I was late to the phone app game, and scoffed at people who played. After all, it was just mindless entertainment. Couldn’t you find something better to do with your time?

The fact is, it being mindless entertainment is the point (that I missed at the time). Because sometimes you need something more interactive/stimulating than a TV show. It’s also colorful and gives you tiny rewards that release all sorts of positive chemicals, but that’s not the lesson I learned:

Even when you fail, you can try again tomorrow.

You only have so many Hearts. Sometimes you hit a level that you fail at again and again (and again, after watching a video to earn an extra Heart). So what do you do? You put the device down, step away, do something else. And tomorrow (or several hours later when you’ve regained Hearts), you try again. (Or you use gold bars and/or real money to buy more lives, but let’s put that aside for now.)

The same thing applies to life. This story isn’t working? Put it aside for now and pick it up later. Didn’t get everything done on your to-do list? Well, maybe you spent all your Hearts on washing the dishes, so you’ll have to do the next level tomorrow (or next weekend). For the most part, the levels will wait, and we have time to do them, or try again later if we didn’t succeed the first time.

Oh, and every once in a while, treat yourself to a candy explosion.