March 9 | By the Rules

Here is one way to view your day:

You have a certain way of being. Some of it is intentional—things you literally chose. Much of it is unintentional. If this sounds vague, it’s because it’s broad: from what time you wake up to when and how you brush your teeth to the colors of shirts you prefer to which pocket contains your car keys (and how you go about setting down your coffee and phone to fish them out). Other people may do them the same way, but you do them your way. 

Those are just the surface details: you have a way of operating in the world. Things you value, and things you think other people should not value. What is worth time and money, what is not, people and places and philosophies and movements that you like and dislike for both good reasons and completely subjective reasons.

If it was possible to sum all of those things up, you could, in one sense, call them rules. A way of playing the game called being human uniquely fit to your own time and circumstances.

But while you are playing by certain rules, everyone else you meet is playing by a different set. There may be crossover. There may be shared sections. But they have an equally complex and individual way of viewing and navigating the world.

The question is, when the two of you interact, whose rules will you play by?

We often spend our time trying to argue someone into seeing it our way, from our point of view—or said otherwise, from the lense of our rules. 

So what if today, you kept playing to win—didn’t fold your hand early or let off the steam. But what if you were willing to do so in someone else’s game?

What if you tried to play by their rules?… Read the rest