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30DLBL Day 2 – What’s Your Ideal Life?

Celes — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 00:01:29 +0000

Today is Day 2 of Live A Better Life in 30 Days Challenge (View past 30DLBL tasks). If you have not signed up, do so here. Check #30DLBL on Twitter for latest news on the challenge.

We started Day 1 with life wheel assessment. It was absolutely amazing reading your responses and Twitter updates. Many of you got powerful insights doing the exercise which is fantastic! The exercise is meant to drive clarity on how you’re doing in life – and now you have a clear picture, work on maximizing your life, starting with this month (hence the 30 days action plan). Stick true to your 30 days action plan and make this your best month ever.

As I read the incoming new tweets on #30DLBL from participants and responses, I feel very honored to experience this journey with you. I am very impressed with the dedication you have put in towards living a better life. Several participants mentioned spending 2 hours (or even more) on the exercise; many participants have been blogging about their 30DLBL Day 1 tasks and journeys, including participant Shuwei who specially set up a 30DLBL blog for this purpose!

While this is framed a 30 day challenge, know that it’s really more than that. Ultimately it’s about you. It’s about your life. The attention you’re putting into this means you’ll reap even more rewards for yourself and your life too, for the 30 days and even long after that.

On another positive note, we have reached over 1,000 comments for our 30DLBL announcement post and over 900 sign ups! We even have a couple of husband/wife teams and participant Catherine who is engaging it as a family level project . A number of readers shared that they weren’t planning to join/just wanted to do this passively, then eventually jumped fully onboard after they got into Day 1′s task . In just a few hours, we’ll be hitting over 1,000 participants We’ve hit over 1,000 participants! Sign-ups will remain open for a couple more days for new visitors, as well as those who decide to join mid-way.

Without further ado, let’s now move to Day 2′s task.

Day 2 – Your Ideal Life

Today’s task will take about 1.5 hours.

“Your imagination is your preview of life’s coming attractions.” ~ Albert Einstein

“Everything you want should be yours: the type of work you want; the relationships you need; the social, mental, and aesthetic stimulation that will make you happy and fulfilled; the money you require for the lifestyle that is appropriate to you; and any requirement that you may (or may not) have for achievement or service to others. If you don’t aim for it all, you’ll never get it all. To aim for it requires that you know what you want” ~ Richard Koch (101 Inspiring Quotes of All Time)

Do you remember when you were a little boy/girl? What would you think about? What were your biggest wishes and dreams? What were your aspirations? What did you want to be when you grow up? What did you want to achieve?

For many of us, childhood was a time when we would think about whatever we want. We were free to dream, to imagine, to visualize. We could be whoever we want. We could be Superman, Batman or Spiderman, and no one would tell us that we were crazy. We could set to be the richest person in the world, with all the supplies of ice cream and candy that we would ever want, and it was okay. We could want to be the president, and we would be praised for having such goals.

But somehow along the way, as we were growing up, things changed. Suddenly, certain goals would become labeled as “crazy” by others, and people who think that way would be seen as fools. Suddenly, certain thoughts or goals would be seen as not being “practical” or “realistic”, even though these are really our truest hearts’ desires. Suddenly, it was “wrong” to think/do this and that, and only certain goals were seen as “correct” or “appropriate”

Because of that, we began to think in limitations, rather than possibilities. We stopped thinking about what we want, things that make us come alive 200%. We start to live our lives in autopilot mode, so that we could get by every day. As a result, our ideals, our real self, became stashed to a corner. We forgot who we truly are. We forgot what are the things that make us come alive.

What if all our dreams are actually possible? What if everything is within your reach all along, and it’s a matter of first envisioning it then taking action to make it happen? How would you feel? What would you want to be? What would you want to do? Who would you want to be?

And it is possible. Everything that you’ve ever hoped and wanted is all possible. It’s all a matter of taking the right steps to achieve them, and to do so you have to first be consciously thinking about them. To live your truest, best life, you’ve to first identify your biggest wishes, goals and dreams; things that excite you, that make you come to life, that make you feel like you’re born on a whole new level.

Day 1′s task was about getting clarity and being aware. Day 2 is about possibilities, dreams, your wishes, your ideals, your deepest hopes and desires, your truest passions in life.

For today’s task, you’ll be designing your ideal life.

