How to apply gamification to reach your goals


It wasn’t a new years resolution. I just woke up one morning & decided to build a house.  Now, I know thats not a ground breaking revelation. A lot of people build houses but here’s the kicker I decided that I was going to build a house. With my own two fucking hands. To understand how I came to this decision, you need to understand my mindset. The American economy seems to value a few things: 
1.) Cash/currency  
2.) Knowledge 
3.) Time
4.) Energy

Most transactions seem to boil down to exchanging one or two of those things for another. For instance: Work is trading time and knowledge for cash. College is trading cash for knowledge.

So after college a guy I dated (not my husband) introduced me to boardgames. Not standard boardgames like scrabble and monopoly but EUROPEAN boardgames. ooooooh exotic! These boardgames are totally different. The rules are more complex, they have more ‘moving pieces’ literally and figuratively in the strategy. There are abstract concepts, more variables, and multi step planning. For instance, you will win if you get the most Z. Y will convert to Z, but the exchange rate varies each round. X will convert to Z at a constant rate but you also need to spend X to prevent A from happening. Four V’s = 1 Y. There’s also M & if you manage to collect L,M,N, & O it will multiply your Z’s. 

Like I said, WAY more complicated than Uno. I enjoyed them. I played. I learned. I discovered I was good at them. Once I understood the rules, I could conceptualize how different things ‘flowed’ to the end goal. Then it hit me. If I could be good at a boardgame then I could be good at life. I mean life is often times called a ‘game’ anyways, right? So how can I win the game of life? Figurative life, not the literal game with the fake cars and little pink & blue pegs. To win a game you have to know the goal, the end game, the winning conditions. It’s true, alot of people want alot of different things but a house is pretty high up there on most people’s list and definitly a common goal. So I had a goal, now I needed a strategy to reach it. I’m good at strategy. The example of a European boardgame I made above with the letters would be categorized as a resource management game. You acquire and manage different resources of varying worth. Im good at managing resources because I can be efficient. Efficiency means less time is spent. Time on my value list above. Hey! Doesn’t my value list above look alot like a list of resources? Ding! Ding! Ding!

So I’ve identified the resources & I know my win condition. Now, I have to come up with a strategy. Most people get a mortgage. They then have to work to be able to afford that mortgage. For THIRTY  YEARS! They don’t actually OWN the house until the mortgage is paid off and most mortgages are thirty years! That’s not efficient that’s not even logical in my book. Thirty years is almost half of someone’s entire life! So they are going to spend THIRTY years, while they’re young enough to enjoy life mind you, working to pay for a house. By the time they have the house paid off their older & don’t have much time (or energy) left to enjoy either their house or the rest of their life. The entire American life and economy are built around this one idea or principal. Yes, I know I’m describing the American education, work, banking, retirement, and housing systems. They’re all broken and they’re all fucked. Like I said inefficient and I can come up with something better than that. I refuse to wait to enjoy life.

I’ve identified my win condition, resources, and one strategy that won’t work. Since strategies are built around resources like go back to our resource list. A mortgage represents: 30 years of time and knowledge to acquire money to pay for it. You don’t need a mortgage if you can afford it in the first place. So I was looking to reduce the cost of building a house. A large part of the cost of building a house is labor. By building it myself I’m using the resources of my time & my energy to reduce the cost (cash resource). Another way to reduce the cost? By building it completely different with different materials than most. Is it possible to get some building materials for free? Is it possible for ‘affordable housing’ to not be shitty? Can someone with no building experience build an ‘affordable house’? & what the hell is an ‘affordable house’ anyways?