories as possible. Naturally, they’ll begin to dry up after you begin to exhaust the list. Feel free to take a break and come back to it later, or dig deep into the memory bank.
Here, I share an example from when I was eleven and won a football trophy. You can see that the memory is listed as the specific memories, thoughts, and feelings that were associated with it. This information is important and very useful, as you’ll soon see.
To help you out, I made up a list of other possible examples. These may stimulate some ideas and memories for you to get your list started.
You can see a huge list on the tab here where I’ve gone over relatively real memories that someone might have - A birthday party with friends, attending a theme park with your brother, riding a bike for the first time, a holiday with a girlfriend, graduating school, losing 50 pounds of body fat, and so on…
Step 3
Once you’ve completed as many as you can think of, spend some time filling out all of the details. When completed, you can select and copy all of the text that you’ve written in the cells.
Next, head to this website and paste in the text.
This is insanely powerful. It’s going to populate a visual representation of the most commonly used words from your document. These words will most likely include things like emotions, feelings, states, and memories that you have. Why is this important? Because you’re expressing what things have been most memorable and enjoyable to you in your life.
Step 4
You can export the list of words and use it to gain deeper clarity. Some words are closely interlinked. For example, I have the word ‘present’ and I have the word ‘presence’ on there. They mean the same thing. You may have words such as family, relationships, and connection that could potentially all mean the same thing to you.
Doing this will reveal the truth of what is most important to you.
Step 5
Take some time to reflect on this (maybe 5 minutes or so), get your pen, get a journal and write down any thoughts that come to you. There may be some lightbulbs or realizations waiting to happen. Once you’ve done this, it would be a great time to go outside for a walk, get into nature and give yourself some time to absorb and reflect.
The awareness and observations will begin to reveal things in your life that are important to you. You’ll even start noticing more of those things in your day-to-day life that you love to do or feel inspired to do.
Conclusion
The secret to life has hopefully become clearer throughout these steps. In short, it’s to do more of the things that you love and less of the things you don’t enjoy. This is your life and you’re the one who knows what’s best for you.
One thing I know for sure is that you are capable of achieving so many things in life when you get clear on what you want, shift your mindset, and surround yourself with great people.