Future Guardian,
Let me tell you a story.
The teacher was talking. My mind wandered, eyes glancing around the class.
I was two rows in on the right side. On the opposite side were windows.
We had probably 30 kids in the class.
It was 9th grade.
I didn't know anyone.
We had just moved here so it was all new.
"Ok, we're gonna spend some time getting to know each other!"
Everyone groaned.
I was apprehensive. It was the late 90s and being a nerd was very much NOT mainstream. I liked video games. I like imagination and coming up with things. I played fantasy card games and read fantasy books.
I carried around a beat up copy of The Eye of the World.
It was kinda like my security blanket for awhile.
Our assignment on this day was to share something special about ourselves that made us unique.
I had brought in a cd of a bit of new and unknown software.
It was kind of a 3D modeling world building 'learning-how-to-program' program, which was pretty unusual and interesting in the mid to late 90s (if you were a nerd, like me).
If you're curious, it was called Alice1.
It was my turn to stand up and share.
"I uh ... I like making worlds. Like different worlds."
I started trying to talk about Alice.
Someone in the back started giggling and whispering.
I shrank.
In My World
I was the hero. I was the wizard. I was the mystical sorcerer. I wielded a violin like it contained magical fury which I unleashed in the orchestra.
I sat in the corner quietly, avoiding further scrutiny.
I joined the nerds at lunch playing Magic the Gathering in the math teacher's room. It was our sanctuary, away from the scrutiny and the hate.
I tried writing once.
I followed all the directions.
I wrote in the lines.
I wrote the proper amount with the proper references and the proper citations.
I was told it was good.
I hated it.
Because I was a nerd I used a silly little program to randomly generate sentences and paragraphs based on an input I gave it. (Thank you Dilbert’s Desktop Games)2
I used that to write a 10 page paper.
One whole page was just the letter 'a' like a thousand times.
I got 7/10
I hated writing. What was the point?
There was one teacher who encouraged me to throw the rules to the wind and write outside the lines.
I tried that. I enjoyed it. That was great.
Then I graduated and left that class.
And I had to fit the lines again.
I stretched the meaning of lines. I found a place that accepted boundary pushing as long as I conformed to their (looser than normal) expectations.
I wrote more than ever.
But I still hated it ... except in the hard to reach moments of flow when I didn't.
I spent the first 30 years of my life growing and shrinking between lines of expectation.
Meanwhile in the world of my imagination I stoked a burning fire. I lived that fire through music. I lived it through games. I lived it through painting, sculpture, drawing and photography.
But it continued to burn and rage. Not like a well fed furnace. Like a pressure cooker.
A pot waiting to explode.
And explode I did. A few times.
Who the hell are YOU?
I feel like this is a question I learn more and more every day.
But what I've come to also recognize is that embracing who you are, so you can play your own game, is about far more than just enjoying life and doing your best at things.
Playing your game is about far more than getting the best results.
There's a power in humanity which extends far beyond the physical world we are consciously aware of.
Consider ancient Celtic Druids, and Mayans ...
The ancient druids show up in myth and legend. There are still people to this day who follow those paths, though many of the old teachings have long been lost as they were only ever passed down through storytelling and apprenticeship (one practiced with a druid to become one).
Old myths and legends tell stories which give glimpses into their perceived power. The Tain tells of healing powers and wild beast shapechanging.
The old stories of King Arthur are steeped in Celtic legend -- Merlin is sometimes referred to as a druid.
Even as you peel away the myth and legend, you see practices which centered around gods of the natural world, the changing seasons, plants and animals, and ritual.
Though you may have an image of magic, nature, ritual and mysticism, the writings of Druids illuminate they were for the most part leaders of communities, guides to leaders, respected healers, and wise bearers of deep natural knowledge.
To go to a completely different part of the world, if you dig into the practice and culture of ancient Mayan civilization (not even that ancient, the old ways were still alive in the mid 1900s, even as western culture ate away at them over the previous 400 years).
In Guatemala, the Mayans lived their lives centered around a connection with nature. Their entire culture built around a love and respect for seeds. Their villages culturally focused around ancient leadership tied to the gods and nature.