Your Task

Envision Your Ideal Life

Do this exercise when you’re alone and not going to be interrupted by anymore. You need the quiet, alone time.

Start on a fresh page in your 30DLBL workbook for Day 2. On top of it, write “My Ideal Life”

Envision your ideal life. For the next hour (or more), I want you to seriously answer this question:

What would you do if you can never, ever fail? What would you do if you have unlimited resources, time or networks? What are your biggest goals and dreams? What would you want to achieve in your life? What is your ideal life? What is a life you can look back and be proud of living, and tell yourself “I’ve truly lived to my fullest?”
Be bold; Write everything you want.
- You know how you get a menu whenever you go to a restaurant, and then whatever you’ll basically get the food that you order on the menu? See this paper as the menu of the God/highest power that you’re aware of, where whatever you write on it will come true. Write as much as you need to; 4 pages, 6 pages, or even more than 10 pages!! This should be a life where you’ll score >10/10 and >10/10 on each category of your life wheel too.
- As a small example, in my ideal life which I’ve set since 2008 (since before I started TPEB), TPEB reaches millions of readers every day; I’ve my very own international talkshow; I have books that are in top international best sellers’ lists; I run a full school campus for TSOPE which is my training business; (think Xavier school from X-Men); I’m on the cover of top magazines like Forbes/Times/Business Week/etc; I speak to hundreds and thousands of people in conferences/seminars; I have a private jet and much more. And this is but a fraction of my ideal life.
- How about you? What’s yours? Be bold, be audacious, be free, be truly you. Be as specific as possible; the more specific it is, the more the universe will be able to bring this to you. Write everything that comes to mind. Even little details, nuances are relevant.
Your answers should cover all categories in your life wheel.
1. Business / Career / Studies – What are you doing? What achievements and results do you want to create? How big is your business/career? (If you’ve a business, will it be international?)
2. Finance/Wealth – How much money will you be earning? What property do you live in? What material possessions will you have?
3. Health/Fitness – How is your fitness level? How do you look? What is your diet like? How is your health?
4. Social/Friends – How is your social circle like? What are the kind of friends you are with?
5. Family – What are you doing with your family? How often do you meet them?
6. Romance/Love – (if you’re single) What is your ideal partner? How is he/she like? What do you love about him/her? Do you have kids? How many? How are they like?
7. Recreation – What do you do for recreation? What hobbies do you want to pursue?
8. Contribution – What will you be doing socially? How will you be giving back to the world / helping others?
9. Personal Growth – How will you be pursuing your personal growth? What will you be learning, growing?
10. Spiritual – How connected will you be with the world? How will you be pursuing your spiritual interests?
Your ideal life should meet your 4 core needs. For more details, read the exercise I wrote in an earlier article.
1. Body (physical needs)
2. Mind (mental needs)
3. Heart (emotional needs)
4. Soul (spiritual needs)

After you are done, look back and review what you have written. For the rest of the day, continue to think about what you want in your ideal life, and probe deeper. Fill in if there are new things that come to mind. Add more whenever you want to – this is to be dynamically updated and isn’t supposed to end here. While I’ve set an hour for this exercise, really it’s an exercise to think over and write about for the whole day.

Congratulations, you’ve just created your ideal life , and this is the start towards moving there. We’ll be referring back to this in our later 30DLBL exercises.

Day 2 of Your 30 Day Action Plan

What have you planned for Day 2? Do them with excellence today. Record your results and reflections in your 30DLBL workbook.

Share Your Day 2 Results

Share your results on your ideal life in the comments . By sharing it openly, you’re also reinforcing it to yourself. For those of you blogging about 30DLBL, feel free to share your results and links in the comments area!

While I’m reading every comment and replying where I can, this challenge really involves all of us. We’re all here together in this and to support each other. So feel free to read each others’ responses and reply to one another! Encourage, egg other participants along. If you have some thoughts to share about a participant’ answer/response/question, simply reply! Let’s all share openly. Helping others is also helping yourself too. The more we share, the more we learn, the more we grow.

Preparation For Day 3

In preparation for Day 3′s task, you’ll need

A corkboard (with surface area as big as four A4 papers put together)
A box of thumbtacks (because the ones that come with the corkboard aren’t enough)
Colored printer ink if your printer is running low on colors

If you don’t have any of the above, you can get them at any regular bookstore. If you don’t have a printer, then there’s no need to get the 3 items (you’ll still be able to take part in Day 3′s task, don’t worry).

