As I have been discussing video games for a while now, you’re probably thinking, what makes you eligible to talk about this? Well, my past strongly involved video games too.
It was a large part of my life and even though there came a point where I decided to stop, I still learned a lot from that era of my life.
This is where I want to share how video games helped me.
Talking the talk and walking the walk
As in a previous post I went through how gaming can benefit your life, here is my experience of using video games to benefit my own life.
Drive
When I would play games, I wanted to be the best. Simply put, if you put a game in front of me, I had to beat it and win over anyone else playing.
When I stopped, I used that persistence to get myself to the gym and beat my personal best each week. I also would walk into an interview and want to be the best and win that job.
I found that drive I had gained from ‘winning’ to be so useful in my day-to-day life once I actively triggered it in real life.
Ambition
With that drive that I had gained came a want to get better each time and want to grow in anything I set my mind to. When it came to starting my business, I was always on the lookout for what could make it grow or what could help me achieve my goals.
Not giving up
Like I’ve mentioned before, when you play a video game, you learn to fail, brush yourself off and learn from your mistakes when you start again.
This is a huge skill to gain, as nothing can be made perfect the first time you do it. When I stepped out into the real world, it wasn’t as big of a step to convince myself that things might not always go my way but that’s ok!
What is failure?
Again, failure is normal in the gaming world, so it wasn’t a far stretch for me to dust myself off when my website would go down. I’d simply step and get down to how I can fix it and succeed.
Games and getting to the finish line
Like I said earlier, when I would play games, all I wanted to do was win. So now when I give myself a task or a new obstacle comes my way, all I want to do is level up and win at that too.
Leading onto that need to win and be the best at what I do, I’m still always learning, and adapting to change to be the best version of myself.
Games have helped me to understand myself and become the person that I’ve always wanted to be. And that doesn’t mean masking my flaws and failures, but rather feeling able to see the good, bad, adapt and change the way I relate to the world to my advantage.
Just like therapy, I guess
As I don’t play video games competitively or at all anymore, I want to next take you through my decision to stop playing.
