My Daughter Collided With Gravity

Today my daughter and I went on a walk in the beautiful fall weather.

As per usual, she found tons of things mom probably wouldn’t want her to play with: wire cutters, mud, rocks to chew on, and a weed eater.

She also found us some new friends! She did this by walking up to the friends and staring them down until they acknowledged her presence.

Brilliant execution. Couldn’t have done it better myself.

The best part about all of this is that she is completely engaged in every process. In all of it. She is PLAYING to learn about the world around her.

After experiencing this with her multiple times I’ve come to the conclusion: the rules of her game are fundamentally different than mine.

I wouldn’t approach people in their garage and stare at them.

I also wouldn’t climb up and down stairs over and over or try to leap into the street because dad isn’t looking or get on someone’s porch and walk around for a bit (the owner drove up to the house while we were up there, was a fun convo).

Some of those situations made me feel uncomfortable!

But for her it was just another element to her play.

Her rules are different.

In some ways, the game she plays has one singular rule: explore. Approach the new (potentially dangerous) thing. Figure out what it is. Shake it a bit. Stare at the person. Experience the new sights. Touch the rock and eat it. Lick the dirt.

Sometimes, this exploration creates problems because it collides with other rules. We ended up coming home today because my daughter tried to go down the stairs facing forward without my help. She had never tried that before and ended up taking a little tumble. The laws of physics interrupted her explorations and caused a few tears to be shed.

As she grows, more rules will be discovered through her exploration. My job is to ensure she is aware of the rules she gives herself so she can play the most fun game possible while also pushing her to continue her exploration so she can learn new rules!

This brings me to two fundamental ideas:

1. Do you know the rules of your own life game?

2. Are you actively trying to learn the rules of your fields of interest?

The first is important because if you don’t know the rules (or if the rules change), then it can be frustrating when you get crushed by them. You simply don’t understand why you got crushed.

An example of this frustration: On Thursday this week I ate some of my favorite Panda Express. The next morning I could barely breath and my joints were all swollen. For some reason the rules around the food I can eat have changed. I don’t know when it happened, but it sure was frustrating.

So determining what your rules for life are is important.

One of my favorite exercises for this was given to me by my coach a couple of months back and expands on a strategy I’ve been employing for the last few years.

Here’s how it works:

1. Imagine you’re at your funeral and all of your best friends, colleagues, family, etc. get up to talk about you.

2. One by one, what are the words those individuals use to describe you?

3. Once you have that list of words, go through each one and give it your own definition. A definition that gives you clarity on how to act in the different areas of your life.

Here’s an example of mine:

Those words and their definitions become the rules of the game you play!

When I told one of my friends this strategy his mouth hung open and he said “That’s a lot of work.”

This might be true, but in every game you play there’s always a grind that yields awesome results. This might be one of them to you (I deeply enjoy finding my rules and living by them, it’s one of my favorite games), but it’s totally worth it!

The second point I mentioned above is learning the rules of your field of interest (your obsession, your forever game). This is also important because if you don’t know the rules you’ll get crushed or you won’t function optimally.

One of the best parts (and foundational rules) of the games we play in life is that we must determine what the rules are, whether through discovery (learning) or choice (like building your list of values).

This is true for programming, physics, marketing, art, video games, relationships, and more.

And once we learn the rules we must practice them. I know how to read sheet music, but I certainly can’t play the violin as well as my wife. She both understands how to play and can ACTUALLY play. I know I should be playful at 3am when my daughter wakes up, but man is that hard.

Which leads me to reiterate the question:

• How are you learning the rules of your field of interest?

• How are you making a game out of it?

Games are scenarios with defined rules and either clearly defined progress or competition.

The game of life can be frustrating because the rules are unclear and must be discovered and then mastered.

This will always be true for as long as you live.

You might as well turn it all into a game that you deeply enjoy playing. :)

Having your own values listed out is the first step in designing a game for yourself that you genuinely enjoy. It has helped me know the kinds of products I might want to sell. The kinds of people I’d like to interact with. The person I’d like to show up as.

I’d like to end this beautiful email with one request:

I’m designing a hackathon that (at this time) will be for software teams inside of companies. 

Based on my research so far with team leads and managers, software teams tend to struggle with engagement, communication, and building sustained goodwill. A friend of mine yesterday said he felt like “teams trend towards disliking and distrusting each other” especially in the remote world we work in today. I’d like to solve this by bringing the team together to PLAY and engage and build something amazing together in one day.

Right now, I’m doing market research to determine the problems faced by these teams, and the results they would expect from an experience like a hackathon.

If you’re a software team lead, manager, or a business owner that would like to level up your team, I’d love to interview you for research and learn more about what you struggle with so I can design the perfect product for you!

Ideally, we take no more than 20 minutes to cruise through my questions.

Thank you so much for reading to this point friend!

If there is anything I can do to help you PLAY more in life to learn and build, please feel free to respond to this email (or schedule a time to meet with me, I always enjoy discussion around play, games, and building one’s ideal life).

Sterling Long!

P.S. Again, if you’re a software team lead, manager, or business owner that wants to level up your team, schedule a time to chat! I want to build a product to 5x the productivity and output of your team.