Life is a Role Playing Game
Photo by dkraps
Personal branding is WoW and Final Fantasy; you just don’t know it yet.
What is your goal when you’re playing a role playing game? Your goal is to level up your character, unlock every secret, find every hidden weapon, beat every boss, and ultimately, beat the game with a 100% completion rating. Your goal requires you to put in hours upon hours of invested time and effort into a make believe character in a fantasy land. Let’s say you do beat the game on hard or reach level 70, what then? Do you start another game only to waste another 200 hours leveling up a fantasy character? Where does this fit in with your life goals and ambitions?
Life parallels a video game in many ways. Much like a role playing, we are able to level ourselves up in real life by expanding our network, undertaking an internship, writing a new blog post, learning a new skill, or listening to an audio book. Each of these activities can provide you with a skill or asset that will help you accomplish your life and career goals.
Life is a game, and this is how you can become a strong player:
1. Slay those monsters and level up
Role Playing Game: Constantly slay demons so that you can level up your character and gain new abilities
Real Life: You need to constantly read books, blogs, and listen to podcasts so that you always learn something new. Each new skill that you learn is the equivalent to learning a new ability in a video game. For example, when I first founded Future Delivery, I didn’t know a bit of php, html, css, or SEO. I spent the time and energy to train myself in these arts and now have a skill set that allows me to build any basic site that I want. I no longer have to depend on our in-house developer to build social media rank sites or dropshipping companies because I can do it on my own.
2. Everyone has the potential to help you on your journey
Role Playing Game: Talk to every single random character in the game because you never know when they’re holding a secret.
Real Life: You need to constantly network with everyone. It’s not enough to just network with the big players like Tim Ferris or Robert Scoble; you should be networking at local events in your community with people who haven’t created a super star presence yet. Yes, it’s important to add amazing people like Peter Shankman to your network, but these people are like the bosses in video games that can take a while to conquer. Every single person you meet on your journey in life has the potential to provide you with an asset that can help you with your journey.
Don’t discriminate - introduce yourself to everyone.
3. The best teams have complimentary skills
Role Playing Game: Construct a team of characters who compliment each others skill. You need a magician, warrior, thief, sorcerer, and archer to be able to take on any challenge.
Real Life: Construct a team of close (business) friends whose skills compliment each other. I’m an entrepreneur, and my ideal team is a developer, designer, marketer, and the leader. We currently have all but the designer on the Future Delivery team, so it is my goal to find someone out there who is able to compliment our skills by adding a design talent. Look at your team or close group of (business) friends. Are you guys all of the same breed? If so, it’s time for you to expand your network and actively pursue adding people on your personal team whose skills compliment your own.
4. Utilize every weapon available to you
Role Playing Game: The better, more powerful your weapon, the easier it will be to slay demons and beat the bosses
Real Life: You need to use every single weapon that is available to you. Start a blog, twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and optimize them to further your life goals. It’s not enough to just have a blog lying there with your name on it; you must cultivate and level it up by consistently writing good blog posts and participating in the blogging community. It’s not enough that you have a Twitter profile with your face on it; you must tweet cool sites, follow influential people, and participate in the conversation to build your Twitter presence. It’s important to use your weapons; it’s even more important to use them effectively.
5. It’s about the journey, not the end
Why do we play video games? Is it to quickly beat the game in the fastest time possible to watch the ending, or is it the experience and the story that engages us? We play role playing games because we get sucked into the storyline, characters, and begin to actuality care for the protagonist. We want to see a happy ending.
Why do we live life? Is it to reach the end in one piece? Of course not. Life is the journey that we take, the experiences that we have, the people we meet along the way, and the positive things that we’re able to contribute to this world. You see, unlike a video game, life cannot be placed on pause and there are no save points that allow you to reset if you have made a mistake.
Every person on this planet is playing the same game as you - the game of life. We are the ones who realize this and are thus able to take advantage by actively leveling up so that we can become the strongest players possible. In a video game, what happens to the strongest players? People idolize them, they unlock all the secrets, and their names are forever immortalized on the high score rank. Similarly, if you have a strong personal brand, people will idolize you, you’ll be able to experience things others cannot, and your name will always be remembered.
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This post was orginially posted on Personal Branding Blog
Wow, this could quite possibly be the best explanation of how to be productive in real life that I have ever seen.
I have played a lot of games in my life, but to actually think of my life as a game is a whole different philosophic perspective that is incredible to me.
I’m on my way to leveling up!
I really like this post because there are a lot of transferrable skills between a game world and the real world. Yes, I used to play WoW (don’t judge) – I was a level 70 druid before I quit (Tauren girls rock).
In the game and in real life, it’s important to build your reputation so that other people can want you in their groups / teams. You want to not only meet everyone and build good teams, but also make an effort to be helpful, easygoing, and serious when it counts. WoW gave me one of my first leadership experiences as a guild officer and raid leader. It taught me a lot about managing teams, dealing with people who “underperform,” and motivating people – all in a safe environment where failure is not a big deal (in real life).
