Ultimate Self Growth by Gamifying Your Life

What It Takes to Reinvent Yourself and Achieve Self Growth

The Social Dilemma 

My early love of gaming eventually translated into a love for all technology. I’ve always been the guy that couldn’t wait to get my hands on the flashiest tech toys, bringing out the kid in me as I reached for the latest gadgets.

Many of the people I meet from my generation (and younger) understand this struggle. At first, it’s exciting and empowering.

But as time goes by, it becomes clear that our knowledge and tech skills have outpaced our wisdom. We’re so enthralled with the fact that we can do the impossible (thanks to technology), that we forget to stop and ask if we should accomplish this or that. As the late great Stan Lee once said, 

“With great power, there must also come great responsibility.” 

This podcast is worth listening to Become Unstoppable | Growth Strategies for Startups with Brad Sugars, Bestselling Author, Business Coach & Keynote Speaker

Technology - Is It Helping Us or Hurting Us?

Monster tech companies such as FB and Google are integral to our lives because they built their empires around giving us instant dopamine hits. We try to gather more information, clicking here, there and everywhere thinking that each new click brings us happiness.

This model revolves around selling user attention to the highest bidder to boost a business’s bottom line. We’re being subtly manipulated by algorithms, and our happiness and well-being are nowhere to be found. 

Combine this with the fact that the world is becoming increasingly obsessed with money, power, and fame, and it’s no wonder teen suicide is at an all-time high. The World Happiness Report goes down each year, and our life span is declining for the first time in decades. 

Our relentless search for those quick dopamine hits and desire to make things more convenient has unwittingly led us to a fixed victim mindset, where we prefer the low-hanging fruit of failure habits over a growth mindset. We’re so caught up in what we think we SHOULD do, that we neglect the things we NEED to do.

Technology is a great thing in that it helps us accomplish more with far less effort. And it's in our nature to exert as little effort as possible. This stems from our paleolithic days when conserving energy equated to our best chance of survival. But the downside is stunted personal development.

Growth requires discipline, but every time we choose to grab the low-hanging fruit, we’re degrading our ability to maintain it.

This podcast is worth listening to How to Develop the Good Habit of Having a Growth Owner Mindset

ABG - Always Be Growing

Quantum leaps in science and tech have made it exponentially easier to do less and less, all at the cost of watering down the number one ingredient for deep, long-term, soul-filling happiness: to Always Be Growing (ABG).

What Does It Mean to “Gamify Your Life”?

Gamifying your life means reducing the suffering associated with personal growth by applying game-like elements that will make you WANT to improve success habits. These game-like elements include:

• Play

• Competition

• Reward system

• Social connectivity

I’ve always been a gamer. When I first turned on my Atari 2600, I knew my life would never be the same. I could be anyone and do anything, and all it took to beat each game was a dedication to practice and master certain skills. Each game had its own unique challenges, and I loved decoding the different puzzles and unlocking more rewards.

As my adolescent struggles mounted, my Nintendo helped me cope with some extremely rough times. I could explore new galaxies, slay three-headed aliens, and score goals against the greatest athletes of all time. I could escape the terrible world around me and feel safe.

Much later in life - after finding happiness and building a life on my own terms - I began to think back to those video games.

I thought If only there was a way to translate my love for video games into real life, to defeat the challenges facing major areas of my life like my mindset, relationships, and finances the same way I did those three-headed aliens. 

It’s taken me 25 years to make this dream a reality. Part of the journey was understanding what it meant to truly be happy. It took me many years to dig my way out of my past and overcome my suicidal tendencies from my college days.

To win the game of life means figuring out what truly makes you happy. Once you know what you want out of life, you learn to develop customized success habits and build positive momentum.

What I’ve learned is that we will never be perfect, but we can experience true happiness by gamifying self-reinvention and feeding that momentum over the course of the rest of our lives. No cheat codes necessary.

Examples of Gamification for Amusement

Many big tech companies use gamification to get us hooked on their product or service. 

As we scroll through social media, we’re getting our dopamine shots from the virtual connectivity and a sense of excitement for what we might see in our feeds.

When we order from the Starbucks app, we get points and an immersive experience that has us wanting to come back again and again. 

Playing games like Candy Crush dazzle us with colorful graphics constantly exploding like fireworks and an extremely satisfying system of points and leveling-up.

Examples of Gamification for Personal Growth

The good news is that I’ve seen the pendulum begin to swing the other direction with companies incorporating wellness into their gamified products.

For example, Peloton gamifies fitness with a high-tech interface, rewards system, and social connectivity and competition with others.

Calm gamifies our meditation and breathing with advancing levels and an online community. 

Bumble gamifies meeting other people in person using social prompts, rewards, and a catchy activity of swiping right or left based on your preferences.

Self-reinvention Can Be Fun & Addictive (in a good way)

Gamification is the process of making boring, undesirable, and/or difficult tasks easier to perform by incorporating game-like elements to reinforce daily success habits. It’s a way to ease our brains more naturally into WANTING to take action by giving us those shots of dopamine in a healthier, more sustainable way.

I recommend listening to this podcast - Be Patient in Life | Gamification Tips

The Game of Life Has Rules

Just like any game, the game of life has rules. I refer to these as universal principles that have been around since the beginning of time. The key to winning the game of life is becoming aware of and mastering these rules/principles holistically using success habits.

Growth Owner Versus Fixed Victim

I believe to beat the game of life, you must take ownership by becoming what I call a growth owner versus a fixed victim. 

A growth owner is someone who understands that every day is an opportunity to level up. By contrast, fixed victims blame their circumstances and choose instead to seek dopamine hits using shortcuts and low-hanging fruit.

Everyone can be a growth owner if they choose. And gamifying your self-growth can help you find pleasure in the process of ongoing improvement.

Your 5 Cores

It all starts with a fundamental understanding of what makes you tick. We must identify the main areas of life, find balance, and continually work to improve them. I’ve labeled these main areas as the Five Cores, which are…

1. Mindset

2. Career & Finances

3. Relationships

4. Physical Health

5. Emotional Health

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Without taking all five cores seriously, you will likely excel in one area at the expense of others. An imbalance in your life will prevent happiness, which is why it’s critical to work them all together.

The more you're able to master the underlying rules of these five cores and customize them to your “player” in the “game of life,” the better chance you’ll have to complete each level and increase your happiness. Doing this requires eliminating your failure habits and replacing them with success habits.

Honoring Commitments to Yourself

Discipline and accountability are the two key ingredients to achieving the deep, long-term, soul-filling happiness we all seek. It means owning those actions that ultimately result in your growth and happiness. 

Self-reinvention is understanding what needs to be done, making a plan, and sticking to the commitments you make to yourself until they become part of who you are - daily success habits.

Momentum & the Law of Compounding

Success Loop of Personal Growth

Ultimately, the goal is to help you step out of what I call your “failure loop” (guided by your fixed victim mindset) and into your “success loop” led by your growth-owner mindset. This success loop is the foundation of positive momentum in your life.

Powering yourself up to the next level in the game of life won’t be easy - worthwhile things rarely are. But the good news is it’s a front-loaded process that will harness the same law of compounding currently being used against you by Big Tech.

"Tiny daily improvements accumulate over time to form massive results. Improving by 1% on its own isn’t remarkable, but if you improve by 1% every single day one core at a time, it will compound into something remarkable.” – James Clear, author of Atomic Habits

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