This is isn’t an original idea — I’ve heard it in many different forms — but I do think it’s a profound one. Tony Robbins deals with these issues a lot as well. He refers to it as the difference between “achieving to be happy” vs. “happily achieving.” The latter is more effective than the former.

I’ve applied this concept in my own life and found it to be spot on, although it took me many years before I felt I’d really mastered it. I am in a wonderful place in my life right now, where each day I work from a state of inner peace and a pervasive sense of joy, regardless of what my external results are at any particular time. I don’t need to accomplish anything to achieve these states — I work from these states, not for them or towards them. For me this has become my default permanent state of being.

Imagine waking up every morning feeling wonderful for no particular reason and having that feeling last all day, regardless of what you do that day — every day. This is the state of being from which you will do your best thinking and take your best actions to manifest the other things you want.

The material I found most helpful in reaching this goal came from Dr. Deepak Chopra and Dr. Wayne Dyer, especially Chopra’s Seven Spiritual Laws of Success and Dyer’s The Power of Intention. The main thing for me was to keep focusing on the intention to raise my consciousness to a state of peace and joy. After several months of holding this intention, I found myself locked into these states by default.

What is he referring to? How does having what money won’t buy lead to getting more of what money will buy?

I’ve subscribed to your blog feed, so I’ll definitely check it out.

Stop by the blog, take a look. Thanks for your feedback.

As a complete aside, but related to your postings on gambling, what poker book(s) would you recommend for someone that only plays once in a great, great while but with business execs that are poker sharks? I’d like to be able to hold my own with them, for once.

And because of that higher degree of immersiveness, I think games have the greatest potential expressiveness of any digital media.

This happens with most professions — before I began sound recording/mastering “career”, I didn’t notice how the song sound. Then, when I began making records myself, my brain switch to technical mode and I just couldn’t stop noticing all the technical sides of songs. Now when I dropped, it comes back to me — I listen to songs, not those tracks with guitars, drums, basses, etc

What is it about a game like Ultima IV, that makes it able to express an idea or a feeling, that writing cannot?

I think the low cost of the event explains why a couple of the presentations were sales pitches for more expensive seminars. In that sense it was a bit of a feeder seminar, but there was still an abundance of great stand-alone content. Also, some speakers sold products there. Zig Ziglar offered product bundles ranging from $149 to $649. Speakers commonly earn more from BOR (back of room) sales than they do from speaking fees.

On Tom Hopkins sales questions I agree with you it sounds a bit creepy, but as I have been in sales for years as a business owner I have to agree with Mr. Hopkins that question based selling works best not as a closing technique like he uses it, but as way to really find out what the customer requires and thus match your product too the customers needs Nothing creepy about that.

Finally just out of curiosity how much did this seminar cost?

Keep up the good work.

Johann

You are so good at writing your own mission and your self-belief in it (no doubt a product of your own growth) that it almost appears as if there are no other professions that are optimal, and perhaps even legitimate. I’m sure for you, that is the case.

But I like to know that there are perhaps more paths to the similar objectives, that are better suited for different people in different situations. Right now, I think the best route for me is to do that through games.

Good luck to you!

But ultimately I found my progress in this arena to be too slow, and it was holding back my own growth. It felt like I was moving through quicksand, trying to turn an elephant around. Partly the technology itself was a problem. I can make a blog post in a matter of minutes, and the value gets delivered to thousands of real human beings in a matter of hours. But a game takes far more time and effort, and ultimately it probably delivers a lot less value. If you add up the total time I’ve spent working on this site over the past year, it might have been enough to develop and release a couple games instead. Could I have delivered at least as much value through the medium of those games? I think it’s possible but unlikely (for me that is). And in order to do that, I would have been holding myself back a great deal — I certainly experience a lot more personal growth running this site than I ever did working full time on games.

Perhaps the game that I felt was the best step in the right direction I wanted to go was Ultima IV. I still feel there is great potential in the medium of games — it’s ultimately a richer media than text or speech. But at present I don’t think it’s quite flexible enough in terms of the tools and development times.

I know that leaving the gaming industry was the right decision for me. I don’t even need the benefit of hindsight to know that it was the correct call — I knew it was right for me at the time I made the decision.

Maybe down the road somewhere, I’ll have the resources to fund some experimental software products that are both entertaining and growth-oriented. The best speakers are great entertainers too. So I know that entertainment doesn’t conflict with helping people grow — in fact, it’s a wonderful complement. People grow more when the message affects their heart and not just their head.

I think with increasing technology the medium has a lot more potential to help people in areas other areas of life than it used to. But because people buy a game to be entertained, every other benefit is generally a side-effect, you can’t be completely congruent with providing maximal value and at the same time having a hit product. You have to make compromises.

I suppose that this could also be true with personal development (nobody wants to hear that growth takes work, so there will be a lot of people looking for band-aids to the problems in their lives), so you sometimes have to either accept that your position within a medium may provide the most value to people but at the potential cost of marketting.

You wrote an article earlier about distinguishing between medium and message. I know you chose the path to provide value through direct speaking and writing, but do you still feel that there is a potential for good in games, or is it simply fading away as your perspective changes?

I love your blog, and I feel I can bring value with games, but I always feel it a bit more discouraging when I see you eloquently worded personal mission and your own departure from the games industry. I love making games and I can think of various ways to use them to bring value, but I can’t help feeling discouraged when there is so much negative influence being directed towards games in general.

At a seminar I attended last year where Dr. Wayne Dyer spoke, the audience was 95% female, and most of the speakers were female too. So it varies.

I think there are certain topics which draw more male speakers and others where there are more female speakers. So there are both male-dominated and female-dominated patches of the industry. Overall it seems to be a more even playing field than software development or the computer gaming industry. I certainly gained a lot more female friends after switching careers. It was like graduating from an all boys school and switching to a co-ed one.