tl;dr: Enjoy your life more by gamifying it.
I received a copy from the author for a review. The opinions in this review are, of course, mine and unbiased by outside influences.
'Achieve Your Goals With Quests' is a short book on enjoying life more by treating tasks, chores & goals as quests in a video game. The author, Morgan Addison, makes quite a few compelling analogies to help us look differently at the challenges life throws at us.
The book is relatively compact. We ought to be able to finish it in a single setting in less than an hour. But the information contained in this booklet far exceeds the number of words. There are six chapters in this book. These are
The Introduction: This chapter introduces the basic concept behind the book, i.e. treating one's life as a series of quests and using it for any activity.
Creating Your Future: In this chapter, we choose our main quest, i.e. long term goals that we aspire towards. For example - starting a new business or writing a book.
Preparing for Your Quest: Any quest requires preparation. We learn how to do so in this chapter. Who or what can help us, what can block us, do we need allies?
Map Your Journey: This chapter helps us in preparing a roadmap towards achieving the goal. How can we make it fun for our selves? Are there any side-quests that we can do along the way? What could be some possible level-ups (mile-stones)?
The Path to Success: We learn to track our progress towards the goal using adventure logs. How do we deal with burnout or failures?
Victory: Take the success forward in terms of achievements or loot that we can reminisce over later in life.
I like a few things about the book. The writing style is easy to comprehend and read. The analogies are well thought out. The idea of applying MMORPG like gamification principles is not common, but it is not unique either. But the author has done a decent job in taking these principles a level deeper and made it easy for people to look at their lives differently. For example - practising an activity might be a chore but what if we look at it as grinding in a video game to level up a skill. That puts a different spin on things. There is plenty of practical productivity advice in the book too.
But that said, there are a couple of issues. The first one is the book's length. More examples will make it easier for non-gamers to understand how to gamify their lives. The second is the lack of visual charts and tools that will let people apply this book's principles to their lives. The author has said that these will be on her site, but they are still not available, as of this review. In any case, the templates & charts should be a part of the book since that will be much more effective.
Overall, I liked the book and the basic principles. But it needs more content. I also think that this will be an excellent way for pre-teens and teenagers to manage their lives.
If you liked this review, please support me on
Patreon
and/or buy the book through the affiliate links below.
Amazon India
Amazon UK
Amazon US