If you’re wondering what exactly we’re doing tomorrow, here’s a clue – “AS ROBIN VOID” (it’s an anagram).

Once you are done, move on to Day 3, which is…

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The Howling Dog Story

Celes — Thu, 06 May 2010 23:34:53 +0000

Have you heard of the howling dog story? It’s not as well-known as other moral stories, but this one packs a good punch. There are different iterations but the essence is the same.

Here’s my retelling of the story:

Tom just moved into a new neighborhood recently. He liked his house and his environment, but there was one thing he didn’t get.

His neighbor, Mr Tan, had a dog that kept howling non-stop. Literally. Day in, day out.

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“Auuuuuhhhh………. Aaaauhhhh……….”

Initially Tom thought the dog was just going through a phase, so he ignored the howls, thinking it would eventually stop.

But it didn’t. It continued howling.

“Auuuu…………auuuu………..Auuuhhhhh…….”

1 day passed. Nothing changed. 2 days passed. Still howling. 3 days. 5 days. 1 week. 2 weeks. 1 month. Still howling, with no signs of stopping.

“Auuuhhh………….Oouuuuuhhhhh…….Au au auuhhhhh..”

Finally, Tom couldn’t stand it anymore. One fine day, he walked over to Mr Tan’s house to see what was going on.

Sure enough, there was the dog, sitting at the front porch, howling pitifully to whoever was walking by.

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“Auuuhhh…Ouuuhhh….Auuuuuuuuuuuuuu………Au au au auu au au auuuuhhhhh….”

On the other hand, Mr Tan was relaxing on his bench at the lawn, leisurely reading his newspapers and sipping a cup of coffee.

Wondering what was going on, Tom walked up to Mr Tan.

Tom: “Hi Mr Tan, is that your dog?”

Mr Tan: “Which dog?” He glanced around. “Oh that. Yep he’s mine.”

Tom: “Why does he keep howling?”

Mr Tan: “Oh, that’s cause he’s sitting on a nail.”

Tom: “Sitting on a nail?!?” Tom gave the dog a bewildered look.

“..Okay… so why doesn’t he just get away from the nail then??”

“Well, Tom………”, Mr Tan took a slow sip of his coffee before replying.

“…That’s because he doesn’t find it painful enough yet.”

All of us have nails in our lives that are poking us. Some of us have career nails. Jobs we don’t enjoy. Work that’s dragging us down and sucking our life away. Jobs that we complain about, day in day out, yet we don’t do anything about them. Managers and/or colleagues who stifle us. Recognition that’s overdue. Limited career developments. Unsatisfactory pay and benefits. Not having made a name for ourselves yet in our career.

Some of us have relationship nails. Not being able to find our special someone. Seeing people around us get attached/married while we remain single. Having someone but not sure if he/she is really “the one”. Having a partner who isn’t around enough. Having a partner who is around too much. Having a partner who is too domineering. Unsorted doubts and grievances.

Some of us have financial nails. Increasing expenditures that aren’t matched by our income. Increasing responsibilities we can’t handle. Savings that dip month after month. Increasing debt from credit cards. Not enough money to buy what we want. Making do by limiting our expenditures.

Some of us have dream nails. Dreams that we really want to pursue but aren’t for some reason. Dreams that we have been thinking about for a while but haven’t acted on yet. Dreams we are scared to see unfulfilled when it’s too late for us to do anything.

And there are so many other nails. Health nails. Friendship nails. Spirituality nails. Family nails. Habit nails.

Each of us have different nails poking us. Some of us have a couple of big nails that pokes us every once in a while. Some of us have several small nails that poke on and off. Some of us have multiple big and small nails that poke repeatedly. Rather than take action, most of the times we just sit and howl. Cause the pokes aren’t painful enough.

Are there any nails in your life you are not addressing?

Why? Is it cause they are not painful enough yet?

What are you going to do about them?

Act immediately or do something when it’s too late to do anything?

Don’t wait until the nails really hurt before you take action. Because when that happens, that usually means it’s too late to do anything.

