I believe that “practice makes perfect” if you can act up to the principle.
If you train yourself, you become any specialist who produces results. Your age doesn’t matter.
The key to success is not “brilliant ideas”, “extensive knowledge” or “talent”.
To succeed, you just need to “keep doing it patiently”.
However, many people probably know that it is easy to say, but hard to do when you keep doing it. It is because “you lost motivation”, “the task got complicated” and “you didn’t feel like it”. Then you gave it up.
To tell you the truth, I have experienced failure in many fields such as “sports”, “acquisition of qualification” and “business activity”.
But I keep one habit for 10 years. It’s “to keep track of my household accounts”. It was troublesome once, but is now a part of my life.
I’ll tell you why I keep doing it. It’s a gamification; I made it like a game.
A game is pretty crazy. You could get addicted to it even if it doesn’t make a penny. You know it is a waste of your time, but you can’t help it. That’s why the game market is huge. Some say game is fun and that’s the reason the market is growing, but we don’t quite know why we feel happy with playing a game.
“Gamification” means an idea to change a boring task into a game in order to have someone keep doing it. I don’t completely agree with this idea because some games are fun, but not all games are.
A fun game has components to keep motivate a person, which means if we figure out what the components are, we would know how to make a task a daily routine.
What are the components? M. Csikszentmihalyi discusses several components in his book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience”. The most essential part is “appropriate goal setting” and “immediate feedback whether the action is proper for the goal”.
The book shows you 3 tips.
- Set a goal which is not too high or too low.
- Make the goal clarified.
- Have a system that shows you either you’re moving towards the goal or not.
A game meets to all three components.
Especially 3rd one is most essential, I believe. You would probably like to know the result right after your action.
The reason I keep track of my household accounts is the same. My goal is to “see balance of account in order to avoid overdue of my credit card”, which is pretty simple. Account books gave me an immediate feedback either I’m overdue or not.
To keep doing a thing, you need “an easy to understand goal which you can achieve with small effort”, and “a system to show the evidence of progress”. It is probably valid not only in individual behaviors, but also in management skills in a company.
この記事は、”ゲームはなぜこれほど多くの人がハマるのか？「継続は力なり」を実現するしくみと、ゲームデザインの共通点“の翻訳記事です。
翻訳：ばばゆきこ
アメリカだけれど、
ブログ：いぬさん宛てのお手紙届きました。
