I Never Stopped Playing
—

A friend of mine, an Australian woman whose view of the world I have always admired, once told me that every story has the power to change someone's life.

I was not sure, when she said it, that mine was worth telling. My path had not been traditional or linear or particularly easy to explain. It had been a winding road of unexpected turns, difficult seasons, and discoveries that arrived without warning. But when I sat with her words and began to look back honestly at the moments when I had felt most alive, most genuinely engaged, most like myself, I noticed something I had not consciously named before.

The moments that felt most like living were the moments when work felt like play.

I want to take you back to a living room floor.

I am sitting with family and friends, completely absorbed in a game of Monopoly. The thrill of acquiring a property, the tension of a negotiation, the quiet satisfaction of a strategy coming together. Nobody needed to explain to me why this mattered. It simply did. There was something in the combination of thinking and competing and adapting that made time disappear entirely.

Then there was chess. A game that demanded patience and foresight and the ability to hold the whole board in your mind while making a single move. Every piece had a role. Every decision had consequences that rippled outward. I loved it not in spite of its difficulty but because of it. The difficulty was the point.

And then there was Snakes and Ladders, which taught me something that no classroom ever quite managed to articulate as cleanly. One roll of the dice could send you climbing. The next could drop you back to where you started. The game did not apologise for this. It simply continued, and the only thing that determined whether you eventually won was whether you kept playing. Setbacks were not interruptions to the journey. They were the journey.

Video games arrived later and confirmed everything the board games had already shown me. The rush of completing a level. The particular satisfaction of mastering a skill after failing at it repeatedly. The way failure in that context never felt discouraging, because I understood instinctively that failure was simply information, a signal about what to try differently next time. I never needed to be told to keep going. The game made me want to.

I carried all of that with me into my career without fully realising it.

My first major professional challenge arrived early: building an entire IT department from nothing. No existing infrastructure. A tight budget. Limited resources. I was, in almost every practical sense, on my own. I remember looking at the empty space where a functioning department was supposed to exist and feeling something that surprised me. Not anxiety, though there was some of that. Excitement. The same kind of excitement I had felt sitting down to a chess board, because what was in front of me was a strategy problem of genuine complexity, and strategy problems had always been where I felt most alive.

Every decision had to be thought through carefully, five steps ahead if possible. What hardware was needed. How to make the most of constrained resources. How to build something secure and sustainable rather than simply functional. Every server installed and every cable laid felt like unlocking a new level, and I worked late into many nights not because I had to but because I was genuinely absorbed. When the department was finally complete and I stood back and looked at what had been built, I felt something that had nothing to do with ambition or recognition. I felt the quiet, deep satisfaction of having played the game well.

Years later, the game became considerably more complex.

I found myself managing two entirely different departments simultaneously. On one side, Quality and Safety, with its precise requirements, its systems and standards and the particular discipline of ensuring that everything aligns not just adequately but well. On the other, General Cargo Vessel Agency operations, a world I had never worked in before, with its intricate logistics, its tight schedules, and its high-stakes decisions. I was stepping into unfamiliar territory, and I knew it.

But unfamiliar territory had never frightened me the way it seemed to frighten some people. It had always felt, instead, like a new game to learn. So I studied. I observed. I asked questions of my General Manager and the company's owner, both of whom gave me more support and guidance than I could have asked for. I treated every day as a new level and every problem as a puzzle that had a solution worth finding. Quality management, in particular, felt like assembling something intricate and deeply satisfying, each process and standard and requirement a piece that, when placed correctly, made the whole picture clearer and more functional. I found genuine joy in seeing those pieces align. In watching the people around me work better because of systems we had built together. In the small daily evidence that the work was actually helping.

And then, unexpectedly, writing arrived.

I had not planned to become an author. It was not part of any career strategy or personal vision I had mapped out. But when I began writing about management and leadership and the inner life that underpins both, I felt something I recognised immediately: the same excitement I had felt explaining a game to a friend who had never played it before. The pleasure of taking something complex and making it accessible. Of handing someone a map and watching them begin to navigate with it. Writing, I discovered, was another form of play, one that happened to reach further than any single conversation could.

I have always believed that knowledge should be available to everyone, regardless of their background, their culture, their title, or their starting point. That belief, I came to understand, was not simply a professional conviction. It was the same instinct that had made me want to teach my friends how to play chess when I was a child, the instinct to share something that brought me joy and watch it bring them joy too. Every article I have written and every book I have published has carried that instinct at its centre.

What I know now, looking back across all of it, is that the mindset I developed on a living room floor with a Monopoly board never actually left me. It simply grew, and adapted, and found new games to play in new arenas. The curiosity that made me want to master a video game became the curiosity that made me want to build an IT department from nothing. The resilience that Snakes and Ladders taught me, that setbacks are part of the journey rather than the end of it, became the resilience that carried me through the harder seasons of my professional life. The patience that chess required became the patience that quality management demanded and that writing requires every single day.

None of this means the work was always easy. It was not. There were seasons of real difficulty, real doubt, real exhaustion. But the mindset made the difference between experiencing those seasons as defeats and experiencing them as levels. Harder than expected, sometimes. But still part of the game. Still worth playing.

My Australian friend was right. Every story has the power to inspire. I share this one not because it is extraordinary, but because I believe the insight at its heart belongs to everyone.

You already know how to approach a challenge with curiosity. You already know how to persist through failure without losing the will to continue. You already know how to find joy in the process of mastering something difficult. You learned all of that before you were ten years old, sitting on a floor somewhere, completely absorbed in a game that nobody had to convince you to care about.

The question is simply whether you are willing to bring that same spirit to the life you are living now.

Work, approached with that mindset, stops feeling like something you endure and starts feeling like something you are genuinely playing. And in that shift, something remarkable becomes possible.

Not perfection. Not the absence of difficulty.

Just the deep, sustaining joy of being fully in the game.