How to unf*ck your life

Read time: 3 minutes

Back in 2017, I felt completely lost.

I lacked a feeling of purpose, I didn't want to disappoint my family and friends, and I didn’t have a single clue about how I could improve my situation.

All the big questions about life lingered in my mind. On some days, they didn't even let me sleep.

So there was only one solution: Find the answers.

I dedicated the last 7 years to this single activity.

While I certainly haven't found all of them, I've made some discoveries and found improvements in all aspects of life.

Ultimately, I crafted an architecture for life - a system I have lived by since 2019 (and improved/added what I found out along the way).

This enabled me to:

• Travel the world for 9 months

• Finish a marathon while writing my bachelor's thesis

• Put my name on the Dean's list and get offered a PhD position

• Live in my dream city for 2 years while completing my master's (everything self-financed)

• Get offered the position of Strategic Management Assistant to the CEO of a 500+ MEUR company

Today, I will share my learnings with you.

Let's dive in!

Why your life is an infinite game

The ultimate goal in life is to be happy.

You don't live to wake up at 7 am and go to work. You don't live to maintain contact with people you actually don't like being around. You don't live to acquire as much wealth as possible while being as miserable as possible.

Happiness is what we all strive for.

So how do you live a happy life?

You live a happy life by winning the game of life.

You heard right. Life is a game. To be more specific, it's an infinite game.

As Simon Sinek explains in his same-titled book, "infinite games" are games that never arrive at an end goal. The purpose of the game is to play it forever. You lose by quitting. You only win by playing forever.

The good thing is that you can design the rules for your game.

Therefore, there is one simple objective in life:

Design your rules so that you enjoy playing your game of life forever.

The rules of your infinite game(s)

So how can you design the rules of your game?

This can be a big, overwhelming question. We need to break it down a little more.

First, let's define some sub-games. In the recent years, I've found that there are four sub-games or areas in your life:

• Happiness

• Health

• Wealth

• Relationships

Happiness cannot be achieved directly. You need to work for it from two directions.

First, you need to have a solid foundation - this is your health, wealth and relationships. Achieving these goals is pretty much the same for every human.

Second, you need to find out which activities make you happy. This is very specific to your personality, interests, values, etc.

But both sides have one thing in common: They are all infinite games.

You don't win by getting healthy - you win by staying healthy. Same applies for all other areas.

If these are all infinite games, you can apply the same logic from before: How do I create the rules for these sub-games so that I enjoy playing them forever?

In other words, what does a person who enjoys investing in their health, wealth, relationships and happiness regularly look like? What does my ideal self look like? What does he/she do on a daily basis? What does their ordinary week look like?

Answering these questions can take you days, months, or even years.

You'll have to explore your interests, find out what works, and accept that you won't be right every single time.

But when you've found something that worked out, make it one of your rules - your habits, systems, non-negotiables or whatever you like to use.

Playing them forever

As I said in the beginning, you win in life by playing forever.

If you know what the person you'd like to become in the future does daily, you can now start to analyze the gaps.

In which area do you lag behind? What could you do to reduce this gap? Which skills, habits or systems would benefit you?

As soon as you've found something, just start executing.

Stay seeking.

Philipp