Category Archives: The Game Of Life

Smell the Sweetness

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Volume 4, Issue 22

Annie was moving fast. She always moved fast. She did everything fast. She even laughed fast, and then quickly moved on to the next thing.

She whisked through the garden doing the necessary watering without noticing the sweet fragrance of new-mown grass and wildflowers. The softly scented breeze on her bare arms itself felt delicious and somehow combined into one thing with the scent. Faintly and unheard, a small inner voice related the moment to the song about a kiss you could build a dream on. The perfumed wind and immobile meditation could have been a winged heart dream but all this was literally beneath attention as Annie had things to do and if asked she would have said all her concentration was on getting the job done. There was some truth in that. She was intent on getting the tasks behind her, but not because there was good stuff ahead that she was eager to get to. And there was nothing like a state of concentration going on in her head.

Like so many of us, Annie’s mind was a mess. It was not focused. Her current movements were not based on a carefully-thought-out plan with transparent priorities. She was just keeping up with the have-to-do’s — the pervasive tone of life in the Accelerolithic Era. Distracted state precludes Flow state. There’s too much noisy messy input, with seemingly not enough time to process it.

Annie could be an artist. She is good with her hands and could envision a piece and create it. Doing that got her into the Flow state where she did her best work — her gift to the world.

Making money at her art seemed like an idle fantasy judging from the toughness of the world, her surroundings and friends and the lives they all led. There was great beauty in her surroundings but the mood created by the difficulty of making enough money to live pleasurably without constant fear of money problems made that beauty literally invisible.

If Annie were hypnotized and asked patiently for a long time about why she is always moving so fast, eventually she would come to realize something she does not know: it is because she is always unconsciously striving to make money. She feels without knowing it that she will make more money by doing everything as fast as she can. She does odd jobs for friends and acquaintances, like working in a dress shop, washing cars, walking dogs, and landscaping, so there is some logic in that unconscious thought. However, in reality the fast motion causes a slowdown in finished product due to the need to patch up things not done properly, which also eventually causes her to not get as much work from her employers as she would if everything were always done without things being left in the wrong places or half-done.

One layer deeper she might realize that the quest to make money was not really because she wanted to buy specific things so much as to please her partner and also to have other people be proud of her or realize that she is more capable than the way they have treated her.

Annie went to the mountaintop one day and although as the sun passed its zenith and the breeze began to be cold, she remained bare-armed and slipped into that waking dream where she was uplifted out of her Acceleritis and into the Flow state at what You Are The Universe calls “Soul-Level Two” — the bliss state, ananda. She was not moving fast. She was not under the dominance of any have-to-do compulsions. Her mind and body and every aspect of her were all lined up in the Game. There was no rush. She could see everything around her, hear everything, smell it all, enjoying the moment itself with no force causing her to lose freedom, break the fast on motion, in any direction.

This is the place to live at every moment. It is its own reward. Because we then give our finest performances at any beloved Game, we get paid the most money for it. We cannot get there by giving up as unrealistic the inner drive to do a specific thing we love to do, and settling into a mortgaged life of second-choice work that is steady and dependable. Like the hero or heroine in a movie, in real life we must pursue our highest calling, have the daring to do that extraordinarily risky seeming thing.

Then we will have the ability to concentrate, the prerequisite for Flow state. We will smell the sweetness of Life. And because the Universe is us, if we actually do what we are uniquely designed to do so that we provide true value to others, as if by magic the dreams will come true in the end.

“Do what you like to do. You’re going to be doing it for a long time.”

—George Burns, while puffing cigar

Best to all,

Bill

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: "In Terms of ROI." It is in the free section of the website at  Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.

You Are The Universe: Imagine That is now available. Read an excerpt and watch my videos where I talk about the book.

Optimizing Startups in the Game of Life

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Volume 3, Issue 41

Before launching into this week’s post, I want to share details of the memorial for our esteemed and fabled colleague, Erwin Ephron — a legend in his own time.

 Erwin Ephron Tribute

A memorial celebrating the life of Erwin Ephron will be held 5:30 pm on Dec. 5 at Simulmedia’s offices at 670 Broadway, New York. Capacity is limited and registrations will be accepted on a first-come, first-serve basis. If you’d like to attend, please contact ephronmemorial@mediapost.com. Please put “Remembering Erwin Ephron” in the subject line and provide your name, company/affiliation, email and phone number. 

You start by playing life as a game with the working hypothesis that the Universe is playing it with you, aware of you, because you are really the same Being as the Universe.

You live life this way not because you can prove with certainty that this is the truth about reality, but because even as a mere useful fiction it seems pragmatically superior to every other way of life.

You roll with the punches, seeing how they convey useful future-oriented information you need, which more than justifies the temporary discomfort.

You simply have more fun, seeing everything through this lens, feeling the love, seeing problems as opportunities.

You don’t drop anything because of this lens. It doesn’t lull you into a state where you can be tricked. Believe me, I have been in that other state of Candide-like naiveté suited to some other world, and it is dangerous when used here on planet Earth. You can’t assume everything will go your way instantly. That’s the fun part. Otherwise it would all be too easy, no drama element. Like a movie with no central conflict or predicament.

So playing the game of life recently I had a couple of nights in a row of dreams that left me feeling out of control. Probably a sense of not having allocated bandwidth to cover every detail, or maybe not even having the capacity to do so. Writing books, videos, blogs, consulting for interesting companies, and driving two startups is a lot on the plate.

