Chasing the Dream

I was playing a game of Civilization the other night, a game I’ve played in various forms for almost 30yrs now. I set almost all of the settings to random and ended up with the Maori. I built my first city and started figuring out a win condition based on their abilities. I made use of their early ocean skills to explore the world, building my second city on a prime spot. I ran into the Khmer. Things seemed peachy at first. Then he declared war on me

After several turns of back and forth things weren’t going anywhere. I decided to go ahead and start a new game. This one had been fun so I wanted to replicate the starting conditions and hope for a better starting position to exploit. And that’s where I made my mistake.

The game had been fun because I had gone into it without any expectations or plans. I figured things out as I went. But the next game I had a picture of what I wanted in mind. I tried to make the game match those expectations. It ended up rolling up a dozen new games, trying to get that initial feeling I had. But they all felt inadequate.

This got me thinking about how often this is the case. When we try to make something fit an image in our heads, it rarely lives up to that expectation. The more we try, the worse the final experience ends up being.

In life, the best experiences are the ones we weren’t expecting. My favorite memories are all those that I went into without prior expectation. A restaurant or movie I tried on a whim.  Trying something new that you’re leery of but still open minded about.

Conversely, the worse experiences are those that you had a particular vision of in your head in advance. You imagined it going one particular way and you’re super excited to see that vision materialize in reality. When it doesn’t go exactly as planned we immediately think it sucked. Not because it sucked but because it didn’t match our imagination.

It’s worth striving to go into things without expectation. That doesn’t mean being unprepared. Or never trying to achieve a goal. But rather, not having a rigid vision. This is a lot harder to do then it seems on paper. Because, ironically, trying to do it, expecting it to make everything better, leads directly to it failing.