When I was a kid, one of my favorite video games was Donkey Kong. For those of you unfamiliar with this iconic game, the premise is that you are a carpenter (later named Mario) with a pet gorilla. The gorilla escapes and kidnaps your girlfriend and you have to rescue her and recapture the gorilla. During the course of the game, you have to avoid objects like barrels thrown by the gorilla, fireballs and other deadly elements. You have a chance to grab a hammer to smash some of these objects instead of jumping on them. There are four different screen stages that get progressively more difficult each time you complete them.
So why am I mentioning a video game from my youth? Well, I watched a show about the video game and the more I watched, the more I realized that Donkey Kong is a metaphor for our life’s journey.
There are four screens in Donkey Kong, each similar in some ways but very different in others. It makes me think of the different “screens” in our lives, like work, family, health, and happiness. We spend our lives striving to achieve our goals and trying to overcome the obstacles that come our way. We have to decide if we are going to avoid these obstacles and try to get around them somehow, or if we are going to grab our hammers and face them head on. In some cases in the game it is better strategy to jump the obstacles and in some cases it is better to face them head on. Something like life.
When we have problems with our boss, our children, or our waistline, we always have the option of facing it head on or finding a way around it. Not all problems need to be smashed with a hammer. Sometimes we have to decide which battles are worth fighting and when the best strategy is to just jump over the barrel and let it go. Either way, the goal is to keep moving forward to reach the bottom of the screen. It is up to each of us to discover our own personal strategy.
So as I mentioned, once you get to the end of each of the screens and are able to proceed to the next level, the game becomes more and more difficult with each screen offering more challenges. Sounds familiar? When we reach a goal in life, like a promotion for example, we have reached the end of a screen. But that doesn’t mean the game is over. far from there Now we are at a higher level of the game. We have more responsibility, more accountability, all new goals in front of us to achieve. Our screen looks similar but it has become more difficult, with new challenges, and again we must come up with a strategy to overcome it. Our strategy this time may involve less smashing and more jumping or vice versa, but the point is that we always have to evaluate our strategies to reach our goals on each screen, and sometimes we need to adjust our strategy accordingly.
So what happens if we try to get through a screen and one of the obstacles hits us? What if we can’t avoid it or crush it? Well, we learn from that. We put another quarter into the game (or for our younger readers, hit reset on our game console) and take that experience and use it to better plan the next time that roadblock comes our way. With practice we improve in all facets of the game, be it at work, at home, etc. We’re never going to be able to top it on our first try, and hope it leads to disappointment. It’s best to temper our expectations, knowing that even if we don’t make it to the end of the screen on the first try, we’ve learned and hopefully be better equipped for the next one we face a similar hurdle.
So as we progress through this video game we call life, we hope that we can all achieve our own personal high scores while enjoying playing the game.