How To Gamify Your Life (And Reinvent Yourself... Fast)

Why You Feel Lost

00:00It takes about 1 to 2 months of confusion, feeling lost and being on the verge of giving up for the right amount of vision to form where you have absolute clarity and launch into a new way of life. If you want to launch into a new way of life, the first thing you need to understand is that life unfolds in chapters and each chapter is a predictable sequence of four phases.

00:24There's the limbo phase where you don't know what to do or what you want. There's the vision phase, where an image for the future forms. You act on a new path and momentum builds. There's the flow phase where you can't pull yourself away from the goal you're pursuing.

00:38And then there's the resistance phase, where exponential progress doesn't last forever, but you don't want it to end. And that's off into your own detriment. But most people get trapped in the first phase, the limbo phase, because your entire life you've been trained to follow a script.

00:55You're used to the linear results of schools and jobs. You're used to someone else giving you your certainty. But when it comes to living an unconventional life, because that's the only way to get unconventional results, you interpret feeling lost as a bad sign, so you jump ship and return to the comfortable life that was planned for you in the system that only cares for its own benefit.

01:17And that's probably why you're watching this. You hate the thought of ending up like everyone else, but that means you're on your own, and that usually feels like you're lost in this dense forest. And all you can see is trees, right? You don't.

01:32You don't have the awareness that five yards away, there's a clear path that you can take to the top of the mountain. So here's how you get out. And by the way, I created an AI prompt that turns your life into a video game, and you can use it to guide you through implementing what's in this video.

01:48And I have to say, it's pretty sweet. It helps you identify where you are, helps identify what your passions or interests are, and then it turns those into a main quest. Side quests, character traits to improve, so on and so forth.

How to collect vision

02:00The link to that is in the description. But that leads us into step one, which is how to collect vision. Your mind makes sense of the world in stories. That's why you feel lost, because you don't know what story you're living out, or you're living out of story that someone else assigned to you, and you can feel that misalignment in your soul.

02:20The hardest part about taking back control of your life is collecting the right puzzle pieces until just the right amount of vision forms, where you have enough clarity to act with confidence. And at first, the puzzle looks like a jumbled mess.

02:34Your brain can't make sense of it. You get stressed and worried, which leads to a narrow and negative mind, which makes it painstakingly difficult to notice new opportunities. That's why you feel stuck. So that's step one. Give yourself permission to allow your life to get worse.

02:53Now, if you weren't expecting that, let me explain the reason you feel lost, dull, or even lifeless is because you don't have a clear goal to work towards. But that's the exact problem is you don't know what you want. You don't know what goal you want to pursue since you feel lost in your mind is turbulent.

03:10A clear goal is the last thing your mind will be able to think of, and you'll often make excuses as to why that isn't the right one to pursue in the first place. But the thing is, goals don't exist in isolation. A strong, purposeful goal is the result of the exact opposite, a negative outcome that you will fight tooth and nail to avoid and once you've experienced that outcome firsthand, you'll do anything to not relive it.

03:35You need a problem to solve. You need an enemy to attack. And when you have something to avoid, your goal increases in both gravity pulling you towards it and clarity. So that's where you turn your focus. Ask yourself if I keep doing the same things.

03:52Where will my life end up? Sit with that thought. Really sit with it. Let it consume your mind. Because when it starts to take over, your mind will be hungry to learn. Experiment and grow.

How to change your mind

04:03Step two is how to change your mind. Because you act the way you do right now. Because you already have a goal. That's how the mind works. Your mind is a goal striving machine that perceives the world in a way that allows it to collect useful information to achieve that goal.

04:19The thing is, you're unconscious of the goal you're pursuing and it's ruining your life. Aristotle believed that the final cause of the situation is the ultimate purpose, or end goal, for which it exists. In Adlerian psychology, with a focus on telling, we are not pushed by our past, but pulled by our goals.

