Sunday, February 3, 2013

Changing the game

A game changer is an inflection point that significantly alters a piece of your reality and can come as a person, an event, a confluence of circumstances, a technology, an issue, and a host of other ways.  Most people will never be part of a game changing event and even fewer will be a game changer.  Most of us live in managed conformity, never pushing out to, in Daniel Boorstin's words, the fertile verge.

Jesus Christ was a game changer, Martin Luther King, Jr. was a game changer, World War II was a game changer, television was a game changer, iTunes and the iPod were game changers, the Declaration of Independence was a game changer...you get the gist.  A game change can be a positive event or a negative event, or both.  The election of Barack Obama was a significant game changer in that he was the first black person to be elected president, which is a positive; however, he has proven to be extremely divisive, which is a negative.

Our culture, and mankind in general, abhors changing the game.  Our nature is to conform and obey, to not rock the boat.  Game changers travel against the prevailing winds of conventional wisdom (which is generally the opposite of wisdom, a form of group think).  All of that said, our progress as human beings owes everything to the game changers; those people, technologies, and events that have shaped us, our culture, and our world.

A game change doesn't have to be a civilization shaker; it just has to be that significant alteration of a piece of your reality and everyone is fully capable of being a game changer in their world.  What are you doing to change the game, to advance knowledge and the human condition?  That should be your art, your reason for getting up in the morning.  Now go do it!

Photo by mrpuen.