Many of their core rituals were centered around agricultural growth and harvest, particularly when it came to corn.
It's easy to look at those times, those people, those stories with a modern eye and think that all the mysticism and ritual was absurd. But this is to completely miss the power of our humanity which expands far beyond our conscious measurable ability.
The ritual and connectedness to nature of those cultures sounds like mysticism, but perhaps what they really had was a deeper connection to their natural present self which allowed a level of awareness you can't consciously grasp, but which gives you the ability to understand from those rituals the right decisions to make for the community to survive and thrive.
I share tidbits of these cultures because if you take a moment to see, you can discover that deep within our history and core of being human is an innate ability to connect with our deeper self and the world around us in a way that extends far beyond our measurable consciousness.
(The ancient stories themselves are of course richly figurative as they pass on an understanding that is not directly in front of you - if you want to learn more Celtic Druid lore, I recommend searching for stories from The Mabinogion)
Back to YOU.
Embracing who you are is about giving into a power bigger than you can see.
I'm not talking about something outside of yourself.
It's about recognizing the things in yourself you know deep down to be true and letting them BE and live and thrive and grow.
It's not about being your best self.
It's about deeply knowing the garden of you, and becoming someone who thrives in the process of becoming better and nurturing that garden.
I look back on that kid in 9th grade, 23 years ago, who bravely tried to open up about his weird obsession with creating different worlds, only to be shut down.
I don't cringe (anymore).
I don't regret (anymore).
I don't even want to go back in time to change things …
I can recognize now that the path I walked to find myself here and now is precisely the one I needed to.
Some of me wishes that 9th grade me could have ignored the kids in the room who didn't get it. Could have said "fuck them, I'm gonna do me, and this is what I love doing."
But I wanted to belong.
I so desperately didn't want to be outcast.
I set aside what I started to believe was foolishness.
What I started to believe I couldn't do.
I shut my own power behind a door that has since taken me 23 years to find and walk through again.
Except now I have the entirety of my life experience over the past 23 years, all the failures, all the missteps, all the violating my own principles ... as well as all the good that came from everything in that time.
And I know things.
I believe things.
I can wield this power with far greater aptitude than 9th grade me.
What IS "Playing Your Own Game?"
I think at the heart of this sentiment is letting go of the boundaries and expectations laid out by everyone else.
We live in a culture where we are not only pressured to conform to rigid expectations of our peers in order to belong, but we are also controlled through systems that are designed at a lowest common denominator in order to create average outcomes.
That means pretty much every external force as we grow up in life works against our ability to discover, really know ourselves, and embrace the strengths and joy we individually have which are the path which most likely will lead to our own happy fulfilled life.
Our social experience in 2023 for most people is probably largely driven by social media. How many of us have far more social media interaction than we do in-person interaction (perhaps outside of work)?
And social media presents a polished, carefully crafted lens through which we only see the common ideal "greatness" that everyone seems to be striving for.
Except what we each individually end up seeing is everyone happier and more successful than we are.
To have that success and happiness, all we need to do is be like them, right?
But if we're honest with ourselves, do we really want ALL THAT?
Or is what we really want, to just be happy and content with life? To have no worries or fears. To live the life we truly want to live?
Yet the controlling boundaries of society and pressure to become someone else drives us AWAY from our own self.
Playing your own game isn't just doing whatever you want, it's shedding the basic desire and interest to be like anyone but yourself.
Then recognizing the strengths you have, the things you are particularly good at, the stuff that lights a fire under your ass and which you can spend HOURS in deep joyful work because it connects with the raging river in your bones and your soul that merely trickles when pushed down the line of expectation yet roars and drowns out everything around you when you are fully doing YOU.
Of course ...
You've got to find yourself and embrace who you are to do and experience that.
The Garden of You
I don't know if I'll ever arrive at "fully knowing myself and completely playing my own game".
I think there's an element of embracing the process of growing the garden of myself which is fundamental to uncovering and embracing myself and playing my own game.
