Life is a Game; and the rules are changing

What if you could consider your Life as a Game?
What would be the Rules (general principals, norms & moral guidelines) and Goal of the game?
What kind of incentive and punishment are you giving yourself (You, the Player)?
What activities, interactions and accomplishments would you earn 'points' for?
What kind of points would you like to score?
Would you go for accumulation of Wealth (currently measured in a relative subjective form of Currency: Money) or maybe another value good like: Gold, Clean Water or Energy-units?
Also directly related: What kind of Bad (like waste and garbage) should you avoid or deal with?

On a more Psychological and Spiritual ground you could deal with- or eliminate 'mind'-things that are taking a lot of your time, like worries or unnecessary energy-leaks (resulting in stress): Humans tend to have energy-leaks towards the past or the future. These (often recurring) thoughts about certain people or events are an indication (and opportunity of awareness) that you are not being fully present in the now. You need to accept and forgive to give closure to these (often negative) energy-absorbing thoughts. For the future it is best to be positive (or at least neutral) toward anticipated events. If you sense fear in yourself, you can accept this fear as a signal that you need to prepare or even practice for the anticipated event, like a Fire-drill. As an alternative visualization exercise: If you can accept the worst-case scenario as a possibility you will feel relieved. A generic attitude (by default) with focus on a smooth and positive outcome is best for your body's energy-system and for your health. The stress-level can physically be measured as Heart Coherence (measuring the HRV: Heart Rhythm Variable) with a sensor attached to your finger or ear. This stress-variable can be measured with a portable device and added to your current Life-game.

[Related Biofeedback: Heartmath emWave, Game: The Wild Divine]

The interesting (self-reflecting) factor in your Life as a Game begins when you start thinking about your passions, the things you really like to do (normally: things that give you energy), your natural skills, and your success-variables.

[Changing Rules]
The New Economy, and life within this economy has new rules. The new consumers label themselves as Fans (Apple inc.) vs Customers (Microsoft) which adds a new dimension to Brands. People tend to be loyal to their personality patterns, or put differently: "people don't like to change their common behavior". Brand loyalty can be measured in real life (a tendency to buy one product over the other: ceteris paribus) but in a game-setting these Brand aspects might be described in product-context terms like "Popularity" (based on current sales), or product Quality terms "component or ingredient declaration and Quality" (which is most frequently used), "Industry Standard", "Connectivity & Usability", "Open vs Closed Source", and the Cradle to Cradle (C2C) "Product Lifespan & Lifecycle". I would not be surprised if sustainability and social accountability (like ecological fair trade & treatment of employees) as a Brand value become more important. As an example: the iPhone application (Goodguide.com) scans and checks barcodes with databases revealing the context and lifecycle aspects of the product and Brand. This way you are able to score all aspects of a product (energetic, ecological, ethical, political and sustainable). For example if you want specific info about your ecological footprint you can add these values to your Life-game and make a purchase choice on a product-level.

Web 2.0 (inter-connectivity (RSS), personalized pages, communities) and Web 3.0 (mobile contextual info, meta-tags, and P2P tribes) changes the way we communicate and interact with others. You can see online companies adding interactivity to their communication with terms like dialog-marketing sending personalized mail (harvested by a contest, web-form or social networks). Amazon's personalized and customized recommendations based on previous orders and similarities with other customers in the data-pool are probably the best example.

Given the fact we can communicate and interact relatively easy worldwide with other people on the Internet, a personal challenge with the right social networking coordination can immediately become a collaborative project, multipliable initiative or even a tribal movement. The implications of unlimited scalability through the available technology are enormous and we can only grasp the near future. The power and possibilities of Crowdsourcing, Crowdfunding, tribes, social networks (which are now very measurable) and mobile technology will definitely change our world-view and the way we live.

I hope we will create some real life contexts (domains / arena's) to play with this technology in sandboxes before all newbies and digitally impaired are broadcasting everywhere and (unintended) clogging or even destroy (by overloading) the system. Peer review (like on Wikipedia) might offer a solution, but I seriously see a need for Computer, Media and Internet (Communication Technology) education (Information Literacy) in non-invasive, limited impact controlled sandbox context.

