play.

I’ve always believed that life is a game. You give it your best, get good teammates around you, hopefully win more than you lose, but remember that you’re going to lose at times anyway, so you might as well have fun doing it.

What we didn’t realize before 2020 was just how complacent and safe we were all playing, and how much we were doing things simply because that was the way they had always been done. Yes, we were taking “risks,” but on the scale of how much we’ve all had to change, these risks were small and inconsequential.

I believe we have been thrown a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to embrace a new model of work and of life, and I want us to catch it with both hands. The nine-to-five day is gone, the office as we know it is gone, and the new model for working requires us to show up with a bunch of fresh skills in order to acclimate and get ahead.

There’s a new hustle going on for so many of us right now. Lots of clever people are embracing this new hustle eagerly, with their shoulders back and their eyes wide open. They’ve discarded the old ways of working and are rebirthing a new version of themselves. On the flipside, there are the types of people who are breathing a sigh of relief that they largely escaped the effects of the pandemic and can now return to life as it was. I understand this thinking—familiar is comfortable, after all—but I also urge us to look a little deeper at the opportunities to come from this extraordinary time.

We now have an opportunity to choose, so let’s choose wisely. Let’s take the lessons we’ve learned and turn them into something prevailing and something that matters. We have this chance to build productive teams that stay curious and open, and create inspiring workplaces our people want to come to. We have this beautiful opportunity to question why we do the work that we do and to interrupt old habits that we’ve now outgrown.

This is your chance to press reset for yourself and the people around you. You can architect a new framework for inspiring your people, helping them see that you’re available to them and committed to their new-found freedom and autonomy. You can keep showing up as a radical optimist who encourages positivity everywhere you go, holding space for possibility to thrive among your people and peers.

You can be the one who’s switched on to a new way of being, calling forth more creativity, space and freedom, or you can remain stuck in old ways, half asleep and cruising. Now is your chance to reinvent yourself and ultimately run your own race. You have one chance to go start that stock portfolio (just buy one share—start there!) or write the first sentence in that book you’ve been threatening to write (and then write the second and then the third until it’s done), start that business or save the first thousand dollars toward that investment property you want to own in the next few years.

It’s time for your breakthrough. Go forth confidently, proudly making the days count. This new hustle is yours. It’s yours to design and yours to own. Shoulders back, eyes open—it’s time to leap into a different way of being, and it’s time to claim your new hustle.

Remember this: it’s all one big game where you’re competing only against yourself to get better. When you play it well, you win. Tag, you’re it.