How I Made My Life a Video Game

0:07Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I am your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so you don't miss any more podcast episodes. And if you're out there and you love this podcast, please do me a massive favor. Just share this podcast with one person today. The more people we can grow and impact, the more that we're able to hopefully change the world in our small little way. So if you do that, I would greatly appreciate it. Today, I'm gonna be talking to you about how I decided to make my life into a video game. And when I was younger, I looked at the world very differently than I do now.

0:39and that thought pattern that I had when I was younger caused me a lot of suffering. You know, something would go wrong in my life and my first thought would be like, why is the universe doing this to me? Why do I have such bad luck all the time? Why is it always everybody else gets good luck and I get all of the shit? And it could have been, you know, money stress or relationships falling apart or even just like unexpected detours that my life took. But I saw every challenge that came to me as some sort of evidence that there was something wrong with me or worse, that just life was not fair in any sort of way.

1:20So it's like, there's something wrong with me. There's something wrong with life. And it was kind of like my first half of my life was I was just in battle with the world, with myself, with everything else versus being a part of it. And I'll be honest with you, I was really, really good at playing the victim. I had a black belt in woe is me. And my internal dialogue in the way that I would narrate everything that was going on and the way that I gave meaning to something that was going on is I would always say stuff like, oh, why do I always have the worst luck? You know, why can't anything just be easy for me?

1:57Everything seems easier for everybody else. It's so hard for me. Oh, or one of my favorites, what did I do to deserve this? I'm such a good person. I try to do well. Like, what did I do to deserve this? Why are other people succeeding and I'm still stuck? And then one day, I don't even remember when it was, but I just remember learning about the way that your thoughts create your feelings and your feelings create your actions. And I realized that my entire worldview, just to be transparent with you, it sucked. You know, I realized that our thoughts create our feelings and I felt like shit. So I thought to myself, okay, if I feel like shit, well, maybe I should go back one step and I should actually start paying attention to the thoughts going on in my head.

2:41And maybe if I change my thoughts, then my feelings would actually change. And I kind of realized like, what if life wasn't supposed to be easy? Like maybe I'm thinking in my mind, like this should be easy, but maybe it's not supposed to be easy. And I started realizing and looking at reading about successful people and looking up to, reading autobiographies and looking up to certain people, whether they're athletes or CEOs or authors or whatever they might've been. And I remember looking at different YouTube videos and watching them and I was like, it's interesting. It seems like all people that I look up to in some sort of way embrace challenge.

3:19It's not something they resist. It was more of something they embrace as if it was some sort of fun for them. And I thought, where else do I embrace challenge? Where else do people embrace challenge? What makes challenge fun? And I started thinking about video games. And I was like, yeah, think about that for a second. Like every great video game has locked doors. They have enemies that just get harder and harder and harder every single level. They have these unexpected plot twists where you think it's going to go this way. It ends up going a different way. They have these puzzles that you just can't solve until you get better or until you find a key in harder levels, the deeper that you go.

4:02And that's what actually makes a video game fun. Like that's what makes it worth playing. Nobody plays a video game on easy mode and then just keeps on playing. Like they eventually just get bored and they turn it off. And so what makes the video game fun is kind of sucking at the game for a little while. And you see a little bit of improvement and you get a challenge and you lose in that challenge, but you get another life back and you go and you beat the challenge a second time. You feel good about beating a challenge. But because you beat the challenge, you end up having more knowledge and skill sets.

4:32So then you're better prepared for level number two. And I was like, oh my gosh, that's what makes the game fun. And what if I just started looking at my life like a video game? And I started thinking about, well, okay, if that's the point, like what challenges have happened to me in my life and how have they shifted the way that I see the world? And I was like, well, you know, I had an alcoholic father and this happened and that happened and these things happened. And my father passed away when I was 15. And all of those things were really, really hard when I was going through them. But I realized that I would never change anything that happened to me because it made me stronger by going through those challenges.

5:11And I realized, oh, hold on a second. So these things that I want to be easy, these challenges that I have in front of me are actually brought to me for me to be able to grow. And that's the crazy part. This isn't like some motivational metaphor or anything like that. There's actual science and neuroscience that shows why challenge is essential for humans to change and for them to grow. When you look at working out, if you go and you work out, your muscles only grow when they are torn. Your muscles literally create things called micro tears when you work out. They're tiny little microscopic tears in your muscle.

