In video games, there’s a very interesting gaming mechanic which can drive people to spend countless hours of effort: leveling up. This is a major feature to many Role Playing Games (the Final Fantasy series, World of Warcraft, Skyrim) and it consumes people until they’ve achieved their goal. In some games, “leveling up” will increase your characters skills or abilities , unlock new features or weapons, or move the story of along. Sometimes the only reward is a cosmetic effect for your character, and other times the reward comes in the form of a trophy, badge, or title that indicates you’ve accomplished something specific. These in-game achievements keep players coming back again and again as they strive to build the perfect in-game character.What if we took this same approach with real life? What if we could level up our lives and our real-life character by taking advantage of these same mechanics? To that point, why aren’t we doing this more already?! It seems to make total sense. For today’s post, I’m going to talk about leveling up your life just like it was a video game.
But aren’t we already doing this?
This gaming mechanic kind of exists in our lives already, but not in very obvious or tangible ways. For example, as you gain experience in your career you’re building up your knowledge, skills, and value as an employee or tradesman. Unfortunately, it’s usually difficult to quantify that kind of progress within the context of a year unless you achieve some sort of major milestone or update your resume. Your LinkedIn profile gets filled out and your resume gets longer/more impressive, but this is hardly an incentive to keep working over the course of several months. Getting promoted, on the other hand, is a great motivator for many people – but promotions usually only happen every 1-3 years or so, which leaves you with a long stretch of time in which you aren’t feeling your progress being made.
You may be going to the gym 3 times a week to get in shape, which is sort of like battling monsters to level up in a video game. Both take time and usually involve repetitive tasks, yet regularly going to the gym is one of the toughtest habits for people to establish. In contrast, it’s very easy to get someone addicted to a game like World of Warcraft even though it consumes more time and often yields little-to-no benefit in your actual life. People pick up and quit musical instruments all the time, but kids developed amazing reaction times and dexterity through Guitar Hero and other similar games. Why does it seem like we have it backwards?There are several reasons why gaming mechanics belong in your real life, and these mechanics could propel you to new heights if you took advantage of them. Game designers often craft the player experience around behaviors and actions which are habit-forming to increase the replay value of their game. But why does it work so damned well?
The Real-Life RPG: Structured Self Development is Broken
At my last job, I had number metrics that were important and I had other, less tangible qualities, that were apparently equally important to getting promoted. Happily, most of my managers had different ideas of what those qualities should be and how they were interpretted within the context of my job. Already, I’m starting at a disadvantage because there isn’t a clear path to success: If I succeed in the eyes of Manager A, I could be completely off course from Manager B’s idea of promotion-ready. This was enough to be frustrating. The worst part, however, was working for 2 years towards 3-5 different definitions of “promotion-ready,” which set me up to fail at all 5 because my effort was unfocused. They even tried (bless their hearts) to standardize the playbook, but nobody ever paid attention to the playbook between quarterly reviews and several criteria were intangilble (ex: “Drive for results,” “effective communication,” and “Managing vision & purpose” were numerically measured on a spreadsheet by my managers). You gave me a score of 4 (out of 5) for Driving Results? Great! Are you talking about driving my personal results, or driving results through others? Which results are we talking about, anyways? There was ambiguity at every step which was, ironically, another criteria by which we were measured (“dealing with ambiguity”). *sigh*
That’s just one example, but the same failure happens in other areas. Learning guitar? Better practice those scales until you hate music, becaues this book said so! Nevermind the fact that your guitar teacher has a differing opinion, the other books tell you different strategies, and most of them probably don’t ask you what your goal is for learning the guitar. This can send an excited new musican who just wants to play/sing along with their favorite Katy Perry CD (you know who you are) tumbling down the rabbit hole that’s more appropriate for an intermediate guitar player with some music theory background and a desire to play guitar solos someday. The same problem exists in both examples: lack of goal-oriented action, ambiguous pathways to success, an ineffective or non-existant method for measuring progress, and the absence of quick-wins or short-term milestones.
The Digital RPG: Leveling up works beautifully,
but all you get is a shiny striped tiger.
