I failed again. As I had several times before in recent years, I was facing shutting down a company that I had founded to drive change at scale because it didn’t work as we had hoped. Not even close.
I worked with my wife to see what I’d need to do for the family to get her alignment for me to take a few solo days at the house my parents built in Southern Colorado. Solo time there is something I had always dreamed of, but had never done. After agreeing to a 51-item to-do list for projects around the house, I sent my wife and kids off to visit the in-laws for Spring Break, and set off for what Leith Sharp called my “days of spacious presence”.
I went with very little planned. Just some “good questions” to ponder. You know – meaning of life stuff, career direction, how I can be useful in the world, what’s mine to do – that kind of thing. And yes, before you ask, I’m in mid-life.
After a few days of getting up to watch the sunrise for a few hours on a hillside, and doing whatever I felt like doing in the moment (I picked up a violin for the first time in about a decade), I started to dig in to answer some questions.
I’ll be honest, this failure hit me harder than previous ones because I’ve been conscious of the fact that we are ½ through the 2020’s and that this is supposed to be the decisive decade. And at the beginning of 2025, it feels to me like we are losing ground. That and the grand visions I set for myself at the beginning of the decade (yes, I’m that guy) feel delusional sometimes. Bottom line, I’d been in a disempowered funk for a while, and I needed a reset.
While I won’t give you the play by play here (that is for another time), something started to emerge…
And so I kept chewing on it and I felt … good. It felt light and my creativity was going nuts. I felt energy as I had not in a long time. That’s why I started recording myself to capture what I was feeling.
Best World Game would give me a structure into which all of my current work and future visions could fit. It would give me a way to get my wife and kids in the game with me. It would break my work out of niche confines and allow me to play with anyone who could hear this call to adventure.
I was lit up, unable to sleep (in a good way) and all I wanted to do was to figure out how to play the game. The result of that is this post and all of the other posts that you see on this blog. And if you are here reading this, I have one question for you: