She said her friend was fine and had calmed down. In her cooling-off period, she could see some slight relationship between the game and her life. Although she and her husband did not own a boat, they did own everything else imaginable. She was angry after their divorce, both because he had run off with a younger woman and because after twenty years of marriage, they had accumulated little in the way of assets. There was vir- tually nothing for them to split. Their twenty years of mar- ried life had been incredible fun, but all they had accumulated was a ton of doodads. She realized that her anger at doing the numbers-the income statement and balance sheet-came from her em- barrassment of not understanding them. She had believed that finances were the man's job. She maintained the house andTucTThe entertaining, and he~handled the finances. She was now quite certain that in the last five years of their marriage, he had hidden money from her. She was angry at herself for not being more aware of where the money was going, as well as for not knowing about the other woman. Just like a board game, the world is always providing us with instant feedback. We could learn a lot if we tuned in more. One day not long ago, I complained to my wife that the cleaners must have shrunk my pants. My wife gently smiled and poked me in the stomach to inform me that the pants had not shrunk, somethjng_eJeJvgjcrjanded: me! "~ The'game CASHFLOW was designed to give every player personal feedback. Its purpose is to give you op- tions. If you draw the boat card and it puts you into debt, the question is, "Now what can you do?" How many dif- ferent financial options can you come up with? That is the purpose of the game: to teach players to think and create new and various financial options. I have watched this game played by more than 1,000 people. The people who get out of the "Rat Race" in the game the quickest are the people who understand num- bers and have creative financial minds. They recognize dif- ferent financial optionsTPeople who take the longest are people who are not familiar with numbers and often do not understand the power of investing. Rich people are often creative and take calculated risks. There have been people playing CASHFLOW who gain lots of money in the game, but they don't know what to do with it. Most of them have not been financially suc- cessful in real life either. Everyone else seems to be getting ahead of them, even though they have money. And that is true in real life. There are a lot of people who have a lot of money and do not get ahead financially. Limiting your options is the same as hanging on to old ideas. I have a friend from high school who now works at three jobs. Twenty years ago, he was the richest of all my classmates. When the local sugar plantation closed, the company he worked for went down with the plantation. In his mind, he had but one option, and that was the old op- tion: work hard.