How Ambition and Drive Contribute to Living a Balanced Life

They reflect your passion for a specific project or activity game.

While writing the book Self-Gamification Happiness Formula and developing the Balance Game, which embraces turning all areas of my life into fun games, I realized that ambition and drive could add to the balance in my life rather than contradicting it.

Self-Gamification as an approach to turning life into fun games and books I write on the topic often preoccupy my creative thought processes. Still, I had the idea that I should spread my attention and efforts concurrently over several large projects that I would like to accomplish that year (including working on other books).

Even when making almost daily progress in many of these and gaining points for them, I somehow didn’t feel like I was having fun. Then I realized that I had the ambition to write the book, the excerpt from which you are reading now, first. I wanted to see it come together and become a completed product.

So that was the game I wanted to excel in then, and I wanted to try the others later.

In the Balance Game, I used weekends and holidays to recharge, and I collected stars when I managed not to work too much on projects and work activities at those times.

But when I became aware of a burning passion, I made an exception for that one “ambition project.” I allowed myself to be creative in this project in my free time and weekends too. Mobile, scraps of paper, and the computer were all used as soon as creative thoughts appeared.

Awareness, kaizen, and gamification helped me enjoy this project and anything else that called for my attention on the weekends. This “ambition project” turned out to be a great game to play whenever I had a break between enjoying time with my husband and children, visiting family members and friends, or doing household chores or other things around the house, and I took a little time for myself.

I discovered that being creative in a project I was passionate about was one of the best things I could do for myself.

Seeing and enabling myself to respond to this big wish was an enlightening and self-empowering discovery.

Ambitions, nowadays often prejudiced as bringing us nothing but stress and depression, can actually contribute to the balance and happiness in our lives.

Gamers usually have one game that preoccupies their minds and where they feel most creative. They might play other games too, but they come back again and again to that one. For my son — when I was writing the first version of the text you are reading now — that was Roblox and its many games and simulators.

As I was revising the book Self-Gamification Happiness Formula, my son’s preferred game was Minecraft again (at the beginning of writing this book, Minecraft). He said that he had regained his passion for the game thanks to the many updates since he had last played.

The same can happen with real-life projects.

The project games we thought had stopped being of interest to us might catch our attention and become exciting again after some time.

The project might be the same as it was, but you received an “upgrade” from all the experiences you had since then.

“Think of yourself as a highly sophisticated computer with archaic programming. Simple awareness acts like a complimentary upgrade.”

— Ariel and Shya Kane, How to Have A Match Made in Heaven: A Transformational Approach to Dating, Relating, and Marriage

You might need (and have already) such an “ambition project” too. If you look at what you have on your to-do list (wherever it is recorded: on paper, digitally, or in your head), you will recognize this special project by identifying which of them appears to be both the most attractive and the scariest. It is basically the one about which, while daydreaming, you have both illusions and nightmares.

Yes, as I wrote Self-Gamification Happiness Formula, this project was both the most yearned for and the scariest. I wanted this book to be both valuable and fun to read. So, I allowed myself to own the ambition of finishing writing it as soon as I could (that was Spring 2019) and also enjoy each step on the path to that finish line.

I recorded the points (one per ten minutes of writing) in the little field marked with “SG” (which stood for Self-Gamification) in my Points and Stars Game Book, which was and is a weekly planner where I record my points, bonus stars, and other badges, as self-drawn donuts.

And my guides in all that were and are my awareness of and the will to follow my curiosity, my (what I call) “fun detecting antenna,” and my passion.

A note to this article: It is a modified and extended excerpt from Self-Gamification Happiness Formula: How to Turn Your Life into Fun Games.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this story, then in addition to it and those I referred to above, you might also enjoy these:

P.S. To stay in touch and keep updated on the fantastic possibilities of turning life into fun games offers, join my e-mail list, Optimist Writer.