Life Is More Like Catan Than a Box of Chocolates

Building a career or a business is a lot like playing a strategy board game. Imagine you are playing Catan. As the game progresses, you pick up different tiles and different cards, laying them down turn by turn. The pieces you get are essentially random, just like the conditions we are born into. We do not control our starting position. We do not choose our socioeconomic background or the citizenship we have at birth. That part is like the hand of cards you are dealt in a game.

But it goes further than that. In games like Catan, you keep picking up random cards and new tiles as you go. Life works the same way. Randomness never stops. You continue to be handed new circumstances and opportunities. The difference comes from how you choose to play. You decide when to hold, when to play, and how to shape your overall strategy.

That brings me to what I think is the most important lesson from this analogy. You are not going to win the whole game in one turn. You simply cannot. That is not how the mechanics work. If you do not follow those mechanics you are not even playing the same game. Life is the same. There may not be dice rolls or point systems, but there are rules and mechanics. Society functions in certain ways. Laws exist. Our bodies and minds change over time. The constraints are real, and they mean you cannot do everything at once.

One turn might be finishing a degree. One turn might be building a new connection. One turn might be landing your first client or publishing a piece of work. Sometimes a turn feels small, like only picking up a resource card. Other times it feels big, like putting down a settlement. The truth is that both are necessary. No one wins without the quiet turns that build the foundation for the louder ones.

So while Forrest Gump’s mama said life is like a box of chocolates, personally I think it is a bit more like a game of Catan. 

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