"Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves." -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Games abound and currently there seems to be no bigger game in town than that played by the marketing strategists, life and business coaches, and branding ‘experts’ popping up everywhere like McDonald's.

The bait, if you will, is success. Most, in one form or another, promise ‘success’ if only we follow their particular prescriptive for 'making it'.

It seems to me we need, at the very least, to question what it is we are being sold here.  We need to think critically, if we want to make solid decisions and maintain some degree of sovereignty over our lives (a notion integral to my personal definition of success).

A good place to start could be to ask ourselves how we might define success, irrespective of the conventional metrics that everywhere measure it by ranking things like a large pile of cash (and other markers of superior status), above things like mental, emotional and physical wellbeing.

What about having enough free time for cultivating a culture of compassion and contentment (other notions integral to my personal definition of success)?

If we have no free time for the contemplative arts—anything from meditation proper to swimming, to, perhaps, screaming down the autobahn on your street bike—if there is no room to experience life in deeply pervasive and life-enhancing ways, then what are we here for?

Personally, I’m not up for prostituting myself out to the amassing of wealth—the gold standard (ironically) by which, as I say, we measure conventional success. 

And then dying?! 

Is it just me? Does that not seem a painfully sad waste of a human life?

I don’t have any definitive 3-step plan to sort out what the best solution for living a full and joyful existence is for the billions of us who live here on earth in widely divergent circumstances.

What I do believe is that it is up to each of us to make the quest. We must take responsibility for the education of both our minds and our hearts, and out of that very bold quest answers will come.

Remember: whatever games are played,  play no games with yourself.

Keep it real. 

Keep it close to heart and soul.