Do you ever wish your life could be more like a movie training montage? Just blistering guitar solos and uplighting lyrics until you emerge, a master.
You can’t quite turn your life into a montage, but with gamified self-improvement, you can at least get close. Gamifying self-improvement can make it easier, faster, and more fun.
The Gamified Life: Motivating Yourself with Game Elements
Gamification is all about taking the things that motivate us to play games and applying them to real life. Game designers build their games to be addictive because that’s how they win over players and make money. The good news is, you can apply the same strategies to your life.
You can add game elements to any area where you need a bit more motivation. People are gamifying work, gamifying learning, whatever they need. Below are some of the key elements you can add.
Incremental Rewards and Steady Wins
Games reward players for all of their accomplishments through prizes, coins, loot, experience points, or new skills. Importantly, these rewards come at every stage of the game, not just at the very end. Building in these incremental rewards keeps players motivated.
The rewards also scale. You get a better prize for completing a harder quest.
Apply these same incremental rewards to your own life. Allocate small prizes for achievements along the way to your big goal, and then reward yourself for that big goal with a grand prize. These steady wins will help you move forward.
Clear Feedback
Beyond keeping players motivated, these incremental rewards also provide clear feedback on how a player is doing. They know exactly where they stand at a given moment, and how to get better.
You need to structure the same feedback for yourself, so you know where you stand and, more importantly, can reward yourself for any progress. Feedback is crucial to the idea of deliberate practice: clear results show you what’s working and how to adjust what isn’t.
Competition: Make It Social
One of the best ways to motivate yourself is to turn things into a competition. Just adding one more person, like a workout partner, can keep you accountable and enhance your progress. You’ll also need to start keeping score.
Better still, you can create a leaderboard. Companies do this all the time, for instance rewarding the employee who produces the most in a month with a gift card. It’s not the $20 that motivates people. It’s the competition, the chance to prove they’re the best.
Creating organization-wide games can be more daunting and require a bit more investment. Luckily, there are certain technological solutions that make it easier. You can click this link to see one.
Stop Grinding and Start Playing
Improving your life can be a grind. It may take you hours of practice to build a skill before you see any sort of reward. That can be demoralizing.
Instead, lean on gamified progress. Turn working, studying, or chores into a game and you can stay motivated with steady wins and competition. Then, work becomes play.
For more tips on how to build your business, change your lifestyle, or boost your creativity, browse some of our other blog posts.
