Motivation In the Form of Video Games - What Can We Learn?

Even if you don't play video games, just follow along with me. I've always played video games and have taken a lot away from them over the years. First and foremost, 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!

It didn't really dawn on me until I started playing Xbox 360 games, they had caught on 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 what fuels us... no, not food. Achievements!

Each and every game that you can get for their system comes with a laundry 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 still need to get some Achievements or conversely, not finish it and still get some Achievements to your credit. I've seen people play a game for days, weeks, even months after they "finished" it just in search of those Achievement points.

It's a secondary feature which may seem kind of silly if you haven't tried to get them before but for avid gamers, these can become addictive. If a game had an achievement for playing 365 days straight, you can be sure that there would be people out there playing that game every day for a year. And not just children either, the average age of a video game player might surprise you.

The thing is that the Achievement system drives you on an Xbox 360 because it drives you in real life. It's the fuel you need to move forward.  It's just not usually laid out for you on your television screen. But it could be.

Think about it for just 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 dots in a row without dying, eating 12 ghosts in a row... what ever, you would load that game up and say to yourself "I can get those!" And when you did get those, you would feel really good about it.

You don't have to play video games to get that feeling. And there's no reason that a list of Achievements should only be seen in a video game.

Put it in to practice right now. Make a list of Achievements in your life that you would like to get. Maybe it's drinking only one coffee a day instead of two. Maybe it's putting $100 into a drawer every month until you have $5000. Maybe it's playing less video games.

It doesn't matter what it is. The Simpsons video game has an achievement for pressing Start when you first turn the game on. Hard to get?? Not even close. But it's an Achievement!

Microsoft makes a fortune from doing what you really could do for yourself. Think about it. Learn from it. Do it.