Tag Archives: #motivation

One Minute Read from the 5 Minute Perseverance Game

Self-Gamification, , , , , , ,

Today I start a series of blog posts featuring videos on YouTube, where I read from one of my motivational books for one minute.

Here is the video where I read from the 5 Minute Perseverance Game: Play Daily for a Month and Become the Ultimate Procrastination Breaker.

The extract I am reading is from the chapter “About the Game.”

Here it is if you want to read along, prior, or afterward.

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Excerpt from the chapter “About the Game”

Procrastination means putting off something which needs doing, whereas perseverance is to keep on doing the task whatever it takes.

So procrastination is bad and perseverance is good. Do you agree?

You do? Have you ever tried questioning this statement?

Quite a few people on the Internet do question the supposedly negative side of procrastination by organizing pro-procrastinating fan groups. They rebel and fight the procrastination fighters.

And what do the others, the pro-perseverance say? Many say you need to work hard to achieve something. They search for those inspiring figures throughout history and the present, who achieved amazing heights in various areas, in spite of challenges they might have faced or still face.

You want the same, badly. You want to achieve something, you have a dream. But on the other hand, you like what procrastinators and writers of “Be lazy at work” books say. You want fun, not hard work.

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Special news and a special offer

Before I finish this post, here is a reminder of the special piece of information I announced in the post “How to Persevere With Joy Instead of Effort,” published a week and a half ago.

Here is what I shared there with you:

I will publish the 2nd (5-Year) edition of the 5 Minute Perseverance Game this year. I sent the revised manuscript to my editor this week, and I hope in March, I will publish it.

So, here is my offer to you.

If you buy the first edition of the 5 Minute Perseverance Game before the second is published and send me a copy of your receipt, then within the week of the second edition’s launch, I will send you a link where you will be able to download the second edition of the book as an e-book in a format of your choice.

Please send me your receipt to vib@optimistwriter.com or in a personal message through one of the channels listed on my contact page.

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Where to buy the book

To take a look at 5 Minute Perseverance Game and buy it on Amazon, click on its title or this image:

If you want to see where else you can buy it, then go to the book’s page on this website here.

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Enjoy playing your perseverance, voluntary procrastination, or any other self-motivational and uplifting games! ?

Here is Why You, Writer, Need Cheerleaders

Self-Gamification, , , , , ,

 

(Image courtesy of the author)

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Beginning something new can be both daunting and exciting. We, authors, face the beginnings with each new empty page.

Finishing one page might be super exciting, but suddenly we meet the start of another, empty one.

We all might have heard the brilliant wisdom by Nora Roberts and other prolific authors, “You can’t edit a blank page.” But how do we start filling in those blanks?

Any creative excitement can flip quickly into nervousness and even despair, especially when we love what we do — the bigger the wish, the bigger both the excitement and fear of both succeeding and failing.

Cheerleaders remind sports teams of excitement. They help the athletes to “reframe” nervousness into something positive and fun. They remind them and the audience that something big and amazing is about to happen.

The stories writers create are big and amazing too! Each of them is unique, be it one of fiction or true events.

Thus, we, writers, need cheerleaders too.

We can be our own cheerleaders, and there are many great tips on how to do it. My favorite approach is to turn life into fun games.

But sometimes we also need cheerleaders from outside. Our family, friends, fellow writers, agents, publishers — they all have the ability to be such cheerleaders too.

And I have one in the form of a little book for you. Its title is Cheerleading for Writers. I am thrilled that it has helped many authors on the way and that some acclaimed and even a New York Times bestselling author have appreciated it so much that they wrote a review.

I invite you to read this little book and get powered up in your epic creative writing journey.

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Where you can find this cheerleader

To take a look at the Cheerleading for Writers, read its reviews, and buy it on Amazon, click on its title above or the image below:

If you want to see where else you can buy it, then go to the book’s page on this website here.

Alternatively, you can subscribe to my page, Optimist Writer, on ko-fi for $5 a month, and besides supporting what I do, you will also get access to all my motivational books, which I share there once a month or each time a book is out. Right now, you can get access to four of my books there — one upon subscription or one-time support, and three in the posts solely for subscribers. Cheerleading for Writers will be added later this year or upon explicit request from subscribers.

