Treat Your Goals Like a Video Game
1-Minute Engineering on Goals Achieving — Edition #13
During summer in high school, I stayed up late and played Need for Speed Most Wanted for hours. Writing about this, I realise that since then, almost 20 years have passed—oh, man, time flies. 😳
I remember really enjoying the backstory and gameplay. So, this weekend, I felt nostalgic about it and decided to take the old car for a spin.
After installing it, the first thing I noticed was how much graphics have evolved in the last decade. Back then, this game had the best graphics in the industry; now, it looks pixelated at full resolution and high detail. However, I still enjoyed the gameplay.
To make the long story short, you start as a street racer with a heavily modified BMW M3 GTR who wants to dominate the racing scene—the car is essential, but I will skip the player names for the sake of simplicity.
As you win races and catch the attention of other street racers and the city police department, you get into a race with the top racer, who sabotages your car. Your engine fails mid-race, and like that, you lose your car, get arrested, and start everything from scratch.
Now, with nothing left, you must work your way up the Blacklist (top notorious street racers), defeating all racers, reclaiming your status, and ultimately getting your BMW M3 GTR back:
To race against the Blacklist, you must complete challenges, grow your reputation, and win races.
To gain a reputation, you need to escape the police in hot pursuits
To win races and complete challenges, you need cars.
To buy cars and upgrade them, you need money.
To make money, you need to win races, complete challenges, and escape police.
As you work your way up the Blacklist, the challenges get more complicated, the cars more expensive to buy and upgrade, and police is more aggressive in their hot pursuits.
Where I’m Going With This?
Although, the goal is to defeat the number one on the Blacklist and get your bar back, the real fun is in playing the game:
Buying and upgrading cars
Skillfully get rid of police in hot pursuits to gain reputation
Lose race after race until you become better at it and eventually win
Find out more about the characters’ backstory
As soon as you finish the game, you get to high-five yourself, and after that, it’s not that interesting anymore.
This made me realize that the same is true for our goals. It’s all about the journey, not the destination:
We set an objective for ourselves
Then we split it into multiple, easy-to-grasp but challenging milestones
We work our way toward our objective, one milestone at a time
Each milestone is then divided into smaller and easier challenges
We work our way towards each milestone, one challenge at a time
Every time we fail, we iterate and try different approaches until we succeed
When we achieve our goal, we celebrate briefly, then move on to the next objective and start from the beginning.
However, it seems that in video games, we don’t give up as quickly as we often do with our real-life goals.
—Alex
Racing games are one of the genres I don't play a lot, but I enjoyed playing Most Wanted on my PSP hahaha.
And OMG, I am just thinking of writing about online business and video games, you just beat me to it lol
Man, making a game of goals is the best. And so are those old games 👌