The Game — Background

Life is the most complicated game you will ever play.

It is a game without a rule book, so you have to learn as you play.

The rules are there to be found and if you play well the game becomes more enjoyable and fulfilling.

Originally this book was created to help my consultants deliver an at-the-desk mentoring program helping knowledge workers to avoid the stress of work.

The book needed to be short and snappy while covering a lot of ground. Each consultant was working with eight people per day at their desks, dealing with live problems and issues as they were encountered. A long reference book would not and could not be read between appointments. With only a few minutes to evaluate each person’s condition and success a consultant needed to be primed, ready to go walking up to the next desk. This book was developed to help this part of the consultant’s role offering a troubleshooting resource and source of immediately accessible help.

I chose to loosely model this resource on a booklet well known to all Quakers, called Advices and Queries. It is, in the UK, a thin, small red book easily carried and read. Inside the covers it makes assertions and statements designed to get you thinking. It goes on to challenge you with simple questions. There is no discernible plot, theme or agenda apparent in the text. It can almost be opened at random and read as one item and put down again. Any random starting point can move you forward or backwards in the text.

After the first reading you may be tempted to think you have absorbed all it can say.

This is not the case, because the next time you read it your problems have changed and your life has moved on. So each advice and query informs and challenges you again, and again, in often remarkably different ways.

Approach The Game in this way and you will find it informs your intuition and intellect in a wide range of situations.

One thing this book won’t tell you is what you must do. Its role is to help you see more clearly what is happening in front of you and around you, to prompt you to explore and challenge you to create better solutions than you might otherwise.

John Jones, Stockport, Cheshire, The United Kingdom, March 2011.

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