What is gaming and why is everyone going so crazy about it?

The gaming industry revenue is now dwarfing the revenue that major motion pictures are making. From a couple of hundred million gamers 10 years ago to now it’s almost 3 billion gaming users in the world.

Microsoft purchased Activision for $68 billion dollars.

Sony is buying Bungie for about $4 billion dollars.

What the heck is going on? Why are these companies making such big bets on gaming outfits?

I believe Gamers will be the ones calling the shots in the 2030s and beyond. Just like nerds made their mark on the world and became cool in the 1980s and ’90s.

Keep in mind that when I say gamers I don’t mean the teenage kid sitting on the couch eating cheetos and playing xbox.

Gaming is much more than just Madden football, Halo or Pac-Man.

Gaming is experiences you have together with friends, family and even coworkers.

Let me give you an example. Imagine going to axe throwing but doing it virtually in the metaverse where you have walked in with a bunch of friends into this store in metaverse but your friends are actually physically located all over the world. One is from China, another from India, third from Germany and one from Canada and you are from United States. You can be with each other virtually, throw the axe at the targets, banter among yourselvee just like you would do at the actual axe throwing place. In fact, everything about the experience is normal just like you were doing it if physically present with each other.

Or to simplify it, just chilling at home and watching a Sunday football playoff game virtually with a dozen of your friends from around the world. That’s gaming as well.

Currently I see Meta (formerly Facebook), Microsoft, Sony and a few other players making some big bets in the gaming industry. They see the vision. They see the future. It’s true that recently the revenues of many of these companies have taken a hit but that’s only temporary in my opinion.

My prediction is that other companies will start seeing the same vision as well once they see the realization of benefits and profits that these companies will be accruing.

It’s a wonderful future to look forward to where you can be anywhere and be anyone in the metaverse.

Of course, this wonderful future does not come with drawbacks and challenges that we will have to face just like any other advances in technology that have come before it in the past.

My biggest fear: I hope we don’t all become couch potatoes where we wake up in the morning, put on our virtual reality gear, spend the whole day in a virtual world that that gives us whatever reality we want, momentarily satisfying us for the day and then we turn in for the night to repeat the same thing over again the next day (fourth reference, watch the movie “Ready Player One”). That future would not be good for mankind.

If we want to avail this upcoming opportunity of the metaverse in a way that propels mankind forward, we will have to be disciplined about how we make the best use of the new world instead of becoming slaves to it.

 

Beat your younger self

I totally believe in healthy competition. I tell my kids all the time the competition is a good thing. It drives you, it pushes you, it gives you a target.

Having said that, the best target to beat is your younger self. And when I say younger, it could be a minute younger, a week younger, a year younger. The idea is to beat the performance of your past self.

Many of us fall into the trap of comparing ourselves with others. The only result that comes out of that is second-guessing yourself and your own capabilities.

Now I’m not saying that we should completely ignore everyone around us and just focus on ourselves. It’s definitely good to look for inspiration all around us but there’s a fine line between inspiration and competition. Inspiration can be drawn from others but competition is best when done with your former self.

Just like when you run in track, the coach tells you to focus on your PR (personal record). Don’t worry if you come in last in the race, but do worry if you are not beating your own former PR.

If you are not improving yourself that just simply means you are not trying hard enough. If you are not beating others, there could be several factors affecting that which you cannot control. Don’t worry about that. The more you worry about that, the more miserable it’s going to make you and that doesn’t help move you further in life. Focus on what’s in your hands and keep on improving.

 

Why I write Google map reviews

I’m addicted to writing restaurant reviews for Google maps. When I go to a restaurant, whether I like it or don’t like it, I write a review either way.

You might ask: why do I do it? What’s in it for me?

There’s definitely no money in it of course. I have written hundreds of reviews but Google has not sent me a penny nor do I expect that they ever will.

Then why do it Asif you might ask..?

Not everything you do is going to have a payback in a monetary fashion. Sometimes the reward is the feeling you get when you know the impact you made.

For me in this case, I knew in my heart that I could help folks by writing honest, straightforward and concise reviews of places that I have been to so someone else who considers going there knows what to expect. That small impact makes me feel fulfilled. Just like writing this article makes me feel fulfilled because I’m sharing my thoughts with others who will eventually read it.

No matter how small of a contribution, you can always contribute to others and make your impact with what’s in your hands. Never forget that.

Make yourself useful by changing your context

There’s actually a simple way to feeling fulfilled in life. The secret is:

Being useful to others.

It’s a guaranteed fact that will provide your life meaning which we all crave.

The challenge is it’s not always clear how we can be useful because of our viewpoint of the surroundings. Sometimes our context is such that it feels the people around us and the things around us don’t need what we have to offer in terms of time effort or money.

There’s actually a solution to that:

Change your context.

