Life is like a board game?

[IanH]

Another little insight I had recently.

I play a board game with coworkers fairly regularly. The object of the game is to get your car around a track and across the finishing line before anyone else. You move you're car each turn via a roll of the dice and there are many many rules that you must follow in order to move you're car further along the track successfully.

Because of these rules and also the presence of other players, there are many factors that can influence what you decide to do at each turn.

You can plan ahead and try and figure out exactly  what you are going to do at each turn, but that's pretty useless because you don't know what you are going to roll and you can't be sure of what the other player's are going to do.

You can also look back at what you did and regret the mistakes you made and think where you might have been if you had not made those mistakes. But that is also pointless because it won't change where you are now. Better to examine those mistakes and make sure you don't do them again.

The best course of action, I reasoned, was to be aware of the immediate moves coming up, but be focused on exactly the turn I was making. Figure out all the options and make a good choice based on logic, my experience and also my gut feeling of what choice to make.

When I was fairly new to this game, I found that I used to play safe at nearly every move as I feared the consequences of taking a risk and losing. Needless to say. I didn't do too well although I did win when the dice rolled lucky.

The best strategy I found was to take calculated risks and also calculated 'safe moves'. Since then I've done much better at the game and even when i've lost, I've still enjoyed it, knowing I did the best that I could.

How did I become ok at taking the risks? By be being OK with the fact that it might all go horribly wrong and if it does, i'm not going to beat myself up about it, because it was a calculated risk. Also by realising that if this risk does not pay off, there may be another one later that WILL.

I think these things demonstrate very well how we can live our lives. Why look back at mistakes we make and regret them? Why try to plan so far ahead when really have no idea what's going to happen? Better to live in the moment and make the best choices you can based in logic, experience and your gut feeling.

Even if the risk you need to take does not work out, you've gained more experience and you're safe in the knowledge that there will almost certainly be another risk coming up in the future that WILL pay off.