What are three things you’ve learned about laughter? What are three things you’ve learned about getting into trouble? What are the three best ways to resolve a conflict?
These are the kinds of questions that you’ll find in Three Things.
It’s a card game and the brainchild of Maui-based motivational speaker Eric Saperston — but more than that, it’s a fun way to foster conversation and connection between players and people.
To learn more about the game and the incredible journey that inspired it, HPR sat down with Saperston to learn more about what inspired him. It all began with a quote: “To know the road ahead, ask those coming back.”
“That spoke to me, and I realized that if I wanted to live an extraordinary life, the quickest and surest way for me to do that would be to go seek out some of the most extraordinary people in the world and take them out for a cup of coffee, and find out the values they live by, the struggles they've endured,” he said.
Driven by his curiosity to learn more about the people in the world around him, Saperston’s journey brought him face-to-face with figures as high-profile as the director of the FBI, Woody Harrelson and Kathryn Thornton, the first woman astronaut in space.
The game, he said, was designed to help ordinary people make those same eye-opening connections.
“We live in an era now where technology can answer almost anything,” Saperson explained. “But it cannot tell you what grandma learned after being married for 50 years, or what your best friend discovered after rebuilding after failure, or what your daughter dreams of becoming. Those answers still live inside of people.”
That’s why he describes it as “a game that turns strangers into friends and friends into family.”
Three Things is available for purchase now. More information about the game can be found here.
This story aired on The Conversation on Aug. 31, 2026. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Jinwook Lee adapted this story for the web.
