Play Your Own Game
Authentic, self-actualized thriving requires an acute understanding of what one's own success looks like. The one with a clear philosophy of self is the one best equipped to play their own game. Their joy is in the act of contribution within this game.
Awareness of our overarching and specific, time-bound aims arms us against the temptation that is comparison, reminding us not only of the race we're running, but of what this stretch of that race requires.
One's own game is such that the knowledge of winning can only be fully known by the self. In a podcast episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, CD Baby founder and writer Derek Sivers presented a compelling reframing for how we perceive the success of others:
"My third and real answer [to the question of who I see as successful], after thinking it through, is that we can’t know without knowing a person’s aims. What if Richard Branson set out to live a quiet life, but like a compulsive gambler, he just can’t stop creating companies? Then that changes everything, and we can’t call him successful anymore." (The Tim Ferriss Show episode transcript here.)
Anything addressing the nuanced topic of the “self” bears doing so with clarity. Now little more than an empowerment quip used to excuse any behavior, “not caring what other people think” has become the banner slogan for the contrarian. A philosophy of self is not synonymous with contrarianism, as contrarianism pursued for its own sake is vanity veiling a deeper void.
More useful is the urging to not care about what others think so much that it hinders our expression of capability. Any grain gone against, then, is for the purposes of showing that a better way is possible. Compelling individualism invites better from the whole, encouraging the collective toward what we might be capable of.
Playing one's own game invites others to play theirs, too.
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