You might want to read:

How To Achieve Any Goals Successfully With ESPER (7-part goal achievement series)
What Are You Running Away From? – Dealing with avoidance behaviors in our lives
You Always Have A Choice
If Your Life Was A RPG, What Type Of Character Would You Be?

Pursuing Your Passion With No Money

Celes — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 14:49:08 +0000

This is part of the Passion & Career series. Be sure to check the other articles:

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“Hi Celes, I read your article about how you left your job to pursue your dreams. I did the same for a simpler reason – I had enough of being an employee (it’s been 10 years). However, with no income at all, I’m beginning to regret my decision at times. What is your opinion on this?” – gabybali

Hey gabybali, thanks for your question Let us take a closer look at your situation.

Your current issue is you have no source of income. It’s not explicitly mentioned in your mail, but I’m going to assume that this lack of income is starting to affect your physiological/security-related needs (such as living expenses including food, shelter), for it to become a concern. To a certain extent it is probably affecting your material needs as well.

When Money Becomes An Interference

When you have to worry about security needs, you enter into a survival, instinctual mode where you have to constantly worry about your every day livelihood and every single expenditure you make. And when you are constantly worrying, your connections to both the cognitive part of your brain and your intuition get shut down. You become constrained and set back by your lower-level needs. You can’t pursue your passion properly if you can’t tap into your full prowess. I ran into this situation for a short period of time after I quit my job last year and it was not a very optimal scenario to operate in.

Prolonged exposure to this circumstance worsens the situation. People who have not developed a strong connection to their passions will start questioning it and whether they made the right decision. They may start to regret their decision and belittle themselves and their passions.

If you are starting to develop self-doubting thoughts, put a brake on them immediately. When you took action to start pursuing your passion (assuming it was your true passion and not a lower-level whim), it marked the point when you listened to your heart and your intuition. That was when you deepened the connection with your higher self. That was when you moved up to a higher consciousness level, towards Courage. To doubt this would be to recede into lower conscious levels like Desire/Fear/Pride, where your thoughts and concerns become very much rooted from your ego.

This is a classic situation where many self proclaimed ‘realists’ will be quick to jump on. They constantly cite it as an example to justify (to themselves or others) why they are staying on in a passionless job they do not feel strongly about. They keep lauding about earning money, having to pay bills, living up to responsibilities, etc without any seeming end point. They harp on how they are not pursuing their passion because it will lead to nowhere. They advocate staying on in their current path as the ‘safer’, ‘more practical’ route.

Except that the issue is nothing to do with your passion or the pursuit of your passion. Living a life of your passion should always be your end point. The key question should instead be – How should you achieve that passion?

Since money is the issue here, let’s look at how to get the money. There are a few ways to go about doing this.

Route A: Waiting For Your Passion To Generate Revenue

The first way is to pump every single bit of your resources (time, money, energy) into your passion and expect it to churn out revenue at a certain stage. You dedicate all of yourself into pursuing your passion and ignore the issue of no income, refusing to let it bother you. The problem with this scenario is your original issue of not having sufficient money for security needs remains a glaring concern. It’s something that will not get resolved and will continue to shout at you every day until you start earning actual revenue. This means you start hinging on your passion to generate you money, which in turn means your passion becomes wrapped with a certain level of desperation, anxiety and fear. You become dependent on the probability that your venture will earn you money at X period of time, which may or may not take place. This is highly risky.

Many people who start out with new ventures fall into this pit. They jump straight into the thick of things, invest all their money into it, slough off from day and night and become increasingly desperate when things don’t map out the way they want. Their increased anxiety leads them to make poor decisions of which the consequences ripple out into everything they do. In the end, when their ventures do not take off, things end up crashing and burning.

There’s a difference between jumping off the plane screaming and yelling without a parachute and jumping off with a parachute secured on your back. Unless you are highly confident that you can generate revenue with your venture in your expected time period, route A falls under the first scenario. The second scenario applies to route B.

Route B: Seeking Alternative Sources of Income

Route B is to seek alternative sources of revenue. It can be a full-time job, part-time, freelancing, an investment etc. The objective is to earn sufficient money such that security concerns stop becoming a nag at your back and you can dedicate yourself to fully pursue your passion outside of that. These sources of income should be stable and ideally non-time consuming so you can get the money concern off your back. This means the jobs you get yourself into should require minimal commitment – i.e., no overtime hours, not requiring you to pick up totally new skills just to get the job (e.g., moving into graphic design when you have no background in designing at all). The best case is if the side job you find matches as much of your values and desires as possible.

