Life Is a Video Game. Playing on Hard Mode Is the Only Counter-Intuitive Way to Win.
Here’s why. And what gamers know that most people don't.
Rudolf entered Auschwitz at 18.
To dehumanize him, they replaced his name with number 44070. He got to have sex for the first time in there with a woman named Alice.
He felt lucky.
Alice got gassed to death the next day. Back then no one knew the horrors of Auschwitz. It was a giant secret.
Rudolf had one of the better jobs. He collected baggage from people as they got off the trains. Every day he saw the guards lie to new passengers.
“Right this way, sir. It’s time to have a shower and relax.”
The shower was the gas chamber. I feel sick typing that. What happened at Auschwitz is one of the greatest assembly lines of murder in all history.
Rudolf got it in his head that he could solve this giant problem. He had to escape and get the word out of the mass murders happening in plain sight. He teamed up with fellow prisoner Alfred Wetzler.
They had a massive obstacle to overcome.
Any attempted escape would cause the guards to start a 3-day manhunt. If they got caught they’d be hung in front of the other prisoners as a deathly warning.
Right next to Auschwitz was a huge pile of wood. Rudolf and Alfred decided to hide there for 3 days to avoid the manhunt. But the guards had sniffer dogs.
To hide their scent they drenched themselves in gasoline and tobacco. All went well until a few hours into the manhunt one guard decided to check the pile of wood. They started removing plank by plank.
Rudolf had a knife ready to slit his own throat in case they got caught.
Mid-way through the guards got distracted and stopped their search of the woodpile. Phewwwwww. When the 3 days were up the manhunt stopped as expected.
Late at night they ran from their hiding spot. Now they faced their next challenge. They had to walk 86 miles to Slovakia. They stood out because they had on Auschwitz uniforms. In all the towns on the way, there were hidden Nazi rats ready to report any unusual activity to the Germans.
To top it off, they had no idea where they were going. And no map. And it was freezing cold and they were underdressed.
Surprisingly they made it out alive.
Alfred wrote a detailed report on the mass murders and every aspect of Auschwitz. His report started to go viral amongst everyday people who shared it.
Somehow the report made it into the hands of Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Pope.
Churchill was horrified after he read the report. He claimed it was one of the most deadly and evil acts ever committed.
The Pope and the Vatican managed to pressure the Germans to stop. Eventually the trains out of Hungry that went to the gas chambers were halted.
Rudolf’s brave actions saved approximately 200,000 lives.
This story is the ultimate definition of hard mode.
Life is a hidden video game
99% of us aren’t going to become Rudolf.
And we don’t need to. The point of hard mode isn’t to risk your life and stop a World War. It’s to focus on being action-orientated.
Instead of dreaming, hoping, waiting … you take small daily actions to slowly change. It took me years to figure out why some of my most successful friends are gamers.
In school they were told by teachers and parents that their video game habit was destructive. That they were wasting their life playing games like World of Warcraft. But, now, later in life they are the most successful.
The reason is, to become successful at a video game and compete on the world stage, there’s one decision they all make by default without realizing it.
On the homescreen of the game there are three modes:
Easy mode
Normal mode
Hard mode
I always played on easy mode and never got to compete. They played on hard mode from day one and had no interest in easy mode.
Only later in life does it now make sense to me.
We self-select to play life on hard mode. It’s a hidden choice. And if we make it, then life gets 10x easier. Let me explain.
Hard Mode = Easy Mode
What the hell?
Yep. Most people don’t want to play hard games in life. As soon as they hear an idea is hard they either reject it, or even funnier, they add it to the “someday” list.
My friend Zach Pogrob says “Some stop because it's hard. Some start because it's hard.” I instantly relate to this.
Why?
When I hear a goal is hard, I want to do it because I know there’s almost zero competition. Take online writing for example.
I can only find about 50 good writers in the whole world that I’m happy to read each day. I’ve searched far and wide and that’s it.
So when people complain writing is hard, I laugh. There’s simply no competition. This means hard mode is easy mode if you can be patient and think long-term.
Uncertainty becomes 10x easier to deal with
I hear this all the time: “I don’t know where to start. I don’t know what to do.”
This is normal but staying in this frame of mind is optional. When you choose hard mode you build a library of evidence that says you can do hard things and figure shit out by yourself.
So when uncertain events arrive that you didn’t choose, even if you don’t have the answers, you can figure it out in your own time and not sweat it.
Too many people handicap themselves with easy mode that leaves them unprepared for difficult life events.
This is what living actually looks like
Easy mode isn’t living.
It’s existing. Dan Koe says sometimes people complain to him about new goals being hard. He laughs.
“Oh, you mean you're actually living for once? Not trapped on a flat line of boring easy tasks? You got shocked out of your daily dullness?”
Life doesn’t end when things get hard. Actually, life begins when you play on hard mode. It’s where the real rewards are found. It’s where you discover a new baseline and shock your system enough to produce a transformation.
I lived for decades on easy mode. It got me nowhere and left me broke. I couldn’t handle the smallest inconvenience.
If my train was late, I’d lose my shit.
If the weather got cold, I’d freeze and complain to work colleagues about how cold I was – instead of doing some free exercise to warm up.
The navy seals have a saying: “Adversity is an opportunity.”
The more hard times you face, the more growth you experience.
Growth is value.
Growth is meaning.
Growth is happiness.
Growth = Money (and eventually financial freedom).
"When confidence comes from results, you gravitate toward doing easy things. When confidence comes from the ability to figure it out, nothing can stop you.”
– Shane Parrish