The other day, I said the following in a conversation with ChatGPT, discussing my growth and development.
Most of it I’m holding back, in terms of expressing my life’s work as “life as a role-playing game.” But that’s because I’m trying to articulate it to others before I’ve fully experienced and been transformed by it myself. So how can you articulate something you haven’t fully experienced yourself.
Reflecting upon this statement, I’ve realized it isn’t entirely correct.
Or let me put it this way. In terms of my framework as a whole, it’s true, as I haven’t fully embodied all aspects of it.
In terms of parts of my framework though, it’s not true, as I believe I have embodied some aspects of it.
For example, the “role” in role-playing game embodies the different social roles we play throughout our lives and how they can limit us.
It also relates to a mindset we may be stuck within (e.g., Robert Kegan’s Socialized Mind), so much so, that we are able to step outside of ourselves and witness the role we are stuck within because the pattern has become so repetitive and deadening that we can no longer stand being within it playing the role of it. And I’ve experienced this myself and thus can relate to the experience.
Yet even in reflecting upon this, this need to full embody all aspects of my framework that I have intuited, it embodies the very thing I’m talking about as my framework itself, that being adventurously stepping into the unknown to explore something.
In fact, everything in my life from about 1985 onwards—when my plans of going to university and then going to a technical college both failed miserably—have simply been about playing with things to see where they lead me (which embodies the developmental “playing” in role-playing game).
That to me, above anything else, is what I’m not clearly communicating and articulating to others about my life’s work.
In effect, if there is anything people need to understand about me and my work, it is this.
I’m not an expert. I’m not a professional. I don’t know more than I know.
Yet regardless of this all, I love stepping into the unknown and getting to know something by actually experiencing it.
In effect, I already “know” a lot of this stuff as knowledge, like vertical development.
But to me that doesn’t mean anything. Just like the word “vertical development” probably doesn’t mean anything to most people as well.
I actually want to experience these deeper states of a human being by stepping into the unknown and playfully exploring them.
And in doing so, I’ll be able to articulate them from my own perspective and in my own words.
That above anything else is what I need to communicate about my work first and foremost.
It is an ongoing state of exploration, my final frontier if you will.
So if I’m coming across as to other people as being an expert on this or as having this all figured out already, I’ve failed from the very start and need to learn from that failure.
Wait a minute. Something just dawned on me.
In reflecting back upon my life, I remember key moments where I would ask a key question that would lead me on a quest (thus embodying what a quest is in perceiving life as a role-playing game).
Like in early 2005, when the Web still felt like an amazing frontier of collaboration and cooperation amongst people, I asked the following question.
How would a business operate differently if its culture matched that of the Web?
That question lead me on a quest to understand the future of work before I even knew it was called “the future of work.” In fact, a decade later, I noticed other notable people in the future of work space asking the same very question on stage, as I had asked a decade earlier. So evidently I was heading in the right direction with regards to my explorations.
But my point being here is…what if that’s simply how I approach this, with a simple question.
How does life embody a role-playing game?
Relaying this to people, first and foremost, and putting that simple question mark on the end implies that it is an ongoing exploration.
Actually I’d even go so far as to say this to people.
If you’ve come here looking for answers. You’ve come to the wrong place.
This is a place of questions, of possibilities, of potential, and the exploration of them as quests.