Even if you don’t play video games, follow me. I’ve always played video games and have taken a lot out of them over the years. First, as a child, it greatly increased my hand-eye coordination, fine motor skills, and most importantly, my problem-solving skills. However, as an adult, it taught me something even more important, how to motivate myself!
I didn’t really realize it until I started playing Xbox 360 games, they had figured it out a long time ago and found a way to turn it into money. Microsoft knew that what they needed to make more money was to feed us with what drives us … no, not food. Achievements!
Each and every game that you can get for your system comes with a long list of achievements that extend beyond the normal game itself. For example, you can finish the story or beat the bad guys or play with friends and you still need to get some Achievements or conversely not finish it and still get some Achievements under your belt. I’ve watched people play a game for days, weeks, even months after “finishing” it just in search of those achievement points.
It’s a secondary feature that might seem a bit silly if you haven’t tried to get them before, but for avid gamers, these can get addictive. If a game had an achievement for playing 365 days in a row, you can be sure that there will be people playing that game every day for a year. And not just children, the average age of a gamer may surprise you.
What happens is that the Achievement system leads you to an Xbox 360 because it drives you in real life. It is the fuel you need to keep going. It is not usually unpleasant for you on your television screen. But it could be.
Think about it for a second. If you could fire up a video game, say … PacMan, and see a list of things like surviving for 20 minutes without dying, getting 500 points in a row without dying, eating 12 ghosts in a row … whatever, you would load that game and say to yourself to yourself “I can get them!” And when you got them, you would feel really good about it.
You don’t have to play video games to get that feeling. And there is no reason why an achievement list should only be viewed in a video game.
Put it into practice right now. Make a list of achievements in your life that you would like to achieve. Maybe it’s just drinking one coffee a day instead of two. Maybe it’s putting $ 100 in a drawer every month until you have $ 5,000. Maybe it’s playing less video games.
No matter what it is. The Simpsons video game has an achievement for pressing Start when you first turn on the game. Hard to get ?? Not even close. But it is an achievement!
Microsoft makes a fortune doing what you could really do for yourself. Think about it. Learn from it. Should.