How To Be More Productive By Playing More Games

Abdurasheed Hamzat
4 min readMay 9, 2020

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Source: CFA Institute blog

In my Book on the 23 gaming techniques to help you live a gameful life, I made an extensive analogy of motivation with the engines in the Latest Mercedes Benz.

If you want to be at the top, you want to be renowned spectacularly on a field or topic? Skills, talent and the right connection would take you there. Read the last sentence again. But is the ability to self-motivate yourself to keep you at the top of your game that would help you maintain the top.

Have you seen a football player transferred from one club to another that might be dubbed as “future world best” and suddenly becomes a burden to his new club? There are a lot of players that have been dubbed the worst in transfer in the history of a club in EPL, LA LIGA, SERIE A, BUNDESLIGA, etc.

Henrik Edberg of positivityblog.com wrote that “Some days you wake up motivated and ready to go. And some days things feel heavy as you arise and it is hard to get going and find that inner drive.”, as the analogy in my book, the desire to start something and get ahead without getting stuck is what professionals know how to do best. I compared being less motivated with a brand new car that has excellent features, looks sleek, and has class. The only issue is that it engine is faulty. It can not run fast for miles or it cannot move at all, that is almost a scrap you know.

You will understand that not being motivated does not really relate to being ill or sick. You could be healthy with no symptoms of an ailment, you are just like the car with a faulty engine, you find yourself moving too slow and not to speed as you desired.

Zig Ziglar puts it right “People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing — that’s why we recommend it daily.” You should not neglect to service your engine just because you bought it brand new. With proper routine maintenance, you can rest assured of a long-lasting ride.

I will share with you a tested and trusted technique of staying motivated every day. They are combinations of scientific and socially proven techniques that would aid you in going on with whatever endeavor you want to engage in.

Gamers are insanely addicted to their games because they have been able to find a way to self-motivate themselves. Here are some of the gamers’ tricks to help you stay motivated.

-Get started: Henrick Edberg wrote that you should not wait for motivation to start at all. Introduce a new game to any gamer, they either start right away or pend it until they finish the one at hand. What is the secret in that? They have the end result in mind.

They know and see the gratification in enjoying and finishing the game. Have the end result in mind, the emotion that would run through you when you start the task and how happy you would be when you complete it. Wikihow puts it that “You should visualize your dream”.

- Reduce Distraction: Picture the image of any gamer,what do you see? Someone with a headset on concentrating on the task on hand? The distraction you can only allow are positive planned distractions. Get planned breaks to avoid burning out to attend to distractions. But while you are at your game, say no to distractions.

- Compete Healthily: An amazing article from TIMES.COM puts it that you should find peer pressure that would put you in the groove, that you would compete healthily, share common goals and motivate one another.

What is the essence of having a car with a perfect body and engine that can race all day but you cannot find a car to race with- to test your top speed? You have to find cars with similar speed range or better put persons with similar hunger, drive, and ambition. Test one another’s limit.

That is why gamers do share their performance so far, the reason we see paired gaming and the likes.

- Learn when you Fail: Ask any gamer if they always win on the first attempt. The answers would always be NO. They would learn from their failures and keep trying on the next until they proceed to the next stage and repeat.

Geoffrey James of Inc.com encourages that you celebrate your failure. Treat your downtime as a happy moment to cherish what you have one so far. See failure as a method of not reaching your target. You can publish a book on that. For instance, I would soon write “how not to start a Blog”. A combination of failures that I met that did not help me get on very well on time.

- Keep Moving: You would be down, less motivated, tired, that is allowed because we are human and not robots. What you should not mention nor think of is giving up. If you are reading a book, try reading a page more. If you are writing and you meet writers-blocks, try to work to scribe just a single page. Lolly Dascal said in her article for Inc.com. Just keep moving.

You can now see why you have to thank gamers for teaching us how to live a Gameful life.

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Abdurasheed Hamzat

I am a Growth Hacker with experience in managing teams and Social Media campaigns. Reach me at livegamefully@gmail.com