04:38We act in a way that is beneficial toward the aim in which were directed, so toward the goal. So in other words, in this can be a mind bender for many. You are in your current situation because you want to be, but that's unconscious to you, and you probably won't believe it at first you feel lost, confused, or overwhelmed because it's beneficial for achieving the goal of avoiding the pain, fear, and embarrassment that comes with doing something unconventional with your life.

05:07So when you're entering this new chapter in your life, you may not have a clear, positive goal of, oh, I want to get super ripped or start this billion dollar business or whatever it may be, but you still have a goal. All humans have goals at all times, even you moving your hand or taking a step forward or whatever it may be, is aligned with the goal of something you're trying to do.

05:28So if we work backwards from that and understand, okay, where is my mind at right now? What actions am I taking right now? What goal does that align with? And for most people with feeling lost and coming up with all these excuses and other things, their unconscious goal that they aren't aware of is to stay the same because they want to avoid the pain that comes with change.

05:50And the sooner you become aware of that, the sooner you can change the goal that your mind is operating on to be one that is more positive, but the good thing here is that with step one, we've already primed our mind for change by gaining complete awareness on what we don't want in life, by doing what we're currently doing now.

06:08To change your mind completely. You need to immerse yourself in new sources of information to discover the puzzle pieces that lead to clarity. Read new books. Talk to new people. Follow new accounts. Visit a place you've been wanting to go.

06:22Go on a long walk and throw on a podcast. Take a course on a new skill to enhance your career or start a business. Or you can knock out two birds with one stone. Because I recently released a mini course on how I systemize my life with AI, which teaches you how to create a focus coach or a tribe of mentors to enhance your thinking, or how to enhance your content writing, or your marketing or copywriting.

06:45But the thing here is, you can both use AI in this sense to get unstuck, and you can use it to learn a new skill, right? So you can knock out two birds with one stone. There's a link in the description for that. Now, it doesn't really matter what information you consume, as long as it's something that has the potential to spark change.

07:03Because when your mind is in a state of wanting to avoid the current trajectory of your life, the new goal. This is when true learning occurs. You will feel the dopamine spurts into your brain when you find a potential opportunity to pursue.

07:16Now, within a few weeks, you should have some idea of the life you want to live, right? Because so many people just feel like they have to have this like, absolutely clear goal, this absolutely clear vision of what they want to do when you already know what kind of life you want to live.

07:32You understand that you don't want to live a bad life. You understand that you want a good life, and you have some kind of an image of that. You can think of a very vague idea of a good life that you want to live, and just start working in that direction.

07:47Right. It's a general aim. You don't even need to know what to do or what you're doing, as long as you're going in that direction.

Gamify your life

07:54Rather than the opposite. But how you move along that path is up to step three, which is to gamify your life or to turn your life into a video game because your mind runs on a storyline, and games are pre constructed stories with certain mechanisms that narrow your focus and make progress enjoyable when you play a game.

08:13There are a clear hierarchy of goals so you know how to win direct feedback so you know when you are making progress and rules that add a sense of challenge and skill development. Now all of these are core components of flow psychology. And if you don't know what the flow state is, it's the state of optimal experience that we often fall in love with or crave.

08:34It's when we lose that we lose that sense of self-consciousness. We become one with the task at hand. And this is why social media companies and gaming companies and entertainment companies in general spend billions upon billions of dollars investing in research for how to replicate these mechanisms in the games, in the social media, in the media in general, so that we become addicted to it.

08:58But what few people realize is that you can also study and understand these mechanisms and replicate them in your own life to move in a positive direction, to gamify your life. That way you're actually making progress on something real, rather than thinking you're making progress on something that's fake.

Design The Game

09:16So the first step to gamifying your life is to just design the game. And with this, we first need to understand that most people have a very mediocre definition of what a goal is. A goal is an aim. A goal is not something that you must achieve at all costs.

