How to gamify your goals

Photo by Thiago Thadeu on Unsplash

If you’re anything like me, you may have so many things you want to do that picking is almost painful.

And while there are some people who have natural reasons to be drawn to a relatively narrow range of desirable outcomes, others could be happy and successful and strong contributors with many.

This doesn’t mean they’re not fulfilling their purpose or potential. It means they’re creating it along the way.

SMART goals are well and good but if you find yourself taking it all a bit too seriously, struggling to narrow your focus for real traction, or questioning your direction in a way that’s distressing/distracting, ask yourself what you would shoot for if it were “just a game?”

Bonus: What’s a game you could play, where everyone who plays or who it touches, wins as a result when you do?

You can reflect on “life purpose” or your narrative arc for a lifetime. In the end these emerge from how you show up, the actions you take.

Quick tricks to gamify goals are:

1. Create quarterly and 30 day challenges mapped to a long-term vision and/or 12 month objectives
2. Celebrate, celebrate, celebrate. Share your successes with others. If this is embarrassing, get curious about what belief it’s rubbing up against.
3. Make your goals hard enough to be exciting and make you sweat a little.
4. Create friendly competitions with others who are good sports.
5. Take your (scared or defended) ego out of it by asking yourself what would you go for if you couldn’t fail, and didn’t need to prove anything?

Contained and defined games you’re committed to mean you won’t dance or drift all over the place.

Play games you enjoy, that will be meaningful — for your work, life, and relationships. I think that’s what Alan Watts would say.

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