games – The Corrigan Encore

A few posts back I mentioned that I bought a Legend Planner. I get 0 dollars for this blog, no monetization at all but I am going to endorse this planner. The Legend Planner is a great tool for those of us who have amazing ideas and wonderful intentions. Big plans to get our lives together and set the world on fire. Dreams of grandeur will always be dreams until… you act on them and a very positive and good first act is to write them down.

A goal without a plan is just a wish
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

After you have written down the ideas and crafted a plan give yourself deadlines for the lead and lag goals. Planning is no ones favorite thing to do but without it life can become pretty wild. What goals have you accomplished without planning and before you come up with some please realize that others have planned for you. If you were going to say that you graduated high school or college without planning that is false. Academia is nothing but planning for students by admin and support staff. If you are going to mention promotions at work I would point again to the abundance of planning by the various departments at your work place. Nothing happens without some and often copious amounts of planning. Imagine how much more you will get done when you craft a plan. Planning also helps focus our minds and get a clearer picture of our capabilities

Finally give your goals and plans timelines.

A Goal Without A Timeline Is Just A Dream
Robert Herjavec

Chances are high that you will miss the deadlines however you will learn why when you take an assessment and adjust the plan and new deadlines. Life is an infinite game however we can exercise some control through planning and setting goals for ourselves good luck and God bless.

Today is Friday and for many employees it is the end of the standard work week. No more grinding away for our bosses. It is time to get out there and wake up when nature tells us to and spend our time on our own desires!

Yesterday while listening to a podcast I heard a term I know used in a different topic. The term was grinding. I heard the term grinding used to describe repetitive work but, in the podcast the term was used to describe repetitive game play. Grinding in games (video games) is the act of engaging in repetitive tasks to gain some type of performance outcome. According to many game developers grinding is necessary to give all players an advantage. In the wikipedia article , the defense of grinding in video games has to do with the pareto principle.

The pareto principle is another term I have heard a lot at work. Essentially the Pareto Principle (named after the man who wrote it down the first time Vilfred Pareto), says that 80 % of your consequences (winning in a game or building widgets at work) will come from 20% of your actions (20 percent of the players in a game are high performers, 20 percent of the workforce get that widget in the truck out the door and or in the hands of the customer). Grinding was set up in games to off set the pareto principle now see the problem with that is, the pareto principle most likely will now apply to the grinders instead of the players.

I think if someone does not enjoy grinding in a game they should not grind in that game.

My grandfather always encouraged me to become a weather man (I know they are called meteorologist). “Look they, do not need to be right, they only work twice a day and they get to go to work clean and come home clean.” I didn’t become a meteorologist it wasn’t really my passion. I find everything interesting don’t get me wrong but weather didn’t get me out of the bed.

I am fortunate in that, I work with a field that I am passionate about and engages me. I enjoy the weekend and I joke about working for the weekend but, I don’t mind it when I have to work (a little) late.

I hope that whatever you are grinding at you truly enjoy or at least find interesting if not I encourage you to find something that sparks joy

Tag: games

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Friday Grinding and the Pareto Principle