In church on Sunday, the teacher compared our lives to a game of Chutes and Ladders. Sometimes things go well, and we seem to be climbing all the ladders, but at other times, the chutes seem to always bring us back to square one.
I remembered that about a year ago, I was bored and decided to write a computer program simulating the game. I wanted to know how many turns it takes on average to win by reaching the 100th square.
After running the game simulation 125,000 times, the program calculated that it takes an average of 39 turns to win the game. But what about the minimum and the maximum number of turns? What if you were the luckiest player ever and rolled the perfect series of numbers? Or what if you were the unluckiest player and couldn't seem to reach the last square for the life of you? Well, here are the statistics:
- The minimum number of turns to win the game was 7.
- The maximum number of turns to win the game was ... 417. That's almost 60 times more than the minimum number!
So, I got to thinking about how this relates to life.
It might seem like some people have life pretty easy. They seem to have everything going for them—a strong support system, excellent physical and mental health, talents that make it easy to be successful, and so on. They get through the game of life in an easy 7 turns, so to speak.
Most people are probably in the realm of 39 turns, hitting both chutes and ladders throughout their lives.
And then there are the people who seem to always be swimming upstream, facing obstacle after obstacle. And even when they manage to significantly move forward at one point, those blasted chutes just keep bringing them down. Or they might roll only 1s and 2s, making progress annoyingly slow. Surely they climb ladders along the way, but it's hard to be happy about it when you know another chute is lingering right around the corner!
So, if you feel like you're in that final category, take heart in knowing this: the only way to lose the game is to stop playing. If you just keep persevering and rolling that die—time after time, turn after turn—eventually you will make it to the final square. Even if it takes you 417 turns.
