Life is a Rigged Game: Love is Your Key to Winning

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Life moves quickly. Work. School. Kids. Travel ball teams. Friends. Social media. Keeping up with pop culture and the latest Netflix series.

You’ve got to have the right job that combines social consciousness and financial reward.

All while saving the environment and being politically conscious and staying in great shape and finding time for yoga or meditation so you’re not too anxious or stressed or depressed.

And don’t forget to post the latest vacation on Instagram to show everyone else your life is great and you’re keeping up with social expectations.

It’s exhausting. It can drive you to burnout.

The thing is, most of these are just a blur of relatively unimportant distractions in life.

How do you exit this crazy, out-of-control carnival ride?

The answer is to simplify and focus on the fundamentals.

The fundamental is relationship. Love.

That’s it for everything in life.

How does that work?

The meaning of life—your purpose in life—is Happiness.

Happiness doesn’t come from money or social status or education or having your kids at an elite college. Happiness comes from high-quality relationships. Period.

Whether it’s your family or work or friends, high-quality relationships are the highest performing relationships because they are based in deep trust and love.

The secret to winning in business? Focus on relationships instead of profits.

Develop good, high-trust relationships with your customers and they will bring you their business. Develop good, high-trust relationships with your team and you will maximize their engagement and productivity. The combination of good customer relationships and good team relationships will maximize your performance—your profits—which you can then use to benefit your team. Great relationships drive profits better than a focus on profits.

It’s all about relationship.

The secret to a great family? Relationships. A great relationship with your spouse is the best way for your kids to learn that good relationships are the key to success and Happiness in life.

Teach your children that to have great relationships with others, they must first be in a good relationship with themselves.

Childhood and adolescence are the story of your kids discovering, loving and leading themselves so they can be strong in their future relationships with family, work and friends.

Our society is totally dependent on good, high-trust relationships between each other and with our justice, financial, political, health, education, etc. systems. When the trust breaks down in those relationships, society unravels. The word society itself comes from the Latin socius which means companion.

It’s all about relationship.

Picking up on the pattern here? Personal success, family success, friendship success, work success and Happiness in life are all tied to one thing: relationship.

We’re surrounded by examples of the importance of relationship.

More than half of the hit songs are love songs. Relationship.

How do you feel when you are with someone you love? Relationship.

How do you feel when you lose someone you love? Relationship.

Why do people suffer so much in solitary confinement in prison? Because you deprive them of relationship.

What’s the worst way to bully someone? It’s not yelling at them. It’s shunning them. Depriving them of relationship.

In ancient societies, exile was worse than death because you deprived the person of relationship with their clan and their own identity.

If you give infants all the food and water they need but deprive them of love and affection, four out of ten will die. Love and affection are more important for survival than food and water.

More than half the surviving infants will have deep psychological challenges. Why? Because love and affection help form our neurological pathways. When the affection doesn’t happen, the neural pathways get mis-wired.

It’s all about relationship. As humans, we are biologically wired for relationship, especially love.

That’s why relationship is so fundamental, so critical for our personal, family and work success.

That speaks to the power of relationship and love on its own.

If you are an atheist, you may want to stop here.

If you’re more spiritual, there is a lot more.

We know from scripture that the Creator is Love.

Love is a relationship. The deepest kind of relationship. You can’t talk about love without talking about relationship.

If the Creator is Love, He must also be relationship. The Trinity. The Father loves the Son through the Holy Spirit.

We are made in the image of the Creator, which means we are made in the image of Love. At our very core, our very essence, we are Love. That’s why we die when we don’t have love.

If we are love at our core, then we’d also have to be in relationship with ourselves. That sounds crazy until we realize that one of biggest things that differentiates humans from other animals is that we are self-conscious. We are in relationship with ourselves.

Creation itself—this universe that is 94 billion light years across with at least a trillion galaxies—Creation is not just an act of love by the Creator for us.

Creation must also bear the mark of the maker—Love. Love, relationship permeates every aspect of Creation in a way that makes the Star Wars Force look trivial.

Science itself tells us so.

If I hold a pen and let it go, it falls to my desk. If I let go of the pen 100,000 times it will fall to my desk 100,000 times.

That’s the Law of Gravity. It describes the relationship between me releasing my pen and the pen hitting my desk. The Law of Gravity also explains the relationships between stars and planets, and the behavior of black holes, and galaxies bending light, and much more.

The whole point of the laws of nature is to describe the pattern of relationships built into the very nature of Creation.

Right now, scientists are pursuing a Theory of Everything—a single framework that, Wikipedia says, “will fully explain and link together all physical aspects of the universe.” It is a single theory that explains everything by showing how all the other laws of nature relate to each other.

In a real way, science can be understood as an investigation of the relationships that are the foundation for the universe. Relationship permeates every aspect of the universe and how we understand it.

So, this thing we call life and creation is a completely rigged game. It’s all about relationship. It’s all about love. That’s it. That’s what it takes to win.

If you want success in your work, your family and your life, tap into the very nature of the creation. Tap into the very nature of people. Relationship. Love.

At work, build strong, high trust relationships with your customers to get their business. Build strong, high-trust relationships with your team to maximize their engagement and productivity. Strong relationships with your customers and your team will give you a tremendous competitive advantage in the marketplace. High-quality relationships will maximize your performance and profits. The key is relationship. love

Everything you do in life should be about developing good relationships with yourself, your family and friends, and with your co-workers.

Anything else is a distraction. A lost opportunity. A waste of the short time we have with each other.

Your life is a rigged game. Practicing love is your key to winning.

I’m Pete Bowen.