The idea of this newsletter is simple: If we approached life like we did video games, we’d be where we want in life.

So here are five concepts from Video Games that you should utilise in your everyday life.

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Concept #1: Be Willing to Grind It Out.

This is something that Alex Hormozi has spoken about. In video games, people are more than happy to spend time on lower levels, gathering XP, collecting resources, and learning strategies. They know that grinding it out is part of the game.

Yet, in real life, it’s very easy to overlook this. Arnold Schwarzenegger speaks about the incredible power of just putting the reps in towards your goals. Essentially, be willing to grind it out until you’re able to achieve what you want.

We need to stop hoping we’ll stumble on some strategy that makes everything easier - if we do, great. But until then, in case it never happens, we need to be willing to grind it out.

Concept #2: Get up and Go Again.

If you’re anything like me, you probably don’t like to end on a loss. After failing at a level in a video game, or losing a match to a friend, most people will just bounce straight back into it. That’s the approach we need to take in life.

Defeat is largely mental for most of what we’re pursuing. Sure, a few days to recover can help if you’ve tried something physically draining. But usually, we get caught up when we “fail” and don’t put ourselves back in the arena.

We’re willing to go again and again until we win in a video game, but we fail to do it in life, when the stakes are so much higher and the rewards so much greater. Don’t let life gently nudge you out of the Arena - you can only win and become who you want to be by standing your ground and taking your place in the Arena. Fight tooth and nail for it.

Concept #3: Level Up.

The most consistent method for keeping people hooked on video games is the use of levels. Whether it be a progress bar on your character’s level, or the slow building of difficulty throughout the game, it's designed to create a dopamine system.

While life doesn’t have a systemised system of measuring your progress, you can hack your own mind by creating one. Track your workouts, track your savings, break your goals down into small milestones, create checklists, do anything you can to use your dopamine system before it’s hijacked.

This is the reason that the Kaizen method or Atomic Habits are so successful. If you can see and track minor increases, it makes things more manageable and the process more enjoyable.

Concept #4: Invest In Skills and Tools (and Understand Them).

When you play the majority of games, a key part of levelling it up (and the reward for grinding it out) is the ability to invest in skills and tools. We don’t waste resources or time making things look pretty or rewarding ourselves in game, when there’s skills or tools that could skyrocket our progress.

We can definitely reward ourselves in reality (in fact, if you want to make your success sustainable, it’s a requirement) but we need to look at how we can invest in skills and tools. Where could we put some of our limited resources for the potential of massive returns?

A key part of that is also the process of understanding the best way to use those skills and tools. A great example of this is AI. Some creators use it to write their content (and if you’ve read the writing it produces, it’s clunky at best) while instead, you could use it to create an entire content repurposing system to skyrocket your productivity, enabling them to actually create great content that stands out. (For information on how to do this easily, check out this great video on AI Automation)

Concept #5: Use Competition.

A friend of mine likes to poke fun at the fact that I’m very competitive (I think because he has lost 100% of the time we’ve competed against each other). 

The reality is though, competition in video games (and in life) helps drive you to the next level, it creates benchmarks, it provides fuel. Friendly and healthy competition against peers and friends, or deeply motivating competition against rivals, lets you tap part of yourselves that would have gone unused.

There’s countless examples from life and sport on the power of rivals and competition. 

We shouldn’t reserve our competitive side for video games - we should let it push us to become better in all areas. Even if at the beginning, we’re just competing against who we were yesterday.

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That’s it for this week. If you’re someone who’s addicted to video games, put the controller down and try using some of the concepts in real life. There’s real world value to pursuing things with intensity.

Until next week,

Zachariah.