5:53And that stress is what triggers your body to rebuild back stronger. So you can't become stronger unless you continue to place heavier and heavier loads onto your muscles. So it shows in the human body, but it also shows inside the human brain as well. When you look at, and I spoke about this recently, the anterior cingulate cortex, it's a region of the brain that helps with focus, emotional regulation. And this is where willpower comes from. Everybody has this part of your brain. And when you do something that you don't want to do, that is the only way to grow. It only grows when you're doing something hard that you don't want to do.

6:31And so they found like professional athletes have stronger, have larger ACCs in their brain because they have to show up and work hard whether they want to or not. They're on contract. They have to. They found that people who are obese have very small ACCs inside of their brain. but when they lose weight, when they work out, when they eat healthier, when they do a series of things over and over and over again that they don't want to do that's hard for them, that challenges them, they have a significant amount of growth in their ACC over time. And so think about that for a second. The parts of your brain and your body that are responsible for strength and discipline and resilience only develop when things get hard.

7:12They only grow when things get hard. So if life were like a video game, then the challenges that come in our life wouldn't be a glitch. They wouldn't be like a problem in the universe. It wouldn't be a mistake that God made. It would be a feature built into the game of being a human. And so maybe life isn't working against you. Maybe in some sort of way, life is actually training you. And when I started to kind of look at my life this way, I'll be honest with you, it became more fun. Like everything flipped where, you know, I used to think, why is this happening to me? Then I would start to think, ah, this is just extra weight that the universe is bringing in for me because there must be something in my future that I need to grow for.

7:59So this is here for me, for me to grow in some sort of way. And you have to burn this into your brain. Your challenges are evidence that you're being trained, not punished. See, I used to think that I was being punished all the time as if there was something that I did when I was younger or something that I did in a past life or it's just karma catching up to me. And then I realized, oh no, these challenges are here to make me stronger so that I can better prepare for whatever might be coming up in my future. And I was like, oh my god, now I get it. It's not, and you have to say like, it's not easy to believe these things when you're in the thick of it.

8:40It's, but it is easy to remind yourself when you're in the thick of it. Like when I go back to like the hardest, most challenging moments of my life, sitting here today, I would never want to go back to any of them. But sitting here today, I can look at every single one of them and go, wow, I can see 20 years later, 10 years later, five years later, that that was perfect. It taught me exactly what I needed to be exactly where I am right now. You know, and it's hard when you're like in the middle of grieving somebody's death or you're overdrafting your account or a relationship is ending or you're questioning everything about yourself.

9:17But if you can have this reframe, you can look at these challenges and go, how can I make something good out of it? How can I grow from it? How can I become stronger through this thing? And it makes it easier to fight through those things with a better mentality and to fight through them in a stronger way. You know, and it's like a video game where like you don't face the hardest levels at the beginning of the game because everybody would just give up. You face harder levels after you have gained tools and the strength to allow you to maybe be able to win the game. And sometimes you don't win at first.

9:53Sometimes you lose 10 times in a row. And sometimes you lose and you get killed and you get killed and you get killed and you come back and you come back. You're like, oh my gosh, I've only got five total lives. I've already failed four times. And then you end up winning. But you just keep coming back. And that's the fun part about a video game. You just keep coming back. You keep learning the pattern, seeing what you could do differently. You figure out how to beat that level. And then over time, you master the game. And so you have to kind of think about this. It really comes down to your perspective of the world.

10:26I mean, everything really comes down to perspective. I had to make a decision at one point in time in my life when I was going through all this stuff of how I was going to view this entire world that I live in. And it came down to the decision. There's a quote by Albert Einstein that comes back to me constantly. And the quote is, the most important decision that you'll make in your life is whether you believe that we live in a friendly or hostile universe. The most important decision, Albert Einstein says, the most important decision that you'll ever make in your entire life is whether you believe that you live in a hostile or friendly universe.

11:01And for a lot of my life, I thought it was a hostile universe. It was me versus the universe and I was doing everything wrong. And I flipped my perspective and I was like, no, no, no, this right here was actually built for me. Because that one decision of looking and saying, no, this is a friendly universe. It changes everything else. Because if you believe the universe is hostile, every obstacle feels like a punishment. Every mistake feels like some failure in some sort of way. You live on the edge, always waiting for the next disaster. But if you believe that the universe is friendly for you, then your challenges start to become lessons for you.

