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

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,