From Cherie Carter-Scott’s “If Life is a Game, These are the Rules.”

Rules for Being Human

1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it will be yours for the entire period of this time around.

2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called Life. Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or think them irrelevant and stupid.

3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial and error: Experimentation. The “failed” experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiment that ultimately “works.”

4. A lesson is repeated until learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can then go on to the next lesson.

5. Learning lessons does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain its lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.

6. “There” is no better than “here.” When your “there” has become a “here,” you will simply obtain another “there” that will again look better than “here.”

7. Others are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects something you love or hate about yourself.

8. What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.

9. Your answers lie inside you. The answers to life’s questions lie inside you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.

10. You will forget all this.

You’ve heard people say they love their jobs so much they can’t believe they get paid to do it. If you are fortunate enough to be one of those people –as I am– you understand. If not, it just sounds like bullshit. But here’s what I’m wondering… does enjoying your work to that degree change how you feel about money? I can’t remember ever saying to myself, “Hey, I worked too damned hard for that money to (fill in the blank).” I mean, if the money is less important than the satisfaction you get from the job, it’s just less…valuable. For a few weeks one college summer I worked on the assembly line of an auto plant in St. Louis. I think 62 cars an hour passed my station. Would I do that job for 5 years at $100K per? I don’t think so. There’d have to be child that needed an operation or something. I’m not really going anywhere with this. For me, it wouldn’t be enough to just “not hate” my job. If –like me– you love what you do, all of this makes perfect sense. If not, well, I’m not going to tell you to find a job you love. You’ve got a million reasons why you can’t and I don’t have one why you can.