This should be an interim solution and not a final solution. When you have the money issue out of the way, quickly orientate yourself to pursuing what you want to do. Identify plans to get out of the situation ASAP. Find ways to quickly generate revenue with your passion.

This was in fact what I was doing previously in my personal development business. I wasn’t earning anything a few months ago. I was giving free coaching. I had speaking engagements lined up for the upcoming months but they would only generate me revenue when the engagement was complete. I had advertising on my blog which wasn’t generating significant revenue to sustain me. (By the way, I have donation button up for whoever would like to donate in appreciation of the work I’m doing and to support me/my cause. )

Hence, I started brainstorming on alternative sources of revenue outside of my business. I thought of returning to full-time corporate work, but that was a full-fledged commitment which encompassed traveling and investment of extra hours outside of the 9-6 regime. It was a More with More Path that could get me to where I wanted eventually, but it was not the ideal way. This was why I decided against it eventually.

I brainstormed for a More with Less Path. I thought about a series of possibilities, from becoming a part-time waitress, working at Starbucks, going back into graphic design (I was a freelance graphic designer in the past), among others.

After some consideration, I decided on tuition (academic coaching) to school students. Tuition is a very popular part-time job in Singapore, especially since academic excellence is a very key focus area here. When I was studying as an undergraduate, I was working as a tutor as well, so it’s something I’m already familiar with. I just needed to quickly look through the new syllabus to get right back into the hang of it. Apart from that, tuitioning was a low commitment job (about 2-3 hours required per student per week) that gave me decent amount of money to get by. It also utilized an aspect of coaching and comes under a subset of ‘helping others to achieve their highest potential’, so it was really a perfect alternative income source for me.

With my monetary concerns out of the way, I was able to focus on my personal development work fully (when I was not giving tuition). I continued to ensure I was investing sufficient time every day to work on my business, particularly the revenue generation pieces so the money could start coming in sooner than later. And today, that has come into fruition, especially after the media coverage in local media which drew in flocks of coaching and speaking opportunities.

What can you do to get revenue rolling in while still being able to pursue your passion? What is the More For Less Path or 80-20 route in your scenario? Keep your end objective in mind and don’t get deviated by a temporal issue such as money. This will be just one out of the many other challenges that will face you along the way and you need to stay strong. If money is a barrier stopping you from getting what you want, then find ways to get the money first. Once you get your lower-level needs resolved, you will be able to get back into pursuing your passion again

This is part of the Passion & Career series. Be sure to check the other articles:

Media Coverage in My Paper

Celes — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 07:12:14 +0000

I’ve been featured in My Paper today! For the non-Singaporean readers, My Paper is a free Singapore bilingual paper. It is distributed in local train stations every morning, with a circulation of approx 300,000. It also has an electronic version available at its website.

The article features how I made the decision to pursue my passion over money, the personal development work I do at Embrace Living and my views on personal development in Singapore. Overall I’m really happy with the article and the journalist did a really great job (If you’re reading this, thanks Jingting! And thanks Jamie for being such an excellent photographer to work with! ) Just some nuance pointouts on the information in the article – A) My pay – It’s not precisely $70k B) My current coachee profile – They span from 20s to late 30s and include people from other countries.

Unfortunately they didn’t feature the site url, probably due to internal policies regarding advertising other services. It seems like quite a number of the readers have found the site regardless through Google/Facebook search, so all’s good So far I’ve been getting a spike in mails including general queries, coaching requests, speaking opportunities etc on top of the regular inflow. If you have sent me a msg/mail, I’ll get to you very soon!

Here’s the article for those who aren’t living in Singapore or didn’t manage to catch the paper today To everyone new here, welcome! You can read more about me in my About page. Please check out the good archive of over 60+ free personal development articles in Categories page. Meanwhile, do feel free to share this site with your friends as well!

Oh and the room in which this picture was taken in is my room

* Update Aug ’10 - Due to SPH copyright clauses, the article has been removed

Update: The article has also been featured in AsiaOne Business Section and Showbiz OMY News!

PS: I’m really psyched cause I just secured 4 upcoming talks with National Library Board Thanks Nurul!

