Life is a game of games.
Let me tell you about one called Polytopia.
My boys are really into it at the moment, and convinced me to play with them. It’s actually pretty fun.
To understand the concepts I’m going to lay out, you’ll need to understand some basics about the game.
Polytopia is a turn based game. You are an empire with cities and warriors. In each turn, your cities produce resources which you then spend to research technology, build up your cities (so they can make more resources), create more warriors, and fight your enemies.
At the beginning of the game, you start with one technology researched. But each tribe starts with a different tech. Your tribe might know “Organization”, which lets it harvest fruit. Another tribe might know “Fishing” and another “Hunting”. As you use these technologies to actually gather food, your city’s population increases. After enough population increase, it will start producing more resources.
The technology tree branches out over time. After “Organization” you could research “Farming”. After “Hunting” there is “Forestry”. After “Fishing”, “Sailing”.
As you go you need to balance the use of your resources to build more resources, but also to explore the landscape, create new cities, research new technologies, defend yourself from the other players, and attack them.
It’s actually pretty fun.
We all like games, because life is just a game of games.
You play lots of games with your friends as a kid, and then move on to bigger games: schooling, career, politics, relationships.
If you didn’t see the similarities between Polytopia and real life, let me lay them out in excruciating detail. You start life with some natural talents and abilities. You develop those and learn others, and you can use them to acquire resources (money, attention, freedom, more skills, etc.). But you have to balance all that with basic survival – not fending off attacks so much as getting enough food to eat, having a place to live, and so on.
If you look around you, you’ll likely see some people who have nailed one of the basic skills in life: physical health, or a marketable job skill, or they’re very charismatic.
Guess what, you have one too. You may not know what it is. But it’s there.
If it weren’t, you wouldn’t have the freedom to sit back and read these emails.
Now, you need to leverage that skill, ability, or knowledge to build others.
If this sounds an awful lot like habit stacking, it’s because the same principles are at work.
Leverage your existing skills, build new ones, and balance that effort with your survival needs.
Good luck!