The Rules of the Human Game, Part II

Let’s round out the game, shall we?

Rule #3

FEEDBACK SYSTEMS

A game requires feedback systems to show advancement and progress.

This one is hard in the Human Game. If I start going to the gym, it might take 6 months before I really see solid progress. But if I pick up my phone to play a quick virtual game, I’m getting streamers and rewards and feedback within minutes, if not seconds.

Developing feedback systems within our own lives can have a huge impact on our ability to stick with and track our progress.

One of my favorite modern neuroscientists, Andrew Huberman, discusses how we can intentionally create feedback systems using neurotransmitters in our brains. Neurotransmitters such as dopamine are responsible for flooding us with pleasurable feelings when we work toward or achieve a goal.

As he says,

“If we set the goals inside of the larger goal and self-reward each one of those, we essentially have an infinite amount of energy to pursue those goals.”

We’ll be diving much further into creating our own feedback systems and hacking the human brain later on in this series, so stay tuned.

Meanwhile, let’s move on to what is arguably the most critical rule of all:

Rule #4

VOLUNTARY PARTICIPATION

A game requires desire from the player to play, and voluntary opt-in.

Think about it.

Your children are running around playing a game and you’re busy wrapping up work. They beg you to play. You don’t want to.

How can it possibly be fun?

No matter how much fun they are having, you can’t tap into that fun unless you want to play.

There’s no way around this.

Unless we choose to play the Human Game as it’s been laid out for us, it’s easy to suffer at the events of life.

We are prone to the default of experiencing life as a victim of its circumstances. When something goes wrong, or causes us pain, we self-righteously suffer and wonder why it had to happen to us.

But if we choose to play, if we look at life the way we would look at a character in a video game, everything that goes wrong becomes an Arbitrary Limitation, intentionally placed in our Human Game to evolve our character, discover something new, utilize a fresh source of creativity, create something that didn’t exist before- the list goes on.

The key is that we continually choose to play. Of our own volition. No one can force us to play the game we’re being offered. We have to opt-in in every moment.

In this way you become an active participant in the game of your life. You step willingly into the driver’s seat. Nothing is being done to you anymore. Everything that happens is part of the game you choose to play.

Welcome to your life.

You are now equipped with all the rules to begin understanding and designing your Human Game.

Let’s do this.