How To Overcome Fear Of Loss And Pursue Your Dreams

Celes — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 16:39:46 +0000

This is part of the Passion & Career series. Be sure to check the other articles:

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“Hi Celes, having been a sleepwalker all my life, I awoke and realized my purpose in life. I know what my purpose is, I know what my goals are. I know what I *should* do.

But I fear to step out. I fear to lose everything I have now, even though it could or could not turn out better.

How do I address this fear?” – Stevens

Dear Stevens, thanks for your question It’s absolutely great that you already have full clarity of your purpose and your goals. This clarity is what’s going to bring you through a long way later on.

However, right now you have something that’s blockading you from your dreams. And that’s fear. While it’s possible there are several aspects of fear involved, such as fear of change, fear of loss, fear of the unknown, what comes through most strongly is the fear of loss.

When there is a fear of loss, it signals a form of attachment to the item that is at risk of being lost. The fear of loss has caused many to freeze into a mode of inaction in their lives today. People have grown attached to the things in their lives they have come to have. Things like their career, their status, their salary, their lifestyle, etc. To pursue something different would possibly mean relinquishing all of these things they have come to know. Because of this fear of loss, some people choose to put their dreams perpetually on hold.

However, this attachment is illogical and comes about as a byproduct of being too entrenched in our physical world.

The reason why it’s illogical is because everything in our lives, except our consciousness, is impermanent. This includes everything in the physical world: from our wealth, our salary, our material possessions, our status, our careers, our property, our physical bodies. We were born into this world as ourselves, with our consciousness. When we die, we will lose everything and bring with us only our consciousness.

[I have written about attachment before in the context of material possessions, which you can read in the article Materialism Breeds Unhappiness.]

The full understanding and realization of this fact can result in quite a powerful shift in our minds. Suddenly, it doesn’t matter what we have in our lives, as much as how we are living it.

Instead of concerning ourselves with what we have, the important question to ask will be – Am I living my life to the fullest? Am I living my purpose, my passion and my dreams? Am I living my life in the best manner possible? Am I living my life in a way which I will stand true to even the day I die?

When I first realized this a few years ago, it resulted in a total paradigm shift. I suddenly realized all these structures I was focusing on creating in terms of career, wealth, possessions, status, etc were meaningless. They formed a nice, candy fort which I could proudly exhibit and keep building upon as I grow older, but for what – some 40, 50 years? That’s about it. After that – when I die, they would just crumble and disintegrate. They were not things I could take with me beyond death.

This was what drove me to pursue a life of higher purpose and meaning. When I decided to quit my job last year in Oct ’08, I wasn’t concerned with the lucrative pay check I was relinquishing. I wasn’t thinking about the attractive career track I was giving up. I wasn’t thinking about all the material goods and wealth I could be accumulating by staying on.

All I was thinking was how I would be wasting my life away if I continued doing something that’s not my passion. All the time and energy I would be wasting on acquiring different worldly possessions which were not going to last forever anyway. When I looked at my life in the broadest spectrum, beyond life and death, it was starkly clear that I needed to be pursuing my passion full-time. Everything else just didn’t matter at all.

The bottom line is this – If you are not living your passion, then you really have nothing to lose.

Ever since then I started pursuing my purpose full-time, life has been incredible. I’m serious. I’m living my best life ever yet, and I just know that everything is going to be even better and better from here on. And I’ve just scrapped the surface of what’s in-store for me. There’s just SO much more just waiting to be uncovered and unveiled that I can’t even begin to imagine.

Think about the day when you are going to die. Would you rather look back at having spent your life holding on to things which you can’t carry with you after death or look back at how you have passionately and fervently lived out your dreams?

Start by releasing your attachment to the things in your life. That’s when you will start making your best decisions for yourself and your life, devoid of ego and fear.

This is part of the Passion & Career series. Be sure to check the other articles:

If Your Life Was A RPG, What Type Of Character Would You Be?

Celes — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 20:52:30 +0000

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When I was young, I was very much into console games, particularly RPGs. Some of the all-time classics I absolutely love even to this day are the Final Fantasy series (especially FF7, FF8, FFX), Panzer Dragon Saga (Saturn is totally underrated), Shining Force (Sega 16-bit!), Phantasy Star IV, Chrono Trigger, just to name a few.