I can’t help it about startups. I love startups. In the game of life startups are not only the most fun, they allow the growing tip of dreams of what might be possible to edge their way into reality.

Startups are the heart of the American Dream.

Technology startups are where the action has been for decades.

You can do a startup from wherever you are, although you might have to stand aside and allow your employer company to reap the benefits. This is still fun and great experience.

What service or product do people you know need that could be fulfilled by a startup?

Is there something that could be invented and patented to meet that need?

Look around and see which people or companies could be partnered together to effect some great new advantage. If they almost fit but there’s a part missing, that part is the startup.

Look around and see which people impress you the most that are not yet celebs. Who knows the most about the subjects you’ve been thinking about when you think about a particular startup opportunity.

Make sure all of your present business relationships benefit, by optimizing the startup that way. Some of your business partners could actually be doing business with the startup from day one, and might seek strategic interest in it.

Find people who are blown away by the opportunity and are the best people to run it and then incentivize them to do so. Make sure they can feel the stock in their hands. Lead at first so they see the direction and then ask them to make decisions without you (establishing protocols for exceptions where the top people cannot agree).

Continue to knock one out of the park weekly for each of your consulting clients or your employer while doing your startup. Make that your number one business priority each week and rely upon the team you have put in place to run the startup. Make sure their benefits are tangible even if only on paper at first. A startup without sufficient drive will not succeed. Action items must not drag on.

Know how to not be knocked out in the first round. A long time ago, the right decision would have been to downsize my company to Jim Bell, myself, and one known employee in the basement of One State Street Plaza, running the Centigram machines and doing everything else. Looking out from my office on the 31st floor at the Statue of Liberty with pontoon planes landing in the water around it and feeling the 34 warm bodies in the adjoining offices, I took another path that closed that startup within a year. At least it gave Modem Media a clear field in which to make its high mark. Both companies were headed toward the same space.

War stories are part of the fun of the game of life — especially when we “get” the lesson.

Wishing you all fun in the game of all games, Life,

Bill 

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: In Terms of ROI. It is in the free section of the website at  Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.

The Game of Life

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Volume 3, Issue 40

In my Cosmopoly, a game form of my cosmology, we seek to mirror the intuited Self having all these lives, including the life through us as an individual. To the Self it is just a game and since we are the Self why don’t we just wake up to our true role or, if that is too unbelievable right now, play it that way anyway?

What do you have to lose?

Like everyone else, you’ve already made it tough enough on yourself. Couldn’t you use a little relief?

Why not even as purest fantasy, impossible to conceive. Nevertheless let’s just play along with Bill in this funny crazy game… at least unless it becomes too risky or not fun.

There really isn’t any risk because whenever you see any non-fun coming, you drop out of warp. Just try warp with me for a little while, provisionally. Trekkies welcome.

Imagine it is at least scientifically possible (even if you can’t picture it or it sounds too good to be true) that there is one Self, kind of like an optimized Mind — at essence a form of biocomputer. It’s all that ever existed, It will always exist, and It will always be the only thing that exists.

And what you think of as your identity, your sense of being yourself, is actually an active bit of the One Mind that is assigned to your coordinates. It’s living through you.

The Game is to see how long It takes to wake up in each specific role and “challenge-environment”. To wake up and realize who It really is. And what It can really do, even in this attenuated-self version.

Knowledge is power. The power to do good — if this Knowledge we’re talking about is our own inner knowledge of our own true identity. Even if you’re only accepting this as a trying-on of something you might decide to buy, like a new dress or suit. A working hypothesis to be confirmed or disconfirmed — which way shall the evidence point? That’s part of the game. The part we are at now, on Earth.

The process of waking up during our lives, whether or not we are guided by this working hypothesis, always involves a thousand adjustments we must make to ourselves consciously and effortfully as we go along.

Some individual adjustments take lifetimes.

Take a review of where you are at the moment:

  1. For whatever reasons, is there anything happening with your body that you could be paying more attention to and resolving?
  2. Same question about your mind.
  3. What about personal appearance?
  4. What about people in your life, now or in the past, with whom you still have bad feelings?
  5. Are you doing the work you really want to and should be doing?
  6. Are you having moments of fear? Anger? Envy? Melancholy? Greed? Cruelty? 

If you have cleared away most of these adjustments, you are likely to be in and out of the Flow state and usually sustaining the Observer state. And pretty happy most of the time, behaving as the mensch you are, encouraging, mentoring, taking care of other people, loving as many and as much as you can.

Perhaps you agree with some of what I say but consider it arrogant to equate oneself with the Deity, with whom one must always take a surrendering posture. In fact we agree on the surrendering posture, yet the only story I can calculate in optimizing agreement with all observables, is that there could only logically have ever been one point of light, the self-referential Observer Itself. This premise is explored in depth in my upcoming book You Are The Universe: Imagine That!

We surrender in many ways. The most meaningful is the surrendering of existential sloth, eagerly accepting the many challenges to make the adjustments needed to actually make all the connections back to the great Spiritual Mind of the Universe. Honoring the Whole of which we are an aspect is obviously the only sane response to the situation. Playing the (W)Holy Game each day, making the adjustments pointed out to us. Reading situations this way rather than cluttering them up with stuff that is only logical until you realize the process of the game underneath the little games you’re playing on the surface of each day. 

My best to you all, as you,

Bill

Follow my regular blog contribution at Jack Myers Media Network: In Terms of ROI. It is in the free section of the website at  Bill Harvey at MediaBizBloggers.com.