Have you ever tried to illustrate the preferred path to your goals geometrically?
Our stubborn concentration on the goals brings the illusion of this path as being a straight line. At least this straight line is our preferred path. “That would be so great if I would already have been there and achieved that,” we think.
But similar to the way on land to the airport from where we live, our lives are rarely straight lines.
Neither the paths to the wins in the games. They are never straight lines. Because — let’s admit it — straight lines are not very exciting. Yes, they are simple and straightforward, but they are not fun.
Over thousands of years, people shaped their games along with their experience of fun and put many fun obstacles and challenges on the path to the wins in those games.
Fun can rarely be found in a straight line to your goals in life either. At least not in the long run.
And thankfully, our brains don’t function linearly either. Especially the subconscious parts of our minds are very gameful and playful.
I invite you to observe your thought processes, their quirkiness, and how life unfolds with the eyes of a curious and passionate game designer and player. You will discover so many possibilities, as well as your resourceful and gameful powers.
If you open any of my books or other resources on turning life into fun games, you will discover — among others — the recommendations to add some quirky and even silly rules, and not to forget to record your progress in any project or activity you want to pursue by giving yourself points, badges, and observing the levels you reach in your games.
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The doubts and skepticism
You might wonder if this could hinder you in progressing in what you want to accomplish.
You can have your doubts.
I must say, I “slid” into turning my life into games. I just followed my curiosity and became utterly engaged and even addicted. Now, I don’t escape into games or reading from my life, as I used to in the past. Instead, I turn everything in my life, including playing games and reading, but also everything else, including work, private life, relaxing, exercising, sleep, dealing with health issues, and so much more, into fun games for myself.
But I still resonate with the doubts. In fact, I discovered that any doubts in this approach are a brilliant way to test it. I must confess that I am in a constant testing phase of my self-motivational games. I don’t stop developing them, testing, then again tweaking their design, and playing again.
Besides, these doubts and experiences of those I know and myself in life have helped me write my first ever parable called Gameful Writing.
Gameful Writing is about turning writing into fun games. It considers writing not from the point of view of possible genres but by how we treat it or think of it. Most of us deal with writing something every day, be it a novel we want to write but don’t manage, a blog post for the company we work for, a report, a thesis, an e-mail, or simply expressing ourselves to our loved ones — be it in writing or over a video or phone call. And we fear, resist, and overthink all those types of writing.
This little book acknowledges all these fears and overthinking because it features seven people who face them and manage to shift their focus from upsets into something uplifting and empowering them. They achieve it by turning their writing and lives into fun games — the Self-Gamification way.
This book is a work of fiction, but it features many real-life experiences from those I know and myself. Losing loved ones to illnesses and despair, grieving, letting other people grieve, forgiving ourselves, others, and even life itself for whatever grief they and we might have caused us, and instead find empowerment in the moment of now and with what we have available. These stories are braided strongly into the stories of turning writing and life into games.
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Your gain and savings from investing into turning your life into fun games
I invite you on this gentle and awakening journey of discovery to turning anything into something joyful for yourself.
Why is it worth it?
First of all, you will be able to save yourself the costs of drama and seriousness and instead gain resourcefulness and joy in whatever you set out to turn into fun games for yourself.
By reading the seven stories in this little book, you will see what you can gain from turning your life into fun games, and you will be able to join the characters in the book in this fun adventure of playing a fantastic game collection called life.
To take a look at the book and buy it on Amazon, click on its title above or this image here:
If you want to see where else you can buy it, then go to the book’s page on this website here.
Can you remember yourself one year ago, in January 2020? What your thoughts and worries were about? You might have heard peripherally about an outbreak of an illness in China, but most people outside of the epicenters were busy worrying about their own daily ups and downs. I remember, I did.
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The long crisis
Then in March, the whole world was the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. We all started with a state of shock, then slowly trying to find our way through it.
In the first month of the lockdowns everywhere, many thought that this trouble would not go for so long.
The editor and the cover designer for my books, Alice Jago, had an idea for me to write a piece called “Gameful Isolation” to show how my gameful approach to life could help in a time of crisis. She suggested writing a blog post so that it could go out quickly. But as I started jotting down what to write in it, I realized it should be a book, a small one, but still a book.
Alice and I worked on another book at that time, but we thought that the lockdown might end soon, so we made the Gameful Isolation our highest priority. Within less than four weeks from the idea, the book was written, revised multiple times, and published. And along with it, I had a series of videos for each of the chapters of the book, which I made available on YouTube and which you can also see here.
