8 Reasons Why You Should Treat Life Like A Video Game

To answer this notion of why we should treat our life as a video game we ran an experiment.

We wanted to see what differences were in people who adopted a pessimistic scarcity-led mentality to an optimistic abundant-led one. We wanted to measure whether a positive mindset was enough of a push to live life to the fullest or whether something else was at play. Were deadlines more of a motivator?

It seems obvious on the surface that an abundance mentality would always win when pressed again a scare-led one but the results of our experiment show a less obvious story when we combined factors driving both.

While pure pessimism and a lack of belief in your ability is absolutely a recipe for a poorer life, and while when you shoot for the stars you are more likely to reach the moon, there’s an interesting correlation between our fear and our motivation that should be taken into account.

We Need An Adaptable Mindset In Life, Not A Solely Scare Or Abundant One

It’s far too easy to just say ‘be positive’ but practice does show that if you believe you can succeed in something then you are more likely to. However, no amount of simple faith can guarantee or prep your mind for overcoming the hard wired fear responses governed within it to survive.

In other words, we often believe we want to do something on the surface, but unconsciously we have hard wired fears that hold us back as we feel the risks outweigh the action.

It’s not a lack of belief that stops people from taking action, it’s a fear that the consequences of those actions might make us worse off, even when in reality doing nothing is often the worse thing you can do.

Failures still breed success in the form of learning not what to do.

What is most important is seeking to challenge ourselves to take the risks that will lead towards added value in the long run.

This isn’t easy for most people to do though.

People are infinitely more likely to search for more positive-minded articles that will help them feel more comfortable and appease them of hardship than they would in seeking to challenge themselves to make life actually easier by overcoming hurdles.

This is especially true in today’s world filled with so many instant gratification means and entitled expectations.

What’s Happening? Why Do We Think This Way?

One of the biggest reasons we don’t seek risks in life is because we place way too much importance on being safe rather than being alive.

We need to treat our life as a video game.

While we shouldn’t needlessly put our physical lives at risk through being dare-devils for the sake of an adrenaline rush, the value we get out of life when we don’t see life as a game of safe survival dramatically improves our odds at having more options in life.

Think of it this way.

If we were to repeat the same tasks each day how much new stimulus or insight do you think we would actually gain compared to a week earlier?

We might find new things out through passive learning. We might build up crystalized intelligence that way, which in older age can benefit us, so it’s not exactly as bad thing to do, but it does dampen our electrical connections within our brain when we simply repeat and don’t fire new connections.

We don’t just become ‘less smart’, we build up fears in taking action in creating new connections. The double effect is how this fear then stresses and stifles our minds from learning or improving.

It’s vitally important for our brains to create new connections for our brain to stay flexible.

Yet, we often forget to take action because it generates fear, and we associate fear with danger and a strain on our resources. We are hard wired to preserve energy so we stick to our familiar routine, and only change when forced to, when in true survival mode like our very life depends on it.

How many times have you left that project until last minute? How many times have you wished for something more in life but not actively pursued it until you absolutely have to?

We are more likely to allow our money to drop to our last few dollars before our paycheck and rely on the comfort of knowing a paycheck is coming than we are to treat life like there is no paycheck becoming and to therefore be forced to hustle each day.

As soon as most people reach a form of survival beyond poverty they seek comfort rather than challenge.

This is the issue with a positive abundant mindset. We think there’s so much more out there so we aren’t always pushed to get it until we actually have scarcity and then do so.

It’s like we need the wake up call of a scarcity mindset coupled with the desire of an abundant mindset.

Yet we often think we have to have one or the other, which is ironic as thinking in black or white is not really the abundant mentality at all. Thinking in terms of shades of grey, or even better, in a spectrum of colors and possibilities.

You only have to look at Bitcoin to see how power this scarcity awareness with an abundant desire is. A limited supply but with no apparent ceiling is attractive to many people.

So, why don’t we put this scarcely abundant mindset to work more often?

Well going back to Bitcoin again, it holds risks. It can crash. It’s volatile. When it does our sudden positive attitude can turn very sour very quickly.

We can turn off our minds a lot faster than we can turn them onto something. It can take years for us to warm to a new idea and overcome our safety first conditioning, and then if something goes wrong we can fall back into that safety first thinking in an instant.

