Episode 100: Leveling Up

What in life deserves our time and attention and what things don't. I hope that as we consider that question along with other topics on this show, that we can all learn to live our lives just a little more intentionally. This is Seth Roberts. Thanks for joining me on Skipping Stones - “Leveling Up.”

I was feeling a little overwhelmed the other day, and for the first time in a very long time, I found myself playing a video game. I stayed up until 2:00 AM playing that stupid game. I say that most of the time games of nearly any variety don't have much of an appeal to me, so I was pretty confused when I was totally compelled to play this game.

So much so that I stayed up until two, but I think it comes down to our appetite for progress. Even if that progress is fake, the forward movement feels good to us. I think games are the human equivalent to a hamster wheel, but I don't mean that in a negative way. I think sometimes the illusion of progress soothes us sometimes the same way that a baby might be soothed by its mother rocking it back and forth.

Diversions can be a lifesaver, but they can also suck us into a false reality that keeps us stagnant in the real world. It makes sense to me why we might start to prefer these pretend worlds. My real-world reality at the time was overwhelming, and in that moment, I preferred living in that game over my actual life because my actual life was harder to make progress in than the game.

Over the course of the five or so hours, I found myself playing that game. I moved up three levels in foraging, three levels in mining, one level in fishing, and three levels in farming. I was on my way to owning a thriving agricultural business, but in real life I had about a hundred emails to go through and a few major work concerns bouncing around my head and in real life, my small company has been seven years in the making.

But in my game, I probably only needed a few more days to be in a comparable situation to what I was in the real world. When you play a game, you know that building a house is going to cost X amount of gold or wood or whatever. Where in real life the cost of something like a house is usually just a guess.

And anything from fluctuations in material pricing to mistakes made can throw that guess off. Leveling up in real life is just playing hard to do. It takes a ton of time and a ton of concentration, and sometimes we would rather sit and play video games. I have to remind myself sometimes that the real world is in fact its own game, and that if I'm going to play a game at all, it should probably be that one.

The reason life feels so hard is partly because everybody on Earth is playing the same game. In a lot of games, you're only playing against yourself. Your achievements in that game don't reflect where you stand as compared to others, but they reflect the effort you put in. But in the real world, even getting a low paying job takes effort and is an achievement of a sort.

Buying groceries is an achievement. If you happen to be making $10 an hour, then you're going to have to work 10 hours to buy a hundred dollars of groceries, which is absolutely an achievement. 10 hours is a pretty decent amount of time. Things like buying groceries and paying rent seem so mundane, yet they do take real effort and are actually an accomplishment.

If we weren't comparing ourselves against the rest of the world, these little achievements might feel a little more meaningful. The good thing is that we can change our perspective. We can gamify our own life. When you look at the rich and the famous, along with their achievements, it looks overwhelming.

That makes sense. Unless they inherited their money, their monetary success is almost always a result of incredible effort and determination. But every big success was made of thousands of small successes, and the small achievements are where a person can really thrive. If you want to plus one, your strength, for example, you need to exercise.

If you go to the gym and see all these jacked guys walking around you, you might get discouraged. But if day one you tell yourself that 20 pushups is a win, then you've got a good start. All the rest of those guys have simply been playing the game longer than you and more consistently. We would all be better off in real life if we allowed ourselves to be excited about the small wins.

Something I've found to be incredibly useful in my life is creating checklists and doing just a little planning every week. The thing is, when you plan, you're creating your own game. You effectively tell yourself that in order to win the game for the day, you have to accomplish X, Y, and Z. I keep it really simple for myself.

I take a piece of paper, and I divide it into three columns. One column is for work tasks; another is for podcast tasks. And the last one is for my personal tasks. I write out all the things I would like to do in each of those categories, and then I try to rank which tasks are the most important, and I usually put a star next to those.

I do that once a week, and that more or less gives me my game to play for that week. Sometimes I manage to actually schedule those tasks out every week, which works even better, but more often than not, I just refer back to it when I'm wondering what I need to do on any given day. The progress made in something like a game is really an imitation of life, and so why not make life a game?

There's a song in the old children's movie, Mary Poppins, that has a line that says, “in every task that must be done, there is an element of fun”. I tend to believe that life is as fun as we are willing to allow it to be. Life makes it hard to quantify success sometimes, which makes it more difficult to gamify.

For example, it's hard to say that a person has achieved a level 100 in wisdom. But nevertheless, there are accomplishments related to almost anything, including wisdom. If you wanna be wise, you can consider it a level up. Every time you read a book that you think is relevant, people's draw to money is the greatest symbol of success.

Maybe the simple fact that it's so easy to quantify, whether it's money, wisdom, or something else. There are things we can do to move in those directions, and if we set those smaller things as our goals, we'll have more to look forward to. There's a business exercise I wanna share with you that I think applies much more broadly than simply business.

So most businesses will set a monetary goal for themselves and work toward it, but the problem with that is that it is kind of irrelevant what you set that goal at if you don't do the things required to get there. So the better approach is to tell yourself what you would like to make and then ask yourself what tasks have to happen to achieve it.

So instead of saying that we're gonna shoot to make a million dollars. You would say that? Well, for every 10 sales calls I make, one of those calls ends up being a conversion into a sale where someone actually hands me money, and if the average sale is a hundred bucks, then to make a million dollars, we know that we need to make 100,000 sales calls.

So instead of saying, I need to make a million dollars, you've broken it out into what the actionable items are in order to do that, which would be a hundred thousand sales calls. Approaching it this way simply gives you actionable goals. So instead of telling yourself, I wanna accomplish this really hard thing, tell yourself, rather ask yourself how you have to break it down in order to do it.

If you want the best chance to become a professional athlete, you can look at what kind of training regimens the pros are doing and model that. Maybe start at half their amount for the first six months or so, and then gradually ramp up to what they do and then eventually surpass it. If you did that, whether you succeeded or not, at least you wouldn't have to question if you tried hard enough.

Life can be a game and it can be a fun one. There are a lot of things to succeed in if we're willing to change your perspective in such a way as to allow ourselves to feel good about the little wins and with enough little wins. We can achieve big wins. 

This is Skipping Stones “Leveling Up.” You can find this podcast anywhere you choose to listen to podcasts. For more information about me, feel free to visit skippingstonessr.com. And if you enjoyed the show, please like or subscribe. If there is a topic you would like me to speak on, please feel free to email me at: info@skippingstonessr.com. New episodes will be released weekly every Monday.