Three Ways To Play The Game Of Life Like A Champion

How do you play the game of life like a champion?

You do it by knowing what you love to do and going at it full out.

It may take you twenty years to become an overnight success, but if it’s doing something you love, then it’s worth it. It’s time well-spent, because its worth investing time and effort in bringing out your unique gifts to life.

We all want instant success, and, like Woody Allen, we may believe that success can happen just by showing up--but you have to show up again and again and again. You have to start showing up whether you’re in the mood or not. You have to start showing up whether you think you’ll win or lose. You have to start showing up often enough for something to shift, placing you in a new evolutionary paradigm.

This is the way it works: when you’re not sure about how to play the game of life, keep learning, practicing, and trying one thing after another. Sooner or later, you’ll pick up the themes that make a difference, distinguishing between the patterns that don’t work from those that do. While 80 percent of everything you do may appear to be totally wrong, completely missing the mark, the 20 percent that you get right will more than make up for it. Great victory is often a matter of inches, seconds, degrees.

Success in life is working hard, playing well, and success in learning how to play the game of life like a champion is to make work play.

The way to be at the top of your game, then, is to play it over and over and over again until you get it right. Unfortunately, this simple lesson on how to play the game of life is lost on most people. They tend to agree with W.C. Fields when he said, “If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.”

While playing the game that means the most to you long enough will eventually get you ahead--that, surprisingly, is not the purpose of the game. The real reward is not in the end result but who you become while striving for excellence.

Moreover, when you add an element of contribution, a desire to serve others with what you love to do, you add a new dimension to it, a spiritual richness to the experience, and this transforms both you and the receiver.

Here is a short story narrated by the Peace Pilgrim that illustrates how this works.

“I knew a man who was a good architect. It was obviously his right work, but he was doing it with the wrong motive. His motive was to make a lot of money and to keep ahead of the Joneses. He worked himself into an illness, and it was shortly after that I met him. I got him to do little things for service. I talked to him about the joy of service and I knew that after he had experienced this he could never go back into really self-centered living. We corresponded a bit after that. A few years later I hardly recognized him when I stopped to see him. He was such a changed man! But he was still an architect. He was drawing a plan and he talked to me about it: ‘You see, I’m designing it this way to fit into their budget, and then I’ll set it on their plot of ground to make it look nice…’ His motive was to be of service to the people he drew plans for. He was a radiant and transformed person. His wife told me that his business had increased because people were now coming to him from miles around for home designs.”

So how do you play the game of life like a champion?

Here is a quick checklist:

1. You seize the courage to bring your unique gifts to life despite possible social disapproval or personal ambivalence about your ability to do great things.

2. You stay in the game, showing up for it regardless of how your feelings fluctuate and your abilities ebb and flow.

3. You make your game a call to service, bringing a spiritual dimension to what would otherwise be a mundane experience.

When you approach your life as an expression of your love, you create a positive exchange between you and the world, and it is this miracle that makes you a champion. Miracles are examples of right thinking, aligning your perceptions with the truth of the universe.

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