Back to your Life-Game, some final thoughts:

What is your preferred Arena (playing field)?
What are your specific targets (within this context or arena)?
What resources will you use? (information, tools, materials, people, funding)

When have you reached your "level"?

How will you be awarded and how will you share your experience and accomplishments?

How can you document and model your accomplishments as a teaching for others?

Other related info: Game Theory, Moral Psychology, WikiHow: Make-Your-Life-a-Roleplaying-Game, Goalsetting community: 43 Things]

Secrets of Sales

1. A tightly scheduled 12-hour day.
2. Have contacting goals.
3. Systematic communication.
4. Know your subject.
5. Learn from questions you are asked: Don't get caught twice.
6. Always have an active prospect list that you contact regularly.
7. Respond fast.
8. Keep your name in front of the customer.
9. Develop innovative strategies for yourself and your customers.
10. Impressive preparation.
11. Finding a niche.
12. Weekly targets.
13. Show people their strengths.
14. Use 80/20 rule.
15. Each day write down 2 things on the job you did that you enjoyed or found satisfying.
16. React to problems promptly.
17. Honesty.
18. It's all or nothing for the customer.
19. Thorough planning.
20. Verify key points after meetings in writing.
21. Start meetings with a review.
22. Bring, show or discuss one positive they are not expecting.
23. Tried and true case studies.
24. Develop a system that allows you to find info in 15 seconds.
25. Respect deadlines on promises made.
26. Use flexibility to break into new markets.
27. Perfect your communication.
28. Mentally walk with them.
29. Put features and benefits into layers of pyramid and focus on best layer.
30. Mind-emptying exercises.
31. Structured follow-up
32. See how success works and copy, copy, copy.
33. Don't get tired of service.
34. Flair
35. Anticipate questions and know the answers.
36. Believe in your product.
37. Know exactly where you're going to start the next day.
38. Have high daily targets and when you achieve them--quit.
39. Set up definite rules to get over each hurdle and on to the next.
40. Know competitors products.
41. Create pride of ownership.
42. Have a structured selling answer to "What do you do? & a handout.
43. State your price as a benefit.
44. Answer, "What do you do?"
45. Spend 90% of your time either prospecting or on appointments.
46. Develop solid closing questions.
47. Know your product--shoot the answer.
48. List the benefits of your product.
49. Look as if you've operated the product all your life.
50 Full-scale mock-up. Prototype.
51. Be there when you're needed.
52. Never, ever forget one single thing you've promised to do,
no matter how trivial it seems.
53. Respect the client for what he is and for what he has accomplished in life.
54. Verbalize respect.
55. Reliability, responsiveness, tangibles, assurance, empathy.
56. Know your case and their case.
57. Put enormous thought and energy into reconfiguring your world so that when emergencies happen you have exactly what you need to do the job.
58. Know their history when you arrive.
59. Always know and communicate the next step.
60. 3 Steps: Previous, Current, Next.
61. Way of the gull: Work like hell and go after every scrap.
62. Leverage time and effort.
63. Analyze, measure, identify my selling, marketing, advertising and operations.
64. In a minute, describe what it is about your business that gives
greater advantage, greater benefit, and greater result to your client.
65. How can I test one way against another?
66. What is my clear, accurate distinct vision of my business?
67. How many better, other additional ways could I be doing?
68. How can I get the highest and best use of my time and opportunity.
69. Who could recommend me?
70. What do my clients pre-do and post-do that I can leverage.
71. Do one good thing consistently well.
72. If something works, experiment with a copy.
73. Never create the same routine twice.
74. Trial and error but debrief.
75. Rise before dawn.
76. Be willing to be consumed by a task as long as it takes.
77. Practice the basics endlessly.
78. Your core investment must be in understanding your customers.
79. Stress high quality relationships
80. Be a perpetual prospecting machine.
81. Lose the no's.
82. Have a strategic plan and a relentless application of the plan.
83. Document everything. Always know what happened.

The above list was taken from Dale Kirby's Meta-Web. Mostly compiled from the book "The Secrets of the World's Top Sales Performers by Christine Harvey" and other sources.

[Reposted from MetaMagazine website 2002]