So, What Has This Got To Do With Video Games?

When we play video games we often fall into a dream world, a bubble. We feel safe in this world, like our physical self isn’t at risk.

We can play to our limits and push beyond them as if we die in the game with just start over.

That notion of having a second chance is appealing and stops our limbic from flying into fear mode, which then only blocks otherwise rational or creative thinking from taking place.

In a video game we can be what we want to be. We lose our inhibitions and we can fulfill our desires.

Not only do we feel safe in ourselves as the risks don’t feel so, well, risky, we also are able to push ourselves to our mental limits without real fear getting in the way.

There’s one problem though.

Real life isn’t a video game, and already so many people are seemingly lost in a virtual world behind their black mirror phone screens each day.

You want us to become even more lost?

Of course not. There’s a big difference in falling into a drone-like state of not being in control of your choices than there is to actively make them.

It’s not to tell people to actually live in a video game, but to treat their real life like one.

All we have to do is remember the times we played video games, if you aren’t still doing do. We could or can play for hours. There’s an element of getting lost in the flow. To feel free like you are living that life.

Yet there’s no real value in just pretending. We feel joy in knowing we can become superheroes in a fictional world, but it’s short lived when we wake up to reality, so how about feeling like a hero in the real world?

Well it’s possible so long as we learn how to treat our lives like a video game.

We simply have to think of our lives in the same way we think of approaching a game, like a mission to achieve something without giving into fears or comfort so easily.

8 Reasons Why We Should Treat Life Like A Video Game

Here’s 8 main benefits we get out of this mindset.

We Eradicate The Fear of Failure

As mentioned above, we don’t fear failure when we don’t treat our life as one chance but instead it is filled with chapters, or levels, to try to conquer. In a game we don’t just quit after one hurdle, we learn from our mistakes and we try again until we do overcome the hurdle and move onto the next (usually slightly harder) challenge.

We Understand Incremental Progress

In a game we rarely have to jump into the hardest challenge first. We are often walked into it. While sometimes in life that might not always seem so easy, we might have hard challenges right off the bat, one thing that is consistent is how we can only learn to deal with the challenge one lesson at a time. The incremental levels in games allow us the time to process, learn and move on to bigger quests. Apply this to our real life too and it won’t feel so overwhelming.

We Have A Goal To Work Towards

I’m games we have fixed goals to achieve. In life we often don’t have goals to work towards unless we make them ourselves. If we don’t then the only goal we have is what is created for us by others or to simply ‘survive’. If our goal is to only survive then nice we get to a level of being relatively comfortable then we have no more goals do we sit in comfort. The more we are there the more we get used to it and the more we fear changes. It’s so important to keep setting goals to live towards so we don’t just fall into auto pilot in life.

People often attach to games as they give them a purpose or objective to follow, and even though we are creative creatures we do tend to seek to preserve energy where possible and find the path of least resistance, so if a goal is preset then we find that easier than if we had to establish them ourselves. But meaning comes from setting our own goals in life, and this means we have to seek out the goals of our own game of life.

We Learn To Knuckle Down

While studies have suggested that performing over 10,000 hours of practice is what it takes to achieve a level of competence within a field, games require than level of dedication to in order to complete them (if possible to complete at all).

This is often misread advice though. This isn’t 10,000 hours of pressing buttons and repeating the same challenge over and over. In real life we tend to follow that routine and pattern more often, but in a game we are always seeking new challenges, road maps, experiences and quests. If we dedicated our real life practice to this varied level of seeking competence then our real lives would massively benefit from this. We wouldn’t be stale experts stuck in routine but adaptable people who can see a new game every time.

This doesn’t mean you have to specialize either. There’s many advantages to specializing but there’s also a growing need and trend leading towards the era of a smart generalist. The more adaptable you are the more your mind will thank you.

We Find Purpose And Get Rewarded

In games our purpose is our mission but in life we find purpose in something that adds value to our lives.

‘Work for work sake is stress, work for passion is a joy’, or ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ as the sayings go.

Yet in games we are often motivated to keep going by incremental rewards when we achieve a milestone.

Life should be no different. Rewarding ourselves should be a given, but like in games we reward ourselves after we have achieved a milestone.

