Are You Playing Your Own Game?

Years ago, I was at a party talking to a guy I went to high school with.

By then, we had taken pretty different paths.

He had gone straight into work and was building what would eventually become a very successful business. I had spent a decent chunk of my younger years travelling, working wherever I could, moving around and collecting experiences.

At that party, he asked me why I had spent so much time travelling when I could have been working, building something and making money first.

His thinking was pretty simple: work hard while you are young, create financial success, and then travel later when you can afford to do it properly.

And I remember thinking almost exactly the opposite.

Why would I wait?

I wanted to backpack in my twenties. I wanted the cheap hostels, the questionable transport decisions, the freedom to change plans because I met someone interesting the night before. I wanted to arrive somewhere without knowing exactly what happened next.

Years later, I would see photos of him travelling with his family, staying in beautiful places and having incredible experiences.

And I genuinely loved that for him.

But it was also completely different.

Travelling with your family in your thirties or forties is not the same experience as travelling alone with a backpack in your twenties.

Neither is better.

Neither is more successful.

They are just different games.

And I think that conversation stuck with me because so much of life is built around the idea that there is one correct order to things.

Finish school. Go to university. Get the job. Build the career. Buy the house. Get married. Make more money. Travel when you can afford it.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that.

The interesting bit is whether you chose it.

Whose scoreboard are you using?

My conversation with Preetesh Morar (Pretzel) brought that old conversation back to me.

Pretzel has spent years working across sport, branding, coaching and now AI, and one of the themes that kept coming up was identity.

Not just how other people see you, but whether you have actually stopped to think about who you want to be.

He talked about athletes who can spend years training, performing, proving themselves and chasing the next milestone without ever really sitting down and asking some pretty fundamental questions.

Who do I want to be known as?

What do I want to be known for?

What kind of person do I actually want to be?

Those questions are not only relevant to professional athletes.

Most of us have a scoreboard somewhere.

Salary. Job title. Followers. Awards. House. Business growth. Productivity. Fitness. How much we can get done before we collapse into bed.

Sometimes we chose the scoreboard.

Sometimes we inherited it.

Sometimes we do not even realise we are competing until we look around and wonder why winning does not feel particularly good.

Play your own game

Pretzel said something during our conversation that I really liked.

Set your game plan. Set your rules. Play your game instead of getting caught in somebody else's.

That landed for me because I have spent a lot of my life colouring outside the lines.

Which is slightly funny because I also have a strong perfectionist streak.

But I have never particularly liked black and white. I like understanding where the edges are and then working out what is actually possible in the grey.

The older I get, the clearer I become about some of my own rules.

Health matters.

The people I love matter.

Meaningful work matters.

Experience matters.

Freedom matters.

Play matters.

And there are things I am increasingly unwilling to trade for somebody else's version of success.

I was reminded of that very recently.

I had a situation where my phone suddenly lit up with calls, texts, emails and messages across almost every platform available.

It was well outside working hours.

It was urgent to the people contacting me, but it was not an emergency. Nobody was unsafe. Nothing catastrophic was happening.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that noise, I had one very clear thought.

This is why I have boundaries.

Not because I do not care about my work. I care deeply.

But somebody else deciding that something is urgent does not automatically mean I need to adopt their rules about how I should respond.

That distinction matters.

Because if you never decide what your rules are, somebody else will happily hand you theirs.

Success changes

I also think we make a mistake when we talk about success as though it is something we define once.

What I thought success looked like at 20 is different from what I thought it looked like at 30.

It is different again now.

And I hope it keeps changing.

One of my favourite quotes from Dolly Parton is:

"Find out who you are and do it on purpose."

I have loved that for years because, to me, that is exactly what playing your own game looks like.

Know yourself.

Know what matters.

Then make choices that actually reflect it.

Not perfectly. I certainly do not.

There are still times I work more than I intended to. Times I agree to things because I feel responsible. Times I catch myself chasing something and have to ask whether I even wanted it in the first place.

But maybe that is part of it too.

Playing your own game does not mean having everything figured out.

It means noticing when you have accidentally wandered onto someone else's field.

My reflection

Pretzel talked about reaching a point where the different parts of his life started overlapping rather than pulling him in different directions, and how much more enjoyable that became.

I think there is something important in that.

Playing your own game is not about rejecting everything conventional or doing the opposite of everyone around you.

That would still mean other people are determining your choices.

It is simply about knowing why you are choosing what you are choosing.

Maybe your version of success is building an enormous company.

Maybe it is working four days a week.

Maybe it is raising kids.

Maybe it is travelling the world.

Maybe it is earning a ridiculous amount of money.

Maybe it is having enough.

Maybe it is all of those things at different points in your life.

The scoreboard is allowed to change.

The rules are allowed to change.

You are allowed to change.

The important thing is recognising that you actually get a say.