Life is an RPG

Your life is a roll-playing game (RPG). Of course, RPGs are modelled after the real world, and use concepts from it, not the other way around. But since they are a model, their concepts are simpler than real life, making it easier to understand the mechanics from an outside perspective.

Player character vs. Environment

You are the player character. You can only influence how you behave, how your player character acts. Everything and everyone else is environment or events. You have no influence on anything else than your controls. You might do every stupid fetch quest for the king in order to get admitted to the kings guard or whatever, but then the king decides differently. These are things that you don't have under control.

Skilling

You can skill in different skills.

Some are primary stats, and some are secondary or even tertiary stats.

Primary Stats

Primary Stat Increased by
Strength
  • Go to the gym.
Endurance
  • Go running.
Intelligence Difficult to increase, but there are some tricks.
  • Get enough sleep.
  • Drink enough clear water or tea (soft drinks do not count, since they don't hydrate as well).
  • Don't consume alcohol or other recreational drugs.
  • Live in a tidy, positive environment.
  • Sit in the library surrounded by diligent, intelligent people. Instead of dwelling in your own bedroom all day.
  • Have a healthy diet.
  • Exercise regularly.
  • Use the mental capacity that you have for each day on meaningful things that advance you towards your goals.
Knowledge
  • Study in the field in which you want to specialize.
Charisma
  • If you don't interact with many different people, and get to know new people, you might become a bit odd.
Self-Esteem

Secondary Stats

Primary Stat Secondary Stat
Knowledge
  • Knowing how to inverse a binary tree.
  • Knowing how to write a thread-safe hash table.
  • Knowing how to write a join that materializes each tuple in a thread-local mmaped memory before inserting pointers to them into a synchronized hash table that has a fixed size which is determined by HyperLogLog.

Who do you want to be?

Decide on the person that you want to be. What skills and traits does he have?

Look at yourself and your life from the outside

Don't always live your life from the first-person perspective, but also look at yourself from the outside. Like you are controlling your player character, which is actually your self. Do you want that your player character sits in front of the television for three hours now? Or should your player character do something to advance himself? Advance his skills and traits. Or collect money or items that will help him in further tasks.

Should your player character sit in front of his computer and play video games? While his Strength, Endurance primary stats diminish? Or should he advance in the vast, high-definition, high-detail game world that is called the Real World?