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Transform Your Daily Life into an Engaging Adventure with the Flowtasking Approach
Do you feel stuck in your life? As if you're going in circles without clear direction, with that persistent feeling of being lost in a fog of indecision? This feeling is more common than you might think, especially for multipotentialites who often find themselves navigating between different passions without a structured framework.
The good news? There's a powerful method to transform this confusion into clarity: gamifying your life. By applying the principles that make video games so addictive to your own existence, you can create a system that generates motivation, direction, and accomplishment.
Understanding the Chapters of Your Life
The first step to gamifying your life is understanding that existence unfolds in chapters, each following a predictable sequence of four phases:
1. The Limbo Phase
This is that floating period where you don't know what to do or what you want. You feel lost, confused, and sometimes on the verge of giving up. But this phase isn't a bug in the system—it's a necessary feature.
2. The Vision Phase
Gradually, an image of the future forms. The puzzle pieces begin to come together to create a picture that inspires and motivates you. This vision becomes clear enough to push you into action.
3. The Flow Phase
Once engaged on your new path, you enter a state where you can barely detach yourself from your goal. Work becomes effortless, time passes differently, and you're completely absorbed in your quest.
4. The Resistance Phase
Inevitably, exponential progress doesn't last forever. Obstacles arise, motivation fluctuates, but you don't want this flow period to stop—sometimes to your detriment.
What's fascinating is that most people remain stuck in the first phase—limbo. Why? Because our society has conditioned us to follow a pre-established script. We're accustomed to the linear results of school and work, to having someone else provide our certainty.
When we attempt to live an unconventional life (the only way to get unconventional results), we interpret this feeling of being lost as a bad sign. We give up and return to the comfort of the life planned for us.
How to Exit Limbo and Collect Your Vision
To transform this fog into clarity, here's a proven three-step approach:
Step 1: Give Yourself Permission to Let Your Life Get Worse (Temporarily)
As counter-intuitive as it may seem, the first step is to accept that things will temporarily become more uncomfortable.
Here's why: if you feel lost, it's because you don't have a clear objective. But in this turbulent state of mind, formulating a meaningful goal is almost impossible.
What you need is a powerful catalyst for change. And paradoxically, this catalyst often comes from a deep awareness of what you want to avoid at all costs.
Practical exercise: Ask yourself honestly: "If I continue on my current trajectory, where will my life end up in 5, 10, 20 years?" Visualize this reality precisely. Feel the emotion associated with this perspective. When this vision truly begins to inhabit you, your mind will naturally become eager to learn, experiment, and grow.
Step 2: Recognize Your Unconscious Goals
Here's a difficult truth to accept: you are exactly where you are because part of you wants to be there. It's not conscious, of course, but our behavior is always directed toward a goal.
According to Adlerian psychology, we are not pushed by our past but pulled by our goals. The problem? These goals are often unconscious.
If you feel lost or stuck, it's probably because your unconscious goal is to avoid the pain, fear, and embarrassment that accompany radical change. In other words, you're unconsciously programmed to maintain the status quo.
Practical exercise: Analyze your current actions and ask yourself: "What goal do these behaviors serve?" Often, you'll discover that your actions serve the goal of "staying safe" or "avoiding failure" rather than progressing toward your true aspirations.
To reprogram your mind, immerse yourself in new sources of information:
Read books that challenge your worldview
Engage in conversations with people who have different perspectives
Follow new accounts on social media
Visit places that have intrigued you for a long time
Take a course on an entirely new skill
The goal is to create sparks of inspiration that, combined, will form a clearer vision of the life you want to build.
Transforming Your Life Into a Video Game
Once you begin to see the outlines of your new direction, it's time to structure your progression like a video game. This approach is particularly effective because our minds naturally operate in narrative mode, and games are pre-designed stories with mechanisms that focus our attention and make progress enjoyable.
Step 1: Design the Game
Start by creating a hierarchy of goals structured as follows:
Ultimate goal: Your "final boss" or life mission
Long-term goals: Your major quests (1-5 year horizons)
Medium-term goals: Your main missions (1-12 month horizons)
Short-term goals: Your daily and weekly quests
Next, define the rules of your game. What are you not willing to sacrifice to achieve your goals? Your health? Your relationships? These constraints aren't limitations—they make the game more creative and more aligned with your values.
Finally, establish quantifiable priority tasks that will serve as feedback mechanisms:
Write 1000 words per day
Read 10 pages
Contact 5 potential clients
Practice a new skill for 30 minutes
These daily actions become your action levers and progress indicators, creating a clear and motivating feedback loop.
Step 2: Create a Tutorial Phase
In video games, you don't learn by studying endless tutorials or watching others play—you learn by playing. Similarly, you won't discover your path by standing still, but by starting to move forward.
Don't worry about knowing if you've found your eternal calling. You'll discover what you want to do by correcting your mistakes, and you can't correct a mistake that doesn't exist yet.
Once in motion, focus on two fundamental elements:
The basics: Most success comes simply from not getting distracted from the fundamentals
Specific solutions: Intentionally seek answers when you can no longer progress with your own knowledge
To accelerate your learning, incorporate daily learning and building sessions of 1-2 hours. These two activities reinforce each other and create a virtuous circle of progress.
Step 3: Stay at the Frontier of the Unknown
In many video games, the map reveals areas you've explored (bright) and those you haven't yet visited (dark). This metaphor perfectly represents your level of skill and experience in real life.
If you venture into areas too advanced for your current level, you'll feel anxiety and make little progress. Conversely, if you stay too long in areas you already master, you'll get bored and stagnate.
The solution is to stay right at the frontier of your skill level—where the challenge is enough to stimulate you but not high enough to overwhelm you. It's in this zone that the optimal flow state is found, where learning is maximized and life becomes a fluid and satisfying progression.
Practical exercise: Each week or month, slightly increase the challenge level of what you're doing. Not by adding more work, but by gradually increasing the difficulty or complexity of the tasks you're already accomplishing. Like a weightlifter who adds small weights each week, it's this constant but manageable progression that leads to the best results.
The Four Steps to Transform Your Life Into an Engaging Game
To recap, here are the four essential steps to gamify your life and exit the fog:
Accept limbo as a normal phase and use the vision of what you want to avoid as fuel for change
Reprogram your unconscious goals by exposing yourself to new ideas and perspectives
Structure your progression like a game with a clear hierarchy of goals, rules that respect your values, and daily feedback mechanisms
Maintain yourself at the frontier of your competence to stay in an optimal flow state where progression is natural and satisfying
This approach doesn't just help you exit the fog—it transforms your entire life into an engaging adventure where each day offers new opportunities for growth and accomplishment.
What Now?
Gamifying your life isn't just a theoretical exercise—it's a practical methodology that has transformed many people's lives, including my own. By applying these principles, I've been able to move from periods of confusion and stagnation to clear and constant progression toward my goals.
Remember: it typically takes one to two months of confusion, feeling lost, and being on the verge of giving up for the right amount of vision to form. This isn't a sign of failure—it's a normal and necessary step in the process.
If you're currently in this limbo phase, take heart. You're not failing—you're collecting the puzzle pieces that, once assembled, will give you the clarity you need to launch into an exciting new chapter of your life.
What phase are you currently going through in your life? How could you apply these gamification principles to your specific situation? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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