I got to wondering why Solitaire is played so much on computers at home and at work. The obvious answer was it was one of the first games put on computers. I was looking for something a bit deeper.

Solitaire is not a hard game. In fact, most children pick it up very quickly after a few go rounds. So how is it that it’s still the main game of choice when someone is goofing off at the office or passing the time on the computer at home?

Here’s one perspective. Solitaire has 7 piles of cards to work with when you initially lay out the cards. You can keep track of 7 piles with minimum effort. That got me to thinking that our intellect is only capable of keeping track of roughly 7 bits of awareness at any one moment in time.

So Solitaire doesn’t really stretch you. In fact, there is no real benefit whatsoever – other than to pass time or to goof off. It’s not a challenge. Checkers is more challenging than Solitaire. Chess is even more of a challenge. So how come these games aren’t played with more frequency?  Perhaps you’ll find an answer in the paragraphs below.

Solitaire is a treadmill.

If you find yourself regularly playing Solitaire at work, you need a new job.

If you continually play it at home, you are avoiding something that needs attention.

Solitaire will never fill the need in you. And if you thought this was a dissertation on computer game playing consider this:

Excessive food consumption will never satiate your emotional hunger. Abuse of alcohol and drugs will never take away the source of pain you are attempting to deaden. These behaviors are signals that you need something else in your life – an epiphany.

You need to notice that you are playing too small of a game – one that will have you repeat your experience and never stretch you and open you up to what life has to offer. Did you ever wonder, “How good could it be?”

The first step is to recognize you are playing below your talent level. That recognition alone is often enough to get you on the pathway to self discovery. Staying on the path requires that you put yourself out there. It’s like one of my teachers Dave Dobson says, “The ripe fruit is out on the skinny branches.”

The key to begin changing patterns of behavior is a 3 step process:

1.  Recognize a pattern while it is running – not 15 minutes later.

2. Interrupt the pattern while it is running. Deliberately stop what you are doing at that moment.

3. Immediately begin to wonder what productive thing you could do that would be better than what you just interrupted.

These are the first steps to finding a deeper you. The consistent application of the above formula will cause new productive patterns of behavior to form automatically. You may then find yourself buying a chess set or one of my Hypnosis CDs or DVDs.

All the best,

John