Play Your Own Game

Adam Burrows & Chris Erickson of Range Ventures kindly invited me to help kick off their new podcast series by sharing My Biggest Lesson.

While I found it more than a bit intimidating to pick a BIGGEST LESSON, especially given that I have fallen down enough times on my 45 trips around the sun to have learned many, many lessons, I decided to focus on what I referred to as Play Your Own Game, because I find myself f'ing it up frequently with real consequences for my own joy.

Playing your own game is all about optimizing for what aligns with your values and brings you joy. Sounds easy enough, right? Did to me too until I was prompted to step back and realize that I kinda suck at it. Turns out that the data which was my calendar and the shit I was saying was most important to me in life were telling very different stories. Maybe my calendar was being more honest about my values than my mouth?... or maybe that was why I honestly wasn't even really sure what joy was as an adult?

I've spent a bunch of time trying to work on this over the past few years. I still kinda suck at it, but less so. I know a lot more about my values and what brings me joy. I ask myself frequently, "what do you want?"... and try to take the time to really, honestly figure the answer to that question out; the answer which is unique to me. I then try to chart a path from wherever I am to what I really want... anticipating, as best as I can, my own quirks, flaws, & hangups which will make that journey bumpy. For me, this takes intentional effort, but I have learned over and over again that "winning" someone else's game doesn't really feel like winning at all.

If this topic is of interest to you, take a listen to the podcast, though Adam and Chris are thankfully better at picking entrepreneurs to back than they are at picking podcast guests :) - and of course feel free to ping me if you want to dive in further.