In summer 2020, with the situation getting a little better many might have had an impression that the crisis would soon be over. But here we are, a year after the pandemic started, and many of the countries are still in lockdown. So my little book Gameful Isolation is still relevant, and probably will always be, because we can’t avoid crises. They come in various shapes quite often. We might perceive even small challenges as big crises if we are upset and unhappy.
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Your gameful and playful self is resourceful
The main message of Gameful Isolationis tapping into our gameful and playful powers. I discovered that one of the main advantages of turning life into games is resourcefulness.
When we are in a tight space in a game, we don’t despair long but act quickly. We look around, assess the situation, and look for a small bit of solution with what we have at hand. Immediately after this quick assessment, we act. We don’t analyze our actions too long. We engage fully, and what is fun for us often acts as our compass in games.
I discovered that the same possibility is also open to us in real-life and tough times of a crisis. Asking myself the following question helps enormously:
“If this [challenge, project, task, activity, chore] was a game, how would I approach it as its designer or player?”
You might notice me sharing this question often because it has a fantastic potential to help us set the drama of the moment aside and tap into the resourcefulness, in which we tap so easily when playing games.
The next big help in a crisis is to take time and appreciate every step in our days with gameful rewards — points, badges, cool titles for the levels we set for ourselves in our self-motivational games, and so much more.
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How Gameful Isolation can help you
Here are these and other topics you can find in this little book with its e-book format being of a price of a coffee, and which can help in so many ways during our busy days full of homeschooling, work, household, and so much more:
How to motivate ourselves effortlessly in gameful and playful ways.
What tools we have when we are gameful and playful.
Many real-life role-playing games we play every day and which, if played deliberately, can help us on the way.
How to see our resistance to how our life unfolds non-judgmentally.
How to acknowledge and even appreciate our fears.
The uniqueness of each person’s situation.
How we can discover that what we experienced until now prepared us for the crisis we are in and tap into our resourcefulness.
Why and how to play real-life situations as if they were games, and what is the “gameplay loop” of turning life into fun games “game.”
How to gamefully and playfully, and most of all kindly, appreciate what we do, regardless of how we think of the value of what we do or manage through the day.
How to never give up turning life into fun games regardless of the circumstances.
To take a look at Gameful Isolation and buy it on Amazon, either click on its title throughout this post or click on this image below:
To find the links to the book on other online stores and view the videos mentioned above, check out the book’s page on this website here.
I wish you a beautiful and gameful day in any circumstance!
All of us had and have up and downs in our lives. And many have various health conditions, either physical, mental, or both. Some of these are hereditary, and we might want to tell our children or share with our loved ones about our experiences and feelings.
But how to do it without blaming circumstances, other people, or ourselves? Is there any way to do it without getting a very bleak, dark, and dramatic outcome?
In fact, there is. Writing a memoir is one such possibility. I recently wrote and published one to share my experience with varying and changing health conditions with my children, should they ever experience something similar in their lives. I called the book Gameful Healing: Almost a Memoir; Not Quite a Parable. It is Book 2 in the “Gameful Life” series.
I resisted writing it for some time, tried to write it as a fiction book until I realized that simply telling the truth, my truth, was enough. I could tell it without blaming anyone or anything, allowing myself to see my story through the lenses of the experience, feelings, and memories I gathered up till now. In the process, I discovered and re-experienced many beautiful, warm, and joyful moments too.
Approaching the writing process as one of my favorite games and adjusting its design so that I couldn’t wait to engage in working on the book was of big help and enormous fun.
Now, I am not afraid to write memoirs and share various bits from my life, either in long or short form, such as this little post. 😀
If you need help with putting your story into words with joy instead of drama and blame, I suggest you contact me at this address to discuss how we could work together:
(Image courtesy of the author; taken in January 2020 by the author’s then 5-year old daughter)
Successful leadership embraces management skills. But any successful manager is a successful self-manager.
And these successful managers and self-managers know that the best leadership and management is not about control and never about manipulation. It is focused on support. This also applies to self-management.
There are many aspects to management both when we manage teams, projects, or ourselves. We can use many different tools and techniques.
But any of those tools or techniques would not bear any fruit if you don’t concentrate on support for your team, project, and yourself.
The best way to support anyone— and you will know it from when you supported your children or younger siblings and friends when they were upset or needed to accomplish something and resisted it — is to turn the activity at hand into a fun game or play.
That includes management of any kind.
Here is an utterly simple tool to ignite the “idea-generating machine” in your head to approach management tasks — be it for the team, project, the whole company, or yourself — gamefully. Ask yourself the following question:
“If this [challenge, project, task, activity, chore] was a game, how would I approach it as its designer or player?”
Awareness and permitting yourself to be gameful and playful is all it takes to shift your focus from stressed and overwhelmed to supportive and creative.