For the non-gamers reading this, a RPG is a role-playing game. In a RPG, you assume the role of the hero and embark on a journey that typically starts off benign and eventually culminate into epic-level proportions that involve battles of good vs. evil and life vs. death. Along the way, you are assisted by an ensemble cast of followers, or side-kicks. You also get to interact with NPCs throughout the game – the non-playable characters found everywhere, such towns, shops, houses and inns.

Now let’s imagine – If your life was a RPG, what type of character would you be? Would you be the hero? Would you be the side-kick? Or would you be the NPC?

RPG Characters

Let’s take a quick look at how each of the characters is usually typified in a RPG. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll use the male pronoun as descriptor, though depending on the game it can be a male or female.

The Hero embarks on quests in pursuit of his dreams and goals. He is a quick-learner and self-starter. He has a vision on what needs to be done and he will go against all odds and challenges to get it. Even when he faces obstacles along the way which momentarily sets him back, he gathers himself, engages the help of others if needed and eventually overcomes them. Despite overwhelming odds and random curve balls thrown in the course of his journey, he is persistent, resilient and keeps fighting on. In the end, he carves the way for a victory which many touted as impossible at the beginning. The hero dramatically evolves throughout the journey from an almost naive, uncertain apprentice to become an individual of tenacity, wisdom, knowledge and compassion.

The Side-Kick is a very earnest and hardworking individual who devotes his energy to doing his best job. He sometimes thinks about his dreams and goals but never quite takes the step to pursue them, for some reason or another. He sees heroes coming along his way and decides to join them in action. The side-kick lets others develop the vision for him and dedicates all of himself to achieving their goals. He neglects his own dreams in the process and lets them stay dormant in him. Throughout the journey, the side-kick evolves as a person too; however his potential is never fully maximized because he never allowed himself to step up into the position of the hero.

The NPCs basically lead their daily lives in a cyclical manner. Their life can be condensed down into the few same, key mundane activities which they are busy repeating every day. Every time the hero converses with them, it’s the same 1-2 topics and same few lines they repeat over and over. They walk back and forth confined to the same few spots in town, shops, houses, inns, and so on. They don’t spend much time, if at all, thinking about what they want to do. Some of them don’t know what they want at all, others have an inkling of what they want but they are too scared to pursue them. Instead, they live vicariously through the life of the hero. The NPC’s lives are basically shaped by in-game events led by the Hero.

RPGs and You

If you strip away the fantasy elements and the medieval-like settings, a RPG with its protagonists and story plot is actually designed to mirror aspects of yourself and your life. Game developers factor that into account when designing games because they want gamers to be able to relate when playing the game. This relation is what builds the strong connection and affinity to the game, which leads to high utility value and continual purchase of future titles.

These games appeal to us is because it speaks to the hero in all of us. It speaks to the hero in us who wants to take charge of our lives and simply march forth to change our universe. All of us have visionary goals and dreams which we want to bring to fruition. We have passions which we want to pursue full throttle without anything holding us back. We have the idealistic and free-spirited streak running through our blood which is screaming for us to just ‘Go do it!’ without letting ourselves be restrained by anything.

But somehow, when we switch off our consoles and get out into the physical reality, we become bound by fear. Fear of failure, fear of scrutiny, fear of uncertainty, fear of rejection, yada yada. Or we let ourselves be cluttered by a whole truckload of excuses, like responsibilities, need for security, recession, risk, etc. Somehow we seem to spend more time arming ourselves with reasons justifying why we should not pursue our goals than actually pursuing them.

Do you want to be a NPC who sleepwalks through the same routine every day? Do you want to be the side-kick that pursues others’ goals, hides his/her dreams and lives under the shadow of someone else? Or do you want to be the Hero in your life, carving the life that you want?

Honestly, if you don’t know your purpose, find it. If you can’t find a best option to pursue your passion, architect that end goal yourself. If you don’t know how to achieve that goal, plan towards it.

It’s your life – You are the one who has the power to choose and create your own destiny. You have the power to choose your quest to embark on. Don’t let yourself become a mindless NPC that drones through its life. Don’t live the life of a side-kick, pursuing the goals of others. Be the Hero you are meant to be.

Always remember that as your life’s hero, as long you choose your path and keep persisting, nothing can stop you – everything in the universe will eventually fall into place to enable you to achieve what you want.

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