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Hey,
Spring is almost upon us. Are you eating well? Are you taking care of yourself? Don't push yourself too hard. Remember that you are already enough.
I recently realised that life is a bit like a video game, with distinct stages. The first stage in a video game usually happens in a grassy area. It's easy to get by in this stage, just existing is enough, you learn to avoid danger and find nourishment. Similarly, the first stage of life, age 0 - 10 is hard to mess up. Being a good little eater and peeing in the right place is often enough to get you praise from your parents.
The next stage of the game is usually an underwater stage and things start to get hairier, there are more enemies, more objectives to fulfil. In life, age 11-20 is all about making friends, seeking approval from your tribe and figuring out who you are.
Stage 3 is a fire stage, or a trial by fire if you will. Age 21-30, you choose your direction, what you will do potentially for the rest of your life. You begin to make your mark on the world and figure out what you are good at and how to make compromises. And life continues, with every 10 years or so being a distinct stage where the objective of the game completely changes.
The hardest thing about the game of life is not the fact that it doesn't come with a tutorial (a video course on Udemy would be nice). Instead, the difficulty comes from not realising that you have transitioned to the next stage and still trying to play as if you were in the previous. For the jock who excelled in high school suddenly finds that he can no longer use his athleticism to compensate for his lack of proficiency in maths. You get really good at holding your breath underwater, then suddenly you find yourself in a dragon's lair. The skills you learnt for the last stage are no longer useful and you may have to let them go to thrive.
A friend of mine is good at getting women to like him. He prizes this skill so much that even though he wants to get married and have children he can't bear to let this skill go to waste and yo-yos from one relationship to the next. Another friend of mine was a complete nerd in high school. He had few friends because he obsessed over his computers and understood them much better than he understood humans. He completely failed the age 10-20 stage, but now he's got his pick of jobs, chased by headhunters from Apple to Google.
Every stage has a different win condition, we have to constantly adapt to the different win conditions. Just as you get good at one stage, you might have to completely rethink and throw away everything you've learnt to adapt and excel at the next stage.
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