11:37These delays and things that happen are just redirections for your life to be better than you thought it was going to be. And the pain that you feel is just building resilience within you. And so you start to think, oh, this isn't happening to me. This is happening for me. And that's really one of the biggest shifts in perspective you can have in your entire life is it's not happening to you. Nothing is happening to you. It's all happening for you. And it's not toxic positivity of like, you know, I'm standing inside of a burning house and I'm like, let me figure out how to make this positive. No, it's like, get out of the fucking house, of course.

12:13So it's not toxic positivity. it's mental resilience more than anything else. It's deciding that this game isn't rigged and it was designed and built for you. Now I've said it a thousand times in the podcast, but your life is a perfectly crafted curriculum for your soul to learn whatever it's supposed to learn while it's here. So for me, I trust in that perfection. I trust in the perfection of that. So I go, okay, well, what am I supposed to get from this instead? And so really the shifts that I started making, Like my old mindset would say, why is this happening to me? My new mindset would say, what is this here to teach me?

12:51My old mindset would say, I suck at this. My new mindset would say, I just need to get better at this. My old mindset would say, like, this shouldn't be so hard. My new mindset would say, this is supposed to be hard because when it's hard, that's how I grow and that's how I get better. My old mindset would say, I'm behind in life. My new mindset would say, hey, I'm just at an early part of the game. And what I realized is this mindset didn't just make me feel better. It did, just so you know, because once again, your thoughts make you feel different. So I did feel better. But it also made me take different actions.

13:25Because when I stopped resisting the world, which is one of the things I see that most people do more than anything else, like they're just resisting and fighting the world. And when I stopped resisting it, I actually started to learn from it. And so, you know, I didn't quit when things started to feel impossible. I actually started to lean in a little bit more because I was like, ah, this is like I'm working on a PR. Like I'm trying to bench press 400 pounds. I've never done this before. And it's like, of course I should fail a few times. And then I succeed one time. You know, I didn't look at other people and other experts and compare myself to them.

14:04I started studying them. I started realizing like, oh, I'm just new at this. Like this is my chapter one. I can't compare my chapter one as someone else's chapter 20. And then what I started doing is instead of doubting my ability, I started trusting that I'm training, you know, and I shifted my mindset as, uh, as Mel Robbins said, when she was on my podcast a couple of years ago, I stopped viewing myself as an imposter. I started viewing myself as a beginner, you know, cause when you're a beginner, of course you should be bad at something. Of course you should suck. Of course you should fall over and over and over again.

14:37My son is starting to walk. He's going to fall over and fall over and fall over and fall over but he's not going to think, oh, I can't do this. He's just eventually going to get better at it. That's what beginners do. That's just the way that it goes. And so let me tell you something that most people don't hear enough. If life feels hard right now, if you feel like you're constantly under pressure and that it's just getting harder and harder for you, if the game that you're playing feels unfair, if it feels like you're a victim, if it feels overwhelming, it doesn't mean that you're losing. It just means that you're being invited to get better for a higher level.

15:12There's something that you need to learn on this level so that you can get to the next level. And if you resist it, you're just playing the same level. You're just stuck on level five for the rest of your life. But if you go, oh, this is a challenge I'm supposed to learn. This is the bad guy I'm supposed to beat. And you learn it. Well, then you go on to the next level in life. And so your choice is you can keep thinking that life is against you if you want to. It's completely your prerogative to do that. or you can take a step back and you can realize this whole thing is just like a giant video game.

15:44It's a perfectly crafted curriculum for you. Your life is perfectly crafted for you. Every person, every instance, every second, every challenge is perfectly crafted for you. You're the main character in this video game. The challenge is the level that you're currently on and the reward that you're going to get is the person that you become along the way. And so if you're playing a game, stop struggling through the game. You might as well have a little bit more fun with it. So go ahead and play. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please share it on the Instagram stories.

16:20Tag me in at Rob Dial Jr., R-O-B-D-I-A-L-J-R. And if you want to learn about coaching with me outside of just the podcast, you can go to coachwithrob.com and learn a little bit more. Once again, coachwithrob.com. And with that, I'm gonna leave you the same way I leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you and I hope that you have an amazing day.