09:31A goal is a lens from which to make decisions. The goals themselves are supposed to change and evolve as you become more experienced. Now, most people are starting to like write this off as something that doesn't work. The following list that I'm going to go over, they think is just some self-help or productivity hack that people don't really need to use.

09:51So that list of things to do is to create a hierarchy of goals composed of an end goal, long term goals, and short term goals. So you can just think of this as like, okay, what's something something out there that I would want. What's a one year goal that I can achieve to help me get there?

10:06What about a one month goal, a one week goal and then we can break it down further from there? The next thing is to create the rules of the game you're playing. So what are you not willing to sacrifice in your life to make progress toward the end goal?

10:19Do you not want to sacrifice your health or your relationships, or do you not want to work long hours? And this adds constraints. It makes the game creative. You can achieve success without working long hours. There is a way to do it. You can achieve success without sacrificing your health.

10:34You can achieve success without sacrificing your relationships. Most people just don't choose that path because they either don't think it's possible or they just don't know what they don't know, and they're not willing to admit that they don't know how to do that thing and they don't want to learn it.

10:48And the last thing here is to use quantifiable priority tasks as feedback loops, like writing a thousand words a day, reading ten pages, or reaching out to five potential clients. So those are your levers. Write your long term goals like the ten year goal or the one year goal.

11:02The one month goal. Those are just the direction you're heading in, right? You don't have to achieve that thing specifically. You're just trying to move in that direction. And it helps you create clarity for what you do right now, the 1000 words a day or quantifiable priority task is just how you get there.

11:20And by completing those a thousand words, it's the feedback loop that lets you know that you're making progress. It's just one piece of the puzzle for gamifying your life and making it more enjoyable, because that's how your mind responds to a game.

11:34Now, the thing here is that your life loses the spark of novelty and pattern recognition. When you have a vague or unconscious story you were living out. So when you create the order, your mind craves chaos as much easier to keep at bay.

Create A Tutorial Phase

11:48Now, step number two with Gamifying, your life is to create a tutorial phase because in a game you learn by doing, not by studying. Endless tutorials or watching gameplay. And you can watch tutorials and gameplay, of course, but if you do so before you actually start playing the game, that's not learning.

12:05That's entertainment. But if you've ever played a video game, you know you can go watch streamers play the game all day long. And sure, you can start to understand, okay, I get I understand the game. I can probably start playing it. I know what to do.

12:20But then you sit down and start playing and your fingers like, don't know what keys to press. You don't know how to move the mouse in a specific way. You haven't practice, you haven't done anything. And eventually you learn that what you watched doesn't align with the actual reality of what you're doing.

12:36But of course, once you actually start playing the game first, once it's something that you do, once it's a part of your identity and something you do every day. Then when you go to watch tutorials or gameplay, you can pick up strategies or tactics or hacks that you want to try because you understand how to specifically implement them.

12:54And then the more strategies or other things that you collect from other people and combined into your own, that's the what makes your own gameplay unique. So start playing the game. Don't worry if you aren't absolutely confident in whether it's what you want to do for the rest of your life because you figure out what you want to do by error correcting and you can't correct an error that doesn't exist.

13:17So once you are playing your game, the one you're creating, you supplement your mind with the two following things. One is the fundamentals. Because most success is not getting distracted from the fundamentals, and two is specific solutions.

13:31So an intentional search for an answer. Once you can't make progress by your own knowledge or intuition, the main priority tasks for your day should be learning and building for 1 to 2 hours at a time. These do not happen in isolation, and for those who haven't made AI a part of their life right now, this is arguably the best use case for beginners.

13:51For AI is just to get unstuck. Because if I'm creating something in Photoshop, or I'm writing my 1000 words a day, I don't have to have I do that thing for me. But it can be this creative sparring partner, a thought partner that helps me overcome my creative blocks.

14:08So if I'm in Photoshop and I don't know how to do something, I can literally type, hey, I'm trying to do this in Photoshop. What do I try? What do I do? What are five different ways to do this? And it'll spit it out. And then you try those and you overcome that block.

