Curious about Games and Gaming: Do You Have Favorites? What Are the Advantages of Being a Game Player?

“Games lubricate the body and the mind.” - Benjamin Franklin, American politician

“Video games are bad for you? That's what they said about rock-n-roll.” - Shigeru Miyamoto, Japanese designer

I chose the word game(s) for this week’s topic for several reasons. First, because I love playing games. Growing up, I had parents and friends that played games with me. They taught me how to play cards and chess, and my dad even paired me up with a neighbor who taught me better chess strategy. Then, I always played lots of games with my children, and know that they now play games together still.

But, this weekend really brought games and gaming back into the forefront. I belong to Mensa and we had our Cleveland Regional Gathering where the game playing started early on Friday afternoon, and was still prominently being enjoyed last night when I left around midnight. I actually was so busy with other duties, I didn’t get to play a lot, but did enjoy other members’ involvement vicariously.

Games have been around for a long time, and I agree completely with the above quotations, especially Benjamin Franklin’s. As I looked up and picked quotations, I was struck by the different meanings, outcomes, uses, and approaches to and from games. I think you will find a lot to think about.

Let’s get started:

• “I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” - Michael Jordan, American athlete
• “No matter what business you're in, you can't run in place or someone will pass you by. It doesn't matter how many games you've won.” - Jim Valvano, American coach
• “All my games were political games; I was, like Joan of Arc, perpetually being burned at the stake.” - Indira Gandhi, Indian stateswoman
• “I'm a games and theory kind of guy. I love puzzles, so it was fun dissecting Shakespeare's prose.” - Neil Patrick Harris, American actor
• “If anything goes bad, I did it. If anything goes semi-good, we did it. If anything goes really good, then you did it. That's all it takes to get people to win football games for you.” – Paul Bryant, American coach
• “You must invent your own games and teach us old ones how to play.” - Nikki Giovanni, American poet
• “Most other competitions are individual achievements, but the Olympic Games is something that belongs to everybody.” - Scott Hamilton, American athlete

And, some more:

• “I became an optimist when I discovered that I wasn't going to win any more games by being anything else.” - Earl Weaver, American coach
• “What I was proud of was that I used very few parts to build a computer that could actually speak words on a screen and type words on a keyboard and run a programming language that could play games. And I did all this myself.” - Steve Wozniak, American businessman
• “Video games are so popular these days, getting the opportunity to star in one is something special. More people should do it.” - Carrot Top, American comedian
• “Also, after people play these Sim games, it tends to change their perception of the world around them, so they see their city, house or family in a slightly different way after playing.” - Will Wright, American scientist
• “People never knew we were poor, but out of that poverty came the most incredible inventions - board games, recipes... we never stopped inventing.” - Lynn Johnston, American cartoonist
• “I completely love playing and designing games and always will. I am so into games that I listen to game music all day. That may sound strange, but you can guarantee I'm a hardcore gamer and would never let you down by designing a crappy title.” - John Romero, American inventor
• “Our approach to making games is to find the fun first and then use the technology to enhance the fun.” - Sid Meier, American scientist

Three more with a completely metaphoric slant:

• “Oh, the miraculous energy that flows between two people who care enough to get beyond surfaces and games, who are willing to take the risks of being totally open, of listening, of responding with the whole heart. How much we can do for each other.” - Alex Noble, Australian artist
• “Take a look at your natural river. What are you? Stop playing games with yourself. Where's your river going? Are you riding with it? Or are you rowing against it? Don't you see that there is no effort if you're riding with your river?” - Frederick Carl Frieseke, American artist
• “If you never concede a goal, you're going to win more games than you lose.” - Bobby Moore, English athlete

What is your background with games and gaming? How about watching games others are playing? Playing games on the computer? I feel that we can become easily addicted to the time spent. How about you? I would love to hear your comments.

Curious about Culture: What Cultural Influences Have You Experienced? How Have They Contributed to Your Success?

Definition of Culture: The act or practice of cultivating, or of preparing the earth for seed and raising crops by tillage; as, the culture of the soil. The act of, or any labor or means employed for, training, disciplining, or refining the moral and intellectual nature of man; as, the culture of the mind. The state of being cultivated; result of cultivation; physical improvement; enlightenment and discipline acquired by mental and moral training; civilization; refinement in manners and taste. To cultivate; to educate.

“Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.” - Thomas Carlyle, Scottish philosopher

This week’s theme of culture has been an incredible adventure of learning and thinking. It started with my reading of Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers: The Story of Success. This is one of those books you just can’t put down. Gladwell proves that the usual personal explanations of success don’t work.

In his words, “The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine. It’s not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they came from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.”

