No Focus, No Progress: Why a Personal Quest is Important!
It's not just for computer games.
Back in the day, I played computer games. This was a promotion from the pinball parlour to space invaders, also at the pinball parlour, and then on to adventure games.
My favourite at the time was Space Quest. I would spend hours figuring out the puzzles, traps and bonuses to win at all costs. My wife and I stayed up until the early hours working on why we couldn’t get past the swamp. When we discovered how, well, did we celebrate! You’d think we’d won the lottery!
Our friends played their own game too and we’d swap ideas (“cheat codes in real life”) to help solve the mystery. We wouldn’t tell each other. We’d provide cryptic clues to let everyone enjoy “figuring it out”.
It was, literally, all fun and games … and no-one got hurt.
Life is like that.
It can be all fun and games, maybe with the occasional “knee scrape” of the ego, the setback of a “stubbed toe” that causes us to cry out in pain and then get on with whatever we were doing.
Just like a computer game requires focus and concentration, life, to be lived well, also requires a lot of focus and concentration.
Why is this important?
Computer games have rules. They have “if-then” logic, meaning “if” something specific happens, “then” there will be specific consequences.
Life is the same. There are rules. There are guidelines. And there are similar “if-then” consequences.
But … the rules are not always true.
We are raised with rules and beliefs, habits and attitudes which are not chosen by us. They are handed to us by people who had those rules, or a variation of them, indoctrinated into them.
Some people follow those rules obediently and others purposefully go against those rules.
But the decision to follow or ignore these life “rules” are not well thought out. They are obeyed or disobeyed blindly, you might say. There is no structure to the outcome of the behaviour.
“Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man” — Aristotle
Simply, the child at seven has been indoctrinated into the same rules and norms of those who have raised him or her. But the child doesn’t know that. What they see around them is “normal”, unfortunately, child abuse can be included in that!
It’s not until later, interacting with others, reading and observing life, different realities are experienced and, perhaps, new decisions can be made.
These beliefs habits and attitudes are buried deep in the subconscious, not even thought about.
And here’s the kicker: If they are not thought about, they cannot be observed objectively, questioned and changed.
Focus and Concentration
To modify our lives, we must bring the subconscious of what we have been taught to the conscious level to make meaningful change.
This becomes our “quest”.
We decide what we want and where it might align with our current values. If what we want doesn’t align with our values, we have the choice to make a change at the base level.
“All lasting and meaningful change first begins on the inside and works its way out” — Lou Tice
To make the change stick, we need to focus and concentrate on it, day in and day out from the inside — how we think and respond to what is going on within us and around us. It has a lot of brainwashing to overcome.
Not only do we need to focus and concentrate, we need to “Save” on a regular basis, just like a computer game. If you didn’t “Save” on a regular basis when you played Space Quest, you’d go back to the last time you did save and start from there. Damnably frustrating!
In your personal quest, “Saving” is reflecting on things you did and what progress you made, determining to add each lesson to your bag of skills and knowledge.
If worst came to worst and you never reflected (Saved), you’d go back to the beginning.
In a computer game, that just giving up and maybe starting something else.
In life, we give up and go back to our unfulfilled comfort zone!
“Almost”, “Nearly” and “If Only” Walk into a Bar
Let’s not paint ourselves into a corner. Sometimes life is good. We get to experience glimpses of how we’d like things to be.
This is why a Personal Quest is important.
We don’t want a life of Almost, Nearly and If Only. We want more of the glimpses of success and allow them to become the life we lead.
We tend to live a life that is almost what we want. Or we are nearly there, or we nearly made it. If only things were different. We satisfy ourselves as doing okay under the circumstances.
But that’s the problem, the circumstances and the fact we are under them. Yet, we know the satisfaction of being on topof things.
Back to our subconscious of imported rules, beliefs, habits and attitudes that we’ve been given, without our permission … we don’t know what we don’t know.
Flip It!
We need to turn it around. Because life up until now, whichever age you are at, has been lived mostly on a subconscious level, acting in ways we haven’t thought through. We just acted that way! It was normal!
There needs to be a very conscious and intentional flip to focus on a clear and constant purpose. For many people, that isn’t normal. And for those people, life is not what they want it to be. But they don’t know how to flip it.
Success isn’t linear as you take steps to pursue your quest. There will still be ups and downs, good days and bad days, but now you are more in control. You decide what happens and the consequences of the “Ifs”.
Defining a clear and constant purpose isn’t easy. The good news is all you need to do is start. Be clear on your purpose and outcomes and continue to refine those things as you progress on your quest. Even your purpose becomes clearer as you keep progressing.
Impatience, Consistency and Tolerance Walk Into a Bar
A personal quest has challenges.
Just as Jason and the Argonauts had to overcome incredible odds to obtain the Golden Fleece and, having attained it, still had challenges on the way home, you will need to overcome your own challenges.
Let’s look at four of them:
Impatience — Wanting to see immediate results, even though you’ve just started. It’s like going on a diet. We have one healthy meal and head to the scale to see what the result is! We know that’s ludicrous. It is the same with our lives. Changing our habits on day one is going to take a while to see the effects.
Consistency — All meaningful things take time. and we know that more progress will be made by daily steps than inconsistent efforts no matter how significant.
Tolerance (and its close cousin Being Reasonable) — This is a trap for young players. We make allowances for ourselves when we fail. This is fine for an effort we genuinely made that didn’t quite the result we were after. But there is a tolerance for not pushing ourselves when there was an opportunity. Being Reasonable is similar but I apply this to when we feel pressured by others to take the quest down a notch and “be reasonable”.
Opposition from Others — If you intend to make a change, be ready for opposition from others: family, friends, work colleagues. Some will applaud your efforts. And if you explain to opposers your quest and purpose, they will likely come around. But I have noted that some will be horrified by someone renouncing donuts for a healthier lifestyle! 🙄
To Sum Up
The Personal Quest is an exciting journey for a better way to live.
It adds the element of adding a “game-like” aspect into life. We can assign ourselves trinkets and rewards, like they do in computer games.
We begin to imagine a life like the fabled quests we read about as children, and imagined the worlds and adventures and heroes and heroines we idolised.
Challenges will come both internally and from outside our sphere of influence.
We have been indoctrinated from birth around an accepted set of habits, beliefs and attitudes. It could take a significant period, years perhaps, of focused attention to change an ingrained lifestyle we do not want. But as a quest, it becomes the adventure into a world of our imagination.
There will be times when it seems like it is not with it. Hence the need for the clear and well defined purpose.
You’ll need support from those you trust to stay focused at times you want to give up, and I mean really give up!
In the following weeks, I’ll be digging into strategies and tactics about how to make progress on the Personal Quest.
I hope you will join me.
This will be added as a podcast and will on my YouTube channel if you like alternative ways to consume this information.
As always please feel free to share and drop any questions or comments in the … comments section below!
“All lasting and meaningful change first begins on the inside and works its way out” - Lou Tice