“If you don't have a plan, you become part of somebody else's plan.”
- Terence McKenna
The Game
The rules are simple but the planning and executing the whole objective is the hard part. So lets begin with the objective.
To become a wizardly warrior engineer of my life and its outcome. During the process help define and work through the challenges that face those pursuant of a similar level of wholeness in their life.
The rules for this are not very defined as they have not yet had conditional testing to see if they even fly in the context not yet attempted. So for now the basics are:
- Learn what interests you.
- Obtain a high level skill set to better tackle life.
- Just play and make your own game with in the game.
- Have fun!
The "skill trees" have yet to be defined, however many of the basic and specific skills that I wish to include in my wizardly warrior profile were derived from a combination of my 40 list and a second list I call my 10K proficiency list.
The 40 list was conceived some years back when a friend attended a keynote speech wherein the presenter offered up this gem of wisdom and planning that would shape the outcome of many of whom it reached. Make a list in 3 obtainable parts, short term, medium term, and long term, that you personally wanted to accomplish in your personal and professional life. At first glance this could seem either too hard to too easy depending on the goals. There was a stipulation that gave this all a game like flare that really resonated with me; you had to complete these goals by the time you turned 40. Seeing as this was a originally given at a college graduation, the time allotted was 18 years. I was a bit behind on the original timeline but later found this part of the challenge one of the most exciting parts, and having only 14 years to do what most were attempting to do in 18 years fueled me. My list was created over the next few weeks and evolved over the years that followed since hearing the call to action into what I now have as my primary skill list. This included short term events and longer term skills like learning a second language, obtaining a patent, writing a book, flying a plane, and living overseas for 2 years.
My secondary list, which overlapped with my 40 list, consisted of skills that I knew were going to take the most time and therefore needed to include my medium and long term goals. This was intended to track my previous activities and give me a more or less time frame for the objectives that I wished to accomplish. 10K hours is the premise and this was the subject of a Malcolm Gladwell book, Outliers, and was the obsession of mine and final piece to the puzzle that gave rise to gamifying my life. Now the rule stated that in a highly competitive environment where the smallest detail was needed for optimum performance and results, like music and other well defined masteries essentially required an individual to complete 10,000 hours of deliberate practice and skill building of a particular set of tasks could then be seen as master of that skill and a professional at it. This was now the template for how I could achieve most of my longer term goals. This list includes inventor, author, teacher, skier, poker player, and second language. I had already some proficiency in this list and I carefully searched back to account for most of the time spent and the skills within each activity and skill to start my progress bars from. With credit for the past work done in each skill I would be able to accomplish the tasks on my 40 list. For the few that lay outside my 40 list, like mastering yoga and high level martial arts I gave an additional 10 years to accomplish, which looks to be doable.
With just under 175,000 hours left until I was 50 the march to victory commenced and set forth to achieve my goals. There is also timing and the ability to adjust on the fly that is not accounted for but that is all part of "the game". More tweaking would be needed for my final lists but this was a great start. On to making the progress bars that would shape my quest.