Mahjong with my brother
Hello dear reader!
In the last year or so my brother moved to Singapore. One of the things he has taken up is playing mahjong. My brother, not unlike myself, puts am incredible amount of pressure on himself to do well at things he chooses to pursue. We had a conversation the other day about his newfound mahjong obsession.
He was telling me that he was getting a little down on himself for not doing better, when he went to look up some of the stats from pro mahjong players (I had no idea there was such a thing), and was absolutely shocked to find that even professional mahjong players only win about 20 to 25% of the games they play. He went on to relay a story of a professional player who jumped into a competition with a bunch of newbie players just to see how quickly he could climb to the next rank when starting from ground zero.
He lost his first four games in a row.
What my brother said that he found fascinating is that he was able to shrug it off pretty easily. My brother said this guy handled his loss with more grace than almost any other professional competitor. The pro mahjong player said something along the lines of “It’s ok, I did the right things, I couldn’t have done any better than that. I came out with the highest possible last place score I could.”
I feel like there are so many amazing metaphors for life in that.
You can’t control how the tiles will be laid out. There are some things in life that are simply well out of our control. What you can control is how you respond to both lucky or unlucky events.
In the course of our conversation, my brother and I came to the mutual conclusion that all we can expect out of ourselves in life to do our very best in any given circumstance. To extrapolate on that a bit more, we… and by we I mean you, dear reader, need to give yourself some grace even if you don’t win.
Here is the cool thing about life. YOU get to decide what winning looks like. Just as an example: does winning mean climbing the corporate ladder and having a huge house and a nice car? Does winning look like having a job that brings you joy, and a cozy house with a simple car? Neither one of those is wrong. You get to define what success (aka winning) means for you. Just because someone else chooses a different path in life does not mean we are all in a competition each other. It does not mean they are winning and you are losing. It’s not you verses the world, even though it feels like that, and often times society will lead you to believe that is the case.
My brother proposed that he wanted to look at winning [in life] not as being first but making the best use of what you have, and that repeated practice of that philosophy leads to success, even if it means not taking first place.
It’s kind of liberating to think about getting to set your own standards for success and not having to live up to some unattainable, constantly changing external idea of success. As the Baz Luhrmann sunscreen song says “The race is long, and in the end it’s only with yourself.”
In summary:
You get to decide what “winning at life” looks like. Even if a situation is crappy (like losing a game of mahjong), and sometimes life will be crappy, you can decide what to take away from it (such as being happy or content even if you lost. I.e. “I got the best possible score I could, even though the tiles weren’t in my favor and that score wasn’t enough to win this game of mahjong”). The point is, in my opinion at least, to do your best no matter what hand life deals you, be kind, be compassionate, (don’t forget to include yourself among those who receive your compassion) and remember that it is not a competition of you vs. the world. No one wins at the comparison game.
Till next time dear reader, I invite you think about your very own personal idea of success. What does winning at life look like to you? I’d love to know! Whatever you decide, go chase it with your whole heart, and know that I’m rooting for you. <3 Tiff