I once spent several hours across several days playing World of Warcraft to unlock a special mount (a ‘mount’ is a rideable animal for transportation purposes). This stretch of time was extremely boring. It required me to run back and forth across a large in-game area, killing the same small groups of monsters over and over as they re-appeared over time to win in-game reputation points and collect items that the monsters would leave behind at a very low % rate. Why did I do this? The reward was a badass tiger with glowing stripes that almost nobody owned, and for whatever reason… I wanted that damned tiger. After winning the tiger, I rode into battle on the back of an extremely rare and badass tiger while everyone else rode around on their stupid horses and this made me happy How did I succeed at this but fail at going to the gym this month?The failure points I referred to earlier were nowhere to be found. I knew FOR A FACT that a certain set of actions would move me closer to my goal. I even knew exactly how much closer each monster-kill would bring me, so I could caluclate my time and optimize my route/strategy to more effectively reach my goal. I also had a very simple and clear pathway to my goal: I had to collect X number of points, either by killing monsters for a set value or collecting the rare items they dropped for a different set value. I knew exactly how far I was from my goal at all times, both in points and time (because I did the math ahead of time), because my progress was tracked on a colorful bar at the bottom of the screen. If I had gotten 10% of the way there and became miserable, I knew that I would have to do the same work 9 more times and could make an informed decision to either quit or press onward. Additionally, I had a few small quick wins because the monster-slaying would lead to more in-game currency, experience points to unlock new skills, and my tiger points were tracked on a progress bar which leveled up as well. These quick wins didn’t mean a whole lot to me, but they were a nice byproduct of something I was already doing.
Leveling up your life, video game style!
Most real-life goals involve the same series of steps: you take repetitive and frequent steps to build a set of skills or strenghts in order to achieve a certain level of mastery in order to either feel good about yourself or unlock new opportunities. Want a nicer car? Save your money a little bit at a time, learn about ways to cut costs or increase income, grow your savings and purchasing power, and eventually you will have the potential to buy that car. The key is to identify and establish behaviors which move you closer to your goal, and provide yourself with clear information and milestones along the way. For the less-tangible things, you can transform your desire to “be” something into an action that indicates success. For example, if you want to be a better home cook your milestone could illustrate this skill by cooking dinner for a group of friends with no help. Want to be a better piano player? Choose a song that is currently beyond your ability, and your miltestone is to play that song without stopping or making mistakes. Each section of the song can be its own milestone, so you can learn the song a bit at a time and put the pieces together. Set reasonable milestones and repetitive actions to break it down into pieces or miniature quests.
I’m currently using the Everest app for iPhone to track my progress for this website. I want to have a successful websites, and there are several milestones that would indicate success at this. Happily, the behaviors are relatively simple – I need to write posts, I need to do it consistently and regularly, and I need to share and engage on Social Media. There’s no hard definition for a “successful” website, but I’ve decided on milestones that would make it feel like a success to me. Here are some example tasks/milestones that I just started tracking within the app:
– Write a weekly blog post (repeating task)
– Share my blog post on Twitter & Google+ (repeating task)
– Share 1 daily piece of valuable content on social media (repeating task)
– Get 100 Followers on Twitter (milestone)
– Get 100 Likes on the SuperSelf Facebook Page (milestone)
– Get added to 100 Circles on Google+ (milestone)
– Get 100 blog subscribers (milestone)
– Have over 500 site visitors for 6 months in a row (milestone)
– Plan 3 Podcast interviews (milestone + repeating task)
The blog posts and Social Media habits will lead to most of the other milestones, so I’m focusing on building behavior WHILE working towards a milestone. If I achieve a milestone, it is not my ultimate GOAL but a strong indicator which demonstrates my progress towards that goal. The app tracks how many days in a row I’ve worked towards my ultimate goal of having a successful website based on these actions and milestones, and I can track the growth of my followers and subscribers over time with other software to see what’s working, what’s not, and make educated guesses about timeline once I have a couple months of data to look at.
Next steps: Leveling up YOUR life
Your turn, hombre. Ask yourself these questions and write your answers in the comments or on the SuperSelf Facebook page
- What attribute, goal, or long term dream do you want to work towards?
- What are a few milestones that would demonstrate progress along the way?
- What small, frequent, and repetitive actions can I take to slowly build the necessary skills or work towards my milestones?
- How will you track your progress?
Once you’ve chosen your path, it would be awesome to work towards our goals together! Connect with me on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or download the Everest app and look me up. You got this.
– Dan
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