Or perhaps, Playing Your Own Game is about finding the thing that IS how you tend to The Garden of You.
I know that writing is a key part of Playing my Own Game, because embracing this skill and practice has been a clear part of embracing who I am.
And every time I write I uncover something new and interesting.
I've found a way of writing and approaching my work which embraces strengths and interests and joys of mine which result in a seemingly endless fountain of useful and valuable work that can make a difference for others.
Making a difference is important to me.
Embracing the gifts I've been blessed with is important to me.
Helping others is important to me.
All of these principles and philosophies (and more), are important for me to understand in order to know how to cultivate and tend to the garden of me.
They are important for embracing who I am and playing my own game.
Because without understanding the important philosophies and principles of myself and my life, how can I possibly even know what my game even IS?
And yet, as I embrace myself and play my own game, every time I sit down to write, I unveil new words and ideas.
Perhaps more accurately I reveal to myself the ideas and understanding I already have inside of me and have only just yet put them to words.
This is why I like to think of Embracing Yourself and Playing Your Own Game as cultivating The Garden of YOU.
Because there's no way for me to instruct you in Playing Your Own Game directly.
How I Play My Own Game is irrelevant to you, but I think perhaps how I tend to "The Garden of You" can be useful in figuring it out.
And this brings us to the point ... as much as I'd love to tell you How to Play Your Own Game ... I can't. No one can.
I believe playing your own game is an emergent property that comes from knowing yourself deeply and embracing who you are.
I DO think I can help in guiding you towards becoming a better cultivator of The Garden of YOU. And perhaps in that gardening you will discover yourself and how you play your game best.
To give you something to work with, I want to share a process I've recently gone through. This exercise has its intent in the entrepreneurial/business space.
But the core of the practice I believe you can adopt for yourself no matter what you are doing. If you're trying to figure out your business, or if you should have one, great. If you're trying to figure out just what you want to do in life, great.
Weeding Your Garden - A Practice of Self Awareness
As an entrepreneur, I went into "working for myself" partly because I saw it as the only way I could live and do the things that meant the most to me while also making a living.
I think there's inherently a lot of overlap in being an entrepreneur and playing your own game. But you don't have to be an entrepreneur to play your own game.
I say all that because the practice I'm about to share with you is in the context of the work I do as an entrepreneur. It's been highly informative in stepping myself into playing my own game because for me part of that means being able to create work which uniquely fits my game.
That being said, if you choose to do this exercise yourself, you can focus on any aspect of your life (though I suspect including more than just work will be more fulfilling and effective).
The exercise starts simply by outlining your Skills, Hobbies, Expertise, and Experience.
The context for the exercise as I did it was to look at the things which I'm skilled at, enjoy, and have done in order to figure out if there's anything from this compilation which I can use to serve people (and make a business).
You can expand the scope, but I think focusing on the things you are skilled at, enjoy, miss doing, etc, is the best focus. Think about those times you get into flow and time seems to disappear while you are doing the thing - that's a great sign you're onto something.
To give you practical context, I'm going to share some of my own notes from this exercise (they may not make sense to you).
Here are a few items I wrote down from my list of my Skills, Hobbies, Expertise, and Experience:
- writing
- understanding
- making engaging email series
- drilling down to what matters
- emotionally engaging people
- bringing imagination to life
- world building
- creating space for emergence
- learning
- understanding systems / building systems
- fantasy/scifi writing/stories
- learning
- family
- scottish culture
- violin
- email marketing
- running a vision/impact driven business
- copywriting
- publishing digital media (magazine)
- ARM style email marketing
- conventions (attending, building, selling)
- marketing campaigns
- business growth strategy with respect to email
As an interesting note, I did all this handwriting, so I think I disseminated onto the page the items which stuck in my mind as I thought through. Whereas if I approached this with freewriting on a computer, I'd get more words much faster onto the page.
I don't know which one is better. It felt right to do this exercise with pen and paper.
Also my list was about 3x longer than that, I just crossed out random ones that I actually didn't feel much about in reflection. I also discovered some to be redundant, and that was useful in being more aware of important themes (which informed for me the next step).