14:20You get unstuck. And this isn't, outsourcing your learning. This is just how you learn in general in the most effective way. But now it's sped up with AI because you can just open it and ask anything and you take it even further. You don't have to ask AI to give you exactly what to do.

14:36You can say, hey, here's what I'm doing, here's where I'm at, here's where I'm stuck. Can you help me identify my own knowledge gaps, my blind spots, and maybe give me three questions to ask you to help me make progress? And if you do that, I think you'll be very surprised with how much faster you can overcome these blocks.

14:55And if you do that consistently day in, day out, you're making progress a lot faster than many other people now.

Stay at the edge of the unknown

15:01Step three for Gamifying, your life is to stay at the edge of the unknown, because in some video games you have this mini map, and on that mini map there are the spots you've explored which are light and bright. You know that you've explored them.

15:15And then there's the dark areas where you can't see anything on the map. You haven't gone there yet, and this indirectly represents two things inside the game, which is your skill level and your experience. Because in the dark places on the mini map, those are higher level than you, right?

15:30You haven't explored them. There's quests that you can't take on. There's higher level monsters and people. And if you were to somehow because you probably can't get there right now because there isn't a path to get there. But if you were to somehow just teleport into the middle of the unknown, it's like you're jumping into the middle of the ocean and you don't know how to swim.

15:47A higher level character is just going to come in one shot. You, the monsters are going to to shot you. You can't even do any of the quests there. You can't do any of the dungeons. You're just like running back to safety the entire time you're anxious.

15:59But on the flip side, if you stay inside the places that you know for too long, you just get bored because you're the higher level right? In Pokemon, you're catching all of these low level Pokemon. In World of Warcraft, you're just one shotting these monsters and collecting a few bits of gold.

16:15But in the unknown, the gold is higher. The experience that you can gain from it is higher. So in reality, if you take on a challenge or a task that is too high for your skill level, you're going to get anxious and you're probably not going to make that much progress.

16:29If you continue doing the same tasks day in, day out, without any novelty or challenge, you're going to get bored and you're going to wonder why you weren't doing something else with your time. So in both scenarios, you're not making substantial progress.

16:43So the solution is to stay right at the edge of your challenge level. So to stay in the range of optimal experience or enjoying your life, you need to consistently cultivate your skill set and take on higher challenges. That's where the meaningful flow of information is maximized.

16:59That's where you feel as if you are always learning something new. That's where your life becomes an enjoyable blur of progress, a spiritual state of clear perception where things just feel right. And this is also why a 9 to 5 job is a great stepping stone, but is often the death sentence.

17:15You learn and progress until you're stuck doing the same thing over and over again. That's not a meaningful way to live. It's psychologically castrate you and bleeds into all other areas of your life. Now, it's difficult to give like concrete advice of what to do here, but if I could suggest one thing, it would be this every week or month slightly increase the challenge of what you do.

17:37This does not mean adding more work. It means treating what you do like lifting weights in the gym. You don't jump up in your bench press by 50 pounds at a time. The most developed lifters know that adding the smallest 2.5 pound plate every 1 to 2 weeks is how they see the most progress and stay addicted.

17:54And they also understand that ego lifting isn't going to get you anywhere. So I hope this video was helpful. Again, I have a turn your life into a video game I prompt that I made that is actually pretty sweet. I recommend you check it out, link in the description.

18:08And now a few other things is that I'm actually going to start posting two, weekly letters on Substack and the newsletter that you guys previously knew that I would send out every Saturday is going to become a kind of high signal summary of everything inside or everything that I've talked about that week.

18:25And there's also going to be a paid tier of the Substack for a very low cost. That will be my place where I post like the most practical, life changing stuff on marketing, creator, economy, writing, AI, anything that I find helpful in my own life, I'm going to pop in there so you can join that if you'd like.

18:43Again, links all of those in the description. Hope you enjoyed this video. Thanks for watching. Bye!