IRL Achievements!

Sometimes I have motivation issues, and I will find pretty much any excuse to get out of stuff. I've been struggling with this for a few years, but I may have found a ridiculous solution inspired by video games.

A few years ago I wrote an essay on video game addiction in which I argued that the virtual world can be more desirable than the real world because progress can be easily tracked in a simple, numerical format. For example, you can instantly know that you have 130/200 fishing skill, or that you need 5000 more experience to level up. Sadly, this does not apply to real life. You can't get a high score, or tell everyone that you're a level 12 guitarist.

I used to play World of Warcraft. Yeah... I admit it. I was pretty damn good at it too, ranked something like top 200 worldwide at my highest point. Anyway, a few years ago they introduced a feature in the game called achievements, where you earn points for doing all kinds of ridiculous things. Anyone who owns an X-Box knows all about achievements too - same idea. The thing about these points is... they don't do anything. Other than showing them off to your friends, they're entirely pointless. In fact, when they were first announced, I told all my in-game friends that I thought it was stupid and I was never going to bother with them.

Well, a few months later I was pretty obsessed with achievements, to the point where I was in the top 5 on my realm of something like 20,000 people. I don't know why, but I loved the little sparkles and banners that appeared everytime I did something difficult. In fact, I remember telling a friend that if there were achievements in real life, I would get a whole hell of a lot more done. How fucking badass would it be to get a little fanfare everytime you accomplish something, complete with a beam of heavenly light and a couple of points to add to your awesomeness? Best of all you would know exactly what you needed to do to get more of those points, and be able to track your progress in percentages.

I was telling my sister yesterday about some of my weird life goals, and she advised me to write a bucket list. While doing so, I had a flash of genius where all the stuff I've described above came together. Why not make every single life goal into an achievement, and make a little digital chart on my PC to track it? All I had to do was decide what was important to me, and make an achievement for it. Obviously there are nearly infinite numbers of things I could include, but by focusing only on things that I would actually be proud of showing off, I can essentially make a very manageable to-do list.

Here are a few of the ones I made up, just so you can see wtf I'm talking about:

Now, I realize that this isn't for everyone, but if it works for me then hell yeah I'm gonna keep at it.