All the things on that list mean a lot more than the words they are.
This is important. I'm just noting it because I imagine all those words mean something completely different to you, and may look like nothing. But there's a world and life of thought swirling around when I look at those words.
That brings us to the next step.
Start by picking one item from the list. I started with Email, because that's where my business has been focusing for the past few years. I then did it with Writing, World Building, Learning, and then Copywriting, because those things stood out the strongest, and repeated throughout my notes.
Ask yourself WHY?
Why is that important?
Why are you good at that?
Why do you want to do that?
Why wouldn't you want to do that?
(Keep asking why in different ways until you’re tapped out)
Now, I did all this exercise before I had The Clarity Compass framework in my mind. But there's a fair amount of overlap in this thinking process, as you can take Forms (like email in my case) and think backwards to Functions (like why am I interested in email). [[The Form, not the Function]]3
I'm not going to pull all the points from my writing on this, but I'll share some key insights I found for myself through this exercise. These are pulled from my "Why Email," "Why Writing," "Why World Building," "Why Learning," and "Why Copywriting."
(Again, these are my rough notes, a little cleaned up for this format):
Why Email (marketing copywriting etc)?
Because relationships. because this is how humans are made. no matter what, business is relationships
Because I enjoy writing and communicating this way. has the personal feel like a letter. gratifying to have a little private world of fans, to offer and sell things with words through email. I can make my own world invite people in and then do what I want
perfect medium for world building with writing. why world building important? it always has been. i was always the nerd, reading, thinking, dreaming, but never quite embracing writing/creating. i believe i can positively impact people's lives with my worlds
Why Writing?
"I write because I don't know what I think until i see what I say" - Flannery O'Conner
Part of revealing the vision. I have ideas, thoughts, very complex in my mind and richer than I can usually explain, yet as I write them, the full complexity reveals itself. It's a process of unveiling layers of humanity.
There is a magic in words formed and written so well that they evoke deep emotion and can even build relationships. Moving someone with words has power. the world as we know it today was built with this power. we can affect change with this power. That means to me, seeing my visions come to be will necessitate using this power
Writing feels like magic
Writing feels like freedom
Writing is a necessity for playing my own game and getting what I want in life.
Why World Building?
What is it about world building which constantly draws me in? The ability or opportunity to experience something different in life w/o changing yourself or your circumstances. Humans have the ability to make real internally that which we can imagine. explore the impossible.
We LEARN through experience and our ability to tell stories, to draw people into that experience gives us the ability to learn through experience without doing the thing. world building creates a richer more immersive arena within which we can make and explore experiences.
I feel more alive and good when I do business by bringing worlds to life.
Why Learning?
Hard to imagine life without learning. i think learning is living. a life without learning is not a life well lived. to reach our full potential, to live life as our fullest selves, we are meant to learn and grow. learning is growing. our biology can and will grow regardless, but our minds and our spirits require learning to grow
Why Copywriting?
Copywriting is a TOOL. this may be one of the best tools for disseminating my ideas, accomplishing my goals, and getting what I want in life.
That's all several excerpts from larger sets of notes and other writing that I've done around this subject. I can walk through all of this exploration and discover my philosophies and principles, as well as the ideas and things which excite me and really highlight to me who I am, and how I can best play my own game.
Now What?
What you do with this now is up to you.
There are some further steps in the original exercise which have to do with identifying the people you best serve, and honing in on how your skills can serve the best.
But I want to leave this open, because I think the important part of self awareness and getting better at being the cultivator of The Garden of You starts with an exercise like the above.
For me, I'm using all this right now to inform what I really want to be doing in life and and business4, and what my next best step should be in getting there5.
If you're going through the exercise, don't worry about what you're trying to create from it. Just weed the garden, and observe what's growing there already.
And then you can perhaps start to more clearly see how to embrace who you truly are.
Be Useful. Be Present. Love the Journey.
Joseph Robertson, CMO The Guardian Academy
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I will do this exercise. Great article. thanks.