Yes, I know it. That moment when your life is all about killing tons of monsters to get that super-fancy-badass-armour, what ranking you are or getting positive scores. That’s what my life was all about less than a year ago.
Back to those days, I’d play as many hours as I could. I had no limits, on weekends, I’d play 10 hours a day minimum. I couldn’t realise that those games were actually harming myself pretty hard.
I was into a void of procrastination and frustration I couldn’t escape from. As any other person in this world, I had big goals and dreamed of an extraordinary life, but I couldn’t start to move towards my goals. Sometimes, I’d get really motivated and would start working or studying something, but as soon as things would start to be more complicated, I’d fall into frustration and go back to play videogames. “Who would prefer working his ass off rather than play the whole day?” That’s what I’d say back then and sadly this mindset is really common.
Being lazy is the easiest thing, yes, but that drove me to my worst personal crisis. And then after days looking for anything that could help myself I came across with the term that would change my life, Kaizen.
Kaizen is a japanese term understood as continuous improvement. Step by step, always moving forward for the good. Always learning and using everything to improve. This way of thinking worked great for a geek like me, it was like leveling up your character, and becoming stronger with each level. This hooked me and from then on, I’ve never stopped thinking this way.
I just had to improve as much as I could every day, even if it was just a little, it was a success already. That success would give me more motivation for the next day, so most probably the improvement then would be higher. And the days I wouldn’t do anything, I’d feel really bad and realise that even if being lazy is easier, it’s far more boring.
This is the way I started to relate effort to happiness, and lazyness and procrastination to unhappiness. What’s more, is that doing my thing and pursuing excellence started bringing to my life new great experiences, positive friends, and a bunch of amazing things that were impossible to happen if I had stayed playing videogames all day long.
Also, what’s great about this mindset, is that you will insanely seek for more knowledge as you find new obstacles in your way. You just want to keep growing, being the best you can be so you never get stuck.
So, since June 2014 when I started, I’ve changed my life 360º in so many ways this post should be eternal in order to explain everything well enough, but let me share with you the improvement of my artistic skills through this 6 months.
Pere Albacar 