Life is a Game of Snakes and Ladders
Here’s how to play.
We wait a lot in life.
Waiting for the right time. Waiting until we feel capable. Waiting for a promotion. Then waiting for a bonus. Waiting until our health improves. Waiting until we like the way we look.
Waiting for our turn — an elusive fantasy designed to lock us in as diligent members of society, subscribed to staying in our place and not thinking for ourselves too much.
And while we’re waiting, life passes by. Fast.
But it doesn’t need to.
There’s no better way to describe how to play the game of life than taking a good look at an old childhood classic: Snakes and Ladders.
Snakes and Ladders
First, let’s recall the three basic mechanisms of moving along the board in Snakes and Ladders:
- Square by square: You roll a 3, you move 3 squares. You roll a 5, you move 5 squares. So on and so forth.
- Ladders: You land at the bottom of a ladder, you get to “climb” that ladder, bumping you farther ahead on the board than you could have achieved via a dice roll.
- Snakes: You land at the head of a snake, you slide down to its tail, pushing you backwards.
The game relies on players moving square by square for most of the game, occasionally hitting a ladder, bumping them forward, or a snake, pushing them back. In general though, everyone is moving one step at a time, waiting for their turn, then doing it again. Moving slowly, but steadily in the right direction. While everyone is staying on course, generally moving forward, the game propels one player to the end of the board faster than the others — the winner.
Life
There’s one key difference between life and Snakes and Ladders, which will become evident as we go through the comparison. First, we will explore the parallels.
Similarly to Snakes and Ladders, there are three key ways we move through life:
- Linear Motion: Moving forward at a steady, but slow, pace. You follow the rules, slowly rise up in your job, maybe save some money. Very little risk taken. Path is clear — it requires discipline, but you’re on the “right track”.
- Exponential Motion: You seize life, look for shortcuts, opportunities and new experiences wherever possible, accelerating past those moving linearly alongside you.
- Reverse Motion: Regression, moving backwards, losing progress. You fall farther back than where you were before. This is generally a result of negative thinking, complacency, neglect, and in some cases, bad luck.
Linear Motion
Most people live life in a linear fashion: one foot placed carefully in front of the other, each step taken with complete confidence and preparation. A linear life is steady, moving in the right direction, but it moves slowly. More slowly than it needs to. The process will likely get you to your destination — eventually. But there’s a risk it may not get you where you want to go fast enough (or at all), because going one step at a time is slow and demanding.
For society to run properly, most people need to move at this linear speed — timidly, carefully, obediently. The world is not designed for everyone to win. It is designed for most people to cautiously follow the certainty of a pre-defined path — moving at life’s version of a square by square pace.
Snakes and ladders similarly depends on the majority of players taking small steps forward each turn, keeping their hope alive while the winner is simultaneously propelled to the end of the board.
Exponential Motion
Instead of looking down at the square directly in front of you, sometimes you need to look up — worrying less about your next step and more about getting where you want to go, faster.
These opportunities for rapid growth or acceleration are typically not obvious, they may even be concealed, requiring additional effort to identify them. These real-world short cuts are life’s ladders. The fast-track to where you want to go.
When you look for them, you will begin to notice these ladders. Better ways of going places, of doing things. You may not be certain that these shortcuts will work (the linear, square by square path is one of certainty, ladders are not). Ladders require you to be more wide-eyed, optimistic, assertive, creative. They demand a tolerance for uncertainty and risk, with the promise of potentially accelerating you to your next destination.
It can be scary to climb next to those around you moving square by square, bypassing their grind for an unpredictable and sometimes dangerous leap of faith. But doing so can also be wildly thrilling, and efficient.
Real-world ladders make life exponential.
Ladders pack life with engagement, excitement, and meaning. They make life more memorable by actualising our potential and getting us to our destinations faster.
While ladders accelerate our motion along our path in life, they paradoxically slow down the feeling of time passing by. They help us optimize for what is necessary, avoid what is not, and take short cuts wherever we can. This acceleration prevents time from feeling like it is moving so quickly, injecting each day with a sense of presence and excitement that makes each one different than the last. This every-day-enhancement creates a density of experience, extending time. Conversely, a linear life causes each day to blur into the next, creating an inescapable illusion of time moving fast.
How to find ladders and when to use them
Ladders are designed to help you divert from the linear path and create your own luck. To access them, you need to be present, open, and confident in yourself. You need to welcome new and unexpected people, experiences, and initiatives with vigour and enthusiasm.
Meeting the right person, somewhere as random as the subway, could land you your next job: ladder. Asking a question at a conference could put you on the radar of someone there that could change your life forever: ladder. Publishing your art online (writing, music, photographs, videos, whatever it is) can attract abundance and opportunity at a rate not accessible to most: ladder.
Ladders are inherently risky. You need to be OK with the shortcut not working out. Something you post not being well-received. A conversation not going well. Rejection. Getting lost. Potentially slipping off the ladder and landing back where you started, maybe a little bruised up, but probably better off and more developed for having made the attempt. These risks are made more palatable when viewed through a lens of urgency and ambition.
That being said, there is also a time and place for moving linearly.
When to move linearly
The square-by-square, linear trajectory is useful in the ‘building’ phases of our lives, when we need to take steps slowly and carefully, paying attention to where we put our foot next. Moving slowly and steadily is important when you need to get familiar with something: developing a new skillset, starting a new job, learning a new subject.
But once we have reached a critical mass of knowledge, awareness, or expertise — it’s time to look for the next ladder.
Moving square by square helps us go slow to go fast.
What we should avoid is never looking for ladders to accelerate the journey. Recall: those who never hop on a ladder typically do not win the game.
Reverse Motion
Life’s snakes present themselves when we get in our own way (or life gets in the way), sending us back a few squares. Sometimes we drop our routines and let good habits atrophy, making it more difficult to propel ourselves forward. We might start thinking negatively, preventing ourselves from moving at all, let alone exponentially. And sometimes, we just get dealt a bad hand of cards that bumps us back a little bit. Snakes are temporary though — nothing we cannot recover from, nothing irreversible — they are merely setbacks.
It’s important to view these periods of reverse motion this way: as a bad bounce, something we can pick ourselves up from and change direction.
What’s challenging about these periods is that if we don’t get a hold of this reverse motion, we can keep slipping backwards; the snake’s tail seemingly growing as we ride it, sending us farther and farther back from where we started.
In the same way it can start to feel easy to go from ladder to ladder, building up positive momentum, we can also fall down a path of compounding backwards motion—creating a downward spiral.
To avoid this, sometimes we just need to return to what we know: going square by square, slow and steady, up and to the right to get back to where we were. Once we feel comfortable, we can again begin looking for those ladders; the boosts in our path that can fill life with abundance and bring us back to exponential territory.
Ultimately, this metaphor is a short way of saying: most people don’t think about how to make life more full, more meaningful, more abundant. Most people wonder why life is going by so fast and we’re still not close to where we want to be — never thinking about how to slow time down and get to our destinations faster.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably someone who cares about these things. And to extract the most from life, you’re going to have to jump on some ladders, bounce back some from snakes, and take it one square at a time every once in a while.
While the similarities between snakes and ladders and life are abundant, there is one key difference: our fate in life is not decided by the rolling of dice — by luck. It’s decided by what we wake up and choose to do each day.
Ladders are all around us, all the time. We just need to pay attention, exit our comfort zone, and take on some risk to properly capture them.