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Enjoy being cheered and feeding your hungry pages! 😀

How to Answer Questions on Turning Life into Fun Games

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(Image courtesy of the author)

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When we are offered a new idea or a new approach, many questions appear almost all by themselves.

Why should I do it? What is it good for? Who is responsible for making this idea come true? When should I find time for it? Where is it appropriate to do such a thing? Where shall I get resources to make it a reality? Who can help me in the process? And the master of all questions: How shall I do it?

After I formulated my approach to turning life into fun games — which I call “Self-Gamification” — in my book Self-Gamification Happiness Formula (about which I wrote yesterday in this post), I started receiving and answering many questions starting with the six question words: what, why, who, when, where, and how.

Simultaneously, two of the book’s readers have complained about its considerable length — over 90,000 words. The Self-Gamification Happiness Formula considers the approach bringing anthropology, kaizen, and gamification into a strong synergy from multiple perspectives and also shares some of my self-motivational game designs. But what these readers looked for was a short introduction into the Self-Gamification approach, which would concisely answer the what, why, who, when, where, and how questions.

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The 5W&1H book is born

And so the idea was born. I had enormous fun compiling a little book called The Who, What, When, Where, Why & How of Turning Life into Fun Games. You could say, I disassembled the Self-Gamification Happiness Formula, as you would a castle or other big construct built out of LEGO® bricks delivered in a set with an instruction manual. Then I selected many of the bigger book’s “bricks,” took a few from a book I have published shortly prior, Gameful Project Management, and created something completely new.

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Very brief answers to the
who, what, when, where, why, and how
questions

This little book’s description names the questions I answered in the book. I challenge myself now to a game to answer these questions in ten or fewer words each. Let’s see how I will do:

  • Q: Who is responsible for turning projects, activities, and whole lives into games?
  • A: You.
  • Q: What can be turned into games?
  • A: Anything and everything.
  • Q: When does it make sense to turn something into games?
  • A: Now or any time you need help.
  • Q: Where could or should projects and activities be turned into games?
  • A: Where you are.
  • Q: Why does it make sense to turn projects, activities, and even our whole lives into fun games?
  • A: Two of many reasons: lack of drama and effortless resourcefulness.
  • Q: How can we turn projects, activities, and our lives into games?
  • A: By using the three-in-one toolset embracing anthropology, kaizen, and gamification.

Wow, I didn’t plan it, but I did manage to fit my answers into ten or fewer words right from the first formulation of each of them. Yay! I won. 😀

***

Where to find longer answers

My answers above are understandably too short, so I invite you to open The Who, What, When, Where, Why & How of Turning Life into Fun Games and discover longer, but still concise, answers to the six questions above.

To take a look at the book and buy it on Amazon, click on its title in this section above or the image below:

If you want to see where else you can buy it, then go to the book’s page on this website here.

Alternatively, you can subscribe to my page, Optimist Writer, on ko-fi for $5 a month, and besides supporting what I do, you will also get access to all my motivational books, which I share there once a month or each time a book is out. Right now, you can get access to four of my books there — one upon subscription or one-time support, and three in the posts solely for subscribers. Since the day before yesterday, the Self-Gamification Happiness Formula is one of the three. The Who, What, When, Where, Why & How of Turning Life into Fun Games will be one of the next books I will share there.

Enjoy answering any question you receive or ask yourself in a gameful and joyful way!

How the Most Neglected Part of You — the Gameful and Playful One — Can Be the Most Helpful During the Pandemic and in Any Kind of Crisis

Self-Gamification, , , , , , ,
(Image by the author)

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 Isolation is 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!

— Victoria

Self-Gamification News by Optimist Writer

Gameful Project Management, Self-Gamification, , , , , , , , , ,

I have some exciting news to share.

First of all, the Self-Gamification Happiness Formula, which I published in June of this year in e-book and paperback formats, is now also available as an audiobook.

The other news is that I finished writing the Gameful Project Management manuscript and sent it to my editor. In the coming few weeks, I will post some of the chapters, which I haven’t published as blog posts yet.

To celebrate both great news and because of the holiday season, I reduced the price for the e-books on Self-Gamification as follows:

The prices will go back to normal after the holiday season, so please make sure you let your friends and colleagues know so that they can profit from these books too.