My son’s new sport this past spring was lacrosse. What kid wouldn’t like to run around with a stick, whack people, and shoot into a net? He’s learning how to cradle, catch, pass, and shoot. But his all time favorite drill is to play 1 v. 1 against his ole dad.
We set up cones on either end of the yard as our goals and spend time racing back and forth trying to slip the ball past each other. I pretend I know what I’m doing with this sport that’s completely foreign to me and mutter curses under my breath as my fingers get slammed yet again by my son’s stick as he tries to jar the ball from me. My son wants the games to never end. At first we played to 5. But when that tally was reached, my son will look at me and ask, “Can we play to 7?”
Then 7 becomes 9, then 11, then 15! The game is never done. When I finally convince him to take a break (because the sun has set and we can no longer see), he’s chirping in my ear that this is only halftime and we’ll pick up the game right where we left off tomorrow.
The fun for my son isn’t necessarily winning the game. It’s the game itself. He plays to just play. It’s an endless game. Competing is the reward.
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We try to spend a lot of our time in life trying to close out milestones when they really should be an endless games. Here’s some of the milestones we’ve determined as finite:
- Retirement
- Selling a business
- Receiving an inheritance
- Getting the kids off to college
The thinking goes something like this: once I’ve achieved it, I can now be done.
But part of us wants the game to continue or we know that it should.
The objective isn’t to retire, it’s to settle into a lifestyle that you can sustain and continue to make progress on the things that matter. The objective isn’t to sell a business or divest yourself of concentrated stock, it’s to find purpose and identity in your day to day activities. The objective isn’t to receive an inheritance and be set for life, it’s to identify, live out and pass along the family values that produced that wealth.
Most things in life have been billed as a road to a destination when really the journey itself is the destination. You have to fall in love with the process for it is in the process that we find meaning.