Too often in today’s instant gratification and comfort led world we reward ourselves anyway. We can afford a lot more today than what we could in the past. Our level of expectation for even the smallest of apartments to hold modern amenities is growing.

We see rewards around us before we go out to work and it can lead us to a perceived lack of motivation or value. Rewards in life can be on the small mini-achievements or the big milestone changes, yet it’s often the smaller wins that motivate us more.

In a game our goal and vision may be on the bigger outcome of completing the game, but it’s the smaller tasks and rewards that keep us hooked. In life we need to ensure we give ourselves the same motivation to keep going.

We Connect With Others On Our Quest

Which games are the most enjoyable? The ones played entirely on our own or the ones you have to complete with others? Also, games with more character selection options tend to unravel different stories and pathways than one story alone.

Again real life should be no different. We are social beings but unlike in a game where we are actively integrating with others as a character, in our real life we are ironically hurting our heads in that proverbial sand of ‘virtual life’. It might appear like a game is real but it isn’t, and we must remember the difference.

Our real life deserves the same attention we are so readily willing to give games, even more so. How often do people spend buying digital assets for their characters or to learn about the traits of different characters? Yet how often do we do the same in our real lives. Some do, yet even the most social among us tend to meet up with friends today only to bury ourselves into our phones or compare virtual online profiles, text each other at the same table, or spend an entire meetup taking limitless selfie’s to feel ‘connected’ and validated.

If we were to spend more times on building our real traits and connecting to people through real shared values, to be invested in their character like we are in games, then we can reap so many more social benefits in real life.

The same goes for seeking mentors or support in life. We tend not to think too hard about ‘reaching out’ to others in shared communities online, yet we balk at the idea of ‘reaching out’ to other people who know the answers we don’t in real life.

Often the difference between someone who is supremely successful in life to those who just get by is the willingness of the supremely successful to seek out mentors.

They often treat life like video games themselves. They don’t think of themselves as better but as willing learners. They are just trying to get through the levels of their game too and found the best way to win was to bring others together to a shared vision.

They Teach Us Adapting Is Part Of The Game

As we play games there’s many unexpected incidents that can occur.

Unless we have played the game before, we don’t know what will come up and we have to adapt as such. If we don’t adapt we don’t learn what to do the next time that situation comes up.

Sometimes we might have completely unique situations in life where we have no prior experience to deal with it, so what do we do?

We most likely try to deal with it, and more often than not we don’t do it perfectly but we learn for the next time.

When we see life as a game we tend to expect the unexpected more, and our mind becomes more flexible to problem solving (and there’s plenty of problems we find in life – we are serial moaners about how our job, lack of money, the weather, traffic, responsibilities and so on prevent us from doing this or that).

In a game we can moan all we want but we still have to do the next challenge to reach the next level. In life it can appear harder as it’s not always easy to see where the next level is, but the fact remains the same – if we approach a fresh challenge with an adaptable attitude then we are more likely to find a solution. If we approach it with the same toolkit we already have then we might become stuck when we don’t have the right tool for a new job. We have to be creative which means we have to open our minds to bring adaptable first.

You Create You Own Journey

In a game you decided on that game, the character and you selected a mission. Life is somewhat the same.

Too often we float through life expecting answers to be presented to us, purpose to land in our lap. Or we fall into careers or goals that aren’t even of our own true desires, but which aim to fulfill a basic need of ensuring there’s a roof over our head.

Imagine if that was the aim of the game for a second. Your aim is to put a roof over your head and go to work and do some mundane task over and other to ensure you are safe and not our in the cold.

It might be practical but it’s hardly an appealing game. Would anyone want to play a game like that, where you goal is to repeat the same task again and again? Likely not. What is the game was to add dimension? Now you have to build a different roof over your head by working out a series of different challenges? More interest would peak. Then what if you were to find more rewards for the risks you took in the game, and brought others into your game too? Now take this to your life.

You wouldn’t read a book if every chapter was the same, so why make you life so? You would want to write your chapters to captivate a tale of ups and downs, of appeal and interest, of novel experience.

Life has ups and downs, that’s inevitable, so embrace them rather than fear them and treat your life as you would a game. You’ll get a lot more out of it!