It’s also hard to get respect as a girl in WoW; women have to deal with similar issues in male-dominated industries like finance and engineering. Guys either see you as someone they need to help out or a drain on the team. Overcoming gender barriers and actually getting guys to respect you is also something you can directly apply from games to real life.
@June - Wow, I never thought of the gender barrier. That’s a great add on to the analogy!
I’ve never played MMORPGs, but I have played Final Fantasy. Unfortunately, you play FF all by yourself so I didn’t really learn any tangible skills from playing the game.
Gamer girls are cool. You should check out http://girlgamer.com. My friend just launched it.
It’s a good analogy, but I don’t understand why someone should live life so productively. I mean, it gets to a point where someone just lives life in order to be productive, and the point of life, which is to enjoy it, is completely forgotten.
I want to relax, watch movies, play video games, and not worry about networking or creating a business LinkedIn.
This lifestyle does not apply to me, nor do I see it appealing to the masses
First of all, great blog…I have been reading your blog for a while now, but have never commented. I know who you are sort of through Max Bottaro…
Second of all, it is kind of funny that you made a post about this. I’ve had one sitting my my ’saved drafts’ section for a while now, that I haven’t finished which relates real life to online games mainly mmorpg’s
Glenn, I’m glad that this post spurred a comment. I checked out your blog and really like the design. Did you do it yourself?
Let me know when your similar post goes up. I’d be happy to link to it if you offer some really insightful and valuable content.
How do you and Max know each other?
Na i didn’t do it myself, I wish haha.
Yeah, I’ll probably finish the post over spring break after dead week and finals. I’ll let you know when it’s done though.
Me and max both go to UCSB and have known each other since freshman year, and we were roommates last year. Now, we are doing the new venture competition here at ucsb, and are going to move in together in San Luis Obispo with my brother and try to bounce ideas off each other / get a business up and running.
Hi, Jun! I really like the analogies here. I definitely agree with all of them, especially #5. I also see myself as constantly evolving and there is no point in focusing in the end goal because the journey is what makes life worth living.
#3 is also another one that I can relate to. I am working on two projects right now. One of them is setting up a website with a friend of mine. I’m finding out that our skills are complementary and it’s working out great so far because we make up for each other’s weak points.
I am also impressed that you are able to learn all that HTML, CSS, etc from scratch like that. I have seen your FD website and it looks ridiculously complex. I realize you have a great team of people helping. But now I am just starting to learn a lot more about those things and to create even a presentable webpage right now is just overwhelming. I’m taking it a day at a time.
Anyway, great post!
@Valerie - Thank you so much for your compliments. It took me a while to realize that life is truly a game worth playing, and I’m glad you have realized the same.
What projects are you guys working on? Would love to help
Hey Jun, another great post! That is how I see it and what I apply to almost everything I do. What you do in games will most definitely find its way over to the real world, but most people just don’t see it or choose not to apply it. Having played games like WoW and FF in the past, I found it was most effective when you treat everything else you do like you did in the game. You just need to find it in yourself to transfer that hard work and dedication you put into a game into a real life project, and this is what I try to do with my ventures and explain to my teammates (since most have gaming backgrounds too).
Most importantly, just like a game–have fun and enjoy what you’re doing
it’s not always fun in a game (grinding to the next level) but the end result will be worth it!
Wow, this is awesome. I have totally viewed my life this way for a while now, but don’t mention it to anyone who takes everything so seriously.
I believe this analogy is totally relevant to life, but I wouldn’t tell a banker who I’m getting a loan from that he is like the third and final part of my quest to get funding for my business. He would think that I am some child who thinks life has “game over’s” and we can just start over at any time.
I mean this in the sense that I have experience thinking out strategies, planning ahead, etc, and know that there are no “do-over’s” in life. This meaning I would double- and triple-check my steps compared to a video game. We do have the ability to try again, but the losses are much greater and take quite a bit more time to recover from.
Great post Loayza!
Once this analogy is in your mind it is very hard to play any type of video game. You start to wonder, “Why I’m I leveling up this fantasy character when I could be leveling myself up?”
When you realize that life can be played just like a video game, your possibilities become endless.
People are often successful in video games because they are fearless, they know if they fail they will come back and try again, they often try different tactics till they succeed. In life, people hold back and don’t take the chances they would normally do in a video game. That is when you need to step back and recognize life is not much different than a video game, the game of life should be lived for the journey. How do you want your life to be lived? on pause? or full of adventure? The choice is ultimately ours.
Great post Jun.
Haha, for some reason I enjoyed reading this post more than the first time I read it. Maybe because the design here is so much better!
Go FD Lifestyle!
Jun, “use every weapon available to you” is a key statement my friend. If you’re dad is a VP at a Fortune 500 company and you’re jobless, you better use his database to get a job. Also, all the resources and skills available to use is important as well.
Ha! I’m so glad someone else feels this way. I’ve been trying to explain why this is so to many people over the years, and I usually get either a weird look or “nerd” in response.
Nice blog you have here! I’m off to check out your archives.