And then, looking up and choosing the quotations about culture – as the quotations so often do – provided additional education and wisdom. I hope that the selection will do the same for you, too.

Here goes the additional journey:

• “If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.” - Margaret Mead, American scientist
• “Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.” - Marshall McLuhan, Canadian sociologist
• “The worth of a civilization or a culture is not valued in the terms of its material wealth or military power, but by the quality and achievements of its representative individuals - its philosophers, its poets and its artists.” - Herbert Read, English poet
• “A nation's culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people.” - Mohandas Gandhi, Indian leader
• “I’m just trying to tell a good story and make thought-provoking, entertaining films. I just try and draw upon the great culture we have as a people, from music, novels, the streets.” – Spike Lee, American director
• “New needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements... the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture.” - Jackson Pollock, American artist
• “You can't walk alone. Many have given the illusion, but none have really walked alone. Man is not made that way. Each man is bedded in his people, their history, their culture, and their values.” - Peter Abrahams, South African novelist

And some more for your and my adventure with culture:

• “My experiences have been, from the very beginning, cultural and creative. And my business has been a way of exposing the culture, exposing the artists so that the world could hear and see them.” - Russell Simmons, American businessman
• “Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.” - Tom Wolfe, American journalist
• “The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.” - Lewis Mumford, American sociologist
• “There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization.” - Steven Pinker, Canadian scientist
• “The moment you give up your principles, and your values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period.” - Oriana Fallaci, Italian journalist
• “Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition.” - Stephen Jay Gould, American scientist
• “There are things in American culture that want to wipe the class distinction. Blue jeans. Ready-made clothes. Coca-Cola.” - Leslie Fiedler, American critic

So, what do you think? I would love to read your comments about the cultures that have helped to create your success. Travel on!

Curious about Greatness: We All Possess the Power of Unique Greatness. How Do You Use Yours?

Definition of Greatness: The state, condition, or quality of being great; as, greatness of size, greatness of mind, power, etc. Pride.

“Whoever renders service to many puts himself in line for greatness - great wealth, great return, great satisfaction, great reputation, and great joy.” - Jim Rohn, American businessman

A quick story about why I chose greatness for this week’s blog theme. As you may have guessed, I sign up for many webinars and teleseminars. Some of them are good and some are not so good, but I often learn or am reminded of a golden nugget that I can use. Last night I watched a replay of a webinar given by Julie Ann Turner (click on her name) that was so good, I couldn’t take my eyes and/or ears off it for a second.

A quotation from her website: “GREATNESS lives within you ... and your most AMAZING life awaits ... Now is the time to shift your life and work to the next level of purpose, profitability and potential - not only at the level of your work or business, but at the level of your ultimate life contribution ... your LEGACY.”

It has been such an exciting time searching for greatness quotations:

• “Nothing liberates our greatness like the desire to help, the desire to serve.” – Marianne Williamson, American author
• “Never underestimate the power of dreams and the influence of the human spirit. We are all the same in this notion: The potential for greatness lives within each of us.” - Wilma Rudolph, American athlete
• “No student ever attains very eminent success by simply doing what is required of him: it is the amount and excellence of what is over and above the required, that determines the greatness of ultimate distinction.” - Charles Kendall Adams, American educator
• “The greatness of art is not to find what is common but what is unique.” – Isaac Bashevis Singer, American novelist
• “The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.” - John Buchan, Scottish politician
• “The truest greatness lies in being kind, the truest wisdom in a happy mind.” – Ella Wheeler Wilcox, American writer
• “There is as much greatness of mind in acknowledging a good turn, as in doing it.” - Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Roman statesman

And some more – they have been so inspiring:

• “Words alone cannot fully convey the realities of the soul or the greatness of the human spirit.” - William Shirley, British politician
• “If any man seeks for greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will find both.” - Horace Mann, American educator
• “Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends.” - Samuel Taylor Coleridge, English poet
• “Integrity is the first step to true greatness. Men love to praise, but are slow to practice it. To maintain it in high places costs self-denial; in all places it is liable to opposition, but its end is glorious, and the universe will yet do it homage.” - Charles Simmons, British gymnast
• “Monuments and archaeological pieces serve as testimonies of man's greatness and establish a dialogue between civilizations showing the extent to which human beings are linked.” - Vincente Fox, Mexican statesman
• “Big dreams create the magic that stir men's souls to greatness.” - Bill McCartney, American celebrity
• “By constant self-discipline and self-control you can develop greatness of character.” – Grenville Kleiser, American author

And one more to take with you and live by:

“Every day, people settle for less than they deserve. They are only partially living or at best living a partial life. Every human being has the potential for greatness.” - Bo Bennett, American businessman

I urge you to define and live by and with your greatness. It will give you a new lease on life! And, please leave a comment.