The fact is that we all have something to offer to the world. If you can’t see who you can help or what you can offer that would be truly helpful then change your context.

Don’t think people in your inner circle need your help, look outside that inner circle.

Don’t think you can make a difference at your job, change your job.

Don’t think your family needs your help because they’re pretty self-sufficient, don’t change your family of course 😊 but help other families who can use your help.

Don’t think you can make a difference in your current geographical location, change your location.

Can’t change your location? No worries. It’s a small world these days thanks to technology. Reach out and help others through your words and actions virtually.

The fact of the matter is there’s Always someone or something that can use what you have to offer. And just as true is that once you offer that help, you yourself will feel fulfilled. Guaranteed!

So ask yourself:

What’s in your hands and what are you going to do about it?

Reduce the clutter to clear your mind

Have you ever noticed that you can think clearly when present in some spaces compared to others? Context really matters.

There’s a correlation of how clear your mind is to how clear (and clutter free) your environment is.

There’s a story that Bill Gates Sr. was once sitting down with his son Bill Gates Jr. as well as Warren Buffett and he asked them both to write one single word that has made them both successful. They both wrote down the exact same thing: Focus

It’s not a coincidence that people who are focused and clear minded are the ones who are the most successful in this world.

Many of us struggle to attain that focus because of the clutter in our minds. Now I’m not saying that by decluttering our environment, you will automatically become laser focused. However, I am 100% confident that it will help tremendously and it’s something that is very much in our control.

The challenge is of course that we live in a very materialistic society. Buying stuff has become an activity for many. A lot of the stuff we buy is not even out of necessity. We buy just because we need something to do. And because it gives us a temporary spike of pleasure that feels good in the moment.

Obviously the more we buy the more stuff we have the more cluttered our environment gets and the less clear and focused our minds get. It’s a vicious circle that is hard to break.

Let’s at least start with the awareness that if we want to be focused and achieve our goals, we can take the simple actionable step of removing some clutter to start clearing our minds.

 

What is gaming and why is everyone going so crazy for it?

The gaming industry revenue is now dwarfing the revenue that major motion pictures are making. From a couple of hundred million gamers 10 years ago to now it’s almost 3 billion gaming users in the world.

Microsoft purchased Activision for $68 billion dollars.

Sony is buying Bungie for about $4 billion dollars.

What the heck is going on? Why are these companies making such big bets on gaming outfits?

I believe Gamers will be the ones calling the shots in the 2030s and beyond. Just like nerds made their mark on the world and became cool in the 1980s and ’90s.

Keep in mind that when I say gamers I don’t mean the teenage kid sitting on the couch eating Cheetos and playing Xbox.

Gaming is much more than just Madden football, Halo or Pac-Man.

Gaming is experiences you have together with friends, family and even coworkers. Imagine going to axe throwing but doing it virtually in the metaverse where you have walked in with a bunch of friends into this store in metaverse but your friends are from all over the world one is from China another from India third from Germany and one from Canada and you are the United States.

Or to simplify it, just chilling at home and watching a Sunday football playoff game virtually with a dozen of your friends from around the world. That’s gaming as well.

Currently I see Meta (formerly Facebook), Microsoft, Sony and a few other players making some big bets in the gaming industry. They see the vision. They see the future. My prediction is that other companies will start seeing the same vision as well once they see the realization of benefits and profits that these companies will be accruing.

It’s a wonderful future to look forward to where you can be anywhere and be anyone in the metaverse.

Of course, this wonderful future does not come with drawbacks and challenges that we will have to face just like any other advances in technology that have come before it in the past.

My biggest fear: I hope we don’t all become couch potatoes where we wake up in the morning, put on our virtual reality gear, spend the whole day in a virtual world that that gives us whatever reality we want, momentarily satisfying us for the day and then we turn in for the night to repeat the same thing over again the next day. That future would not be good for mankind.

If we want to avail this upcoming opportunity of the metaverse in a way that propels mankind forward, we will have to be disciplined about how we make the best use of the new world instead of becoming slaves to it.

 

 

 

Sacrifice pleasure for happiness

What do you really want in life? Do you want happiness that’s long-lasting or do you want momentary pleasure?

The answer is simple of course: Both right ☺️

Let’s talk about the sources of each – pleasure and happiness.

You get pleasure when endorphins are rushing through your brain and giving you that momentary feel of satisfaction. That type of satisfaction occurs when you just won a race, ate a piece of delicious cake, won the Lotto, had great sex, or a bunch of equivalent things which give you a feeling of satisfaction in the moment.

The challenge with most of us is that we confuse these spikes of pleasure with happiness.

Happiness vs Pleasure

Figure: The way I think about Pleasure vs Happiness

 

So what’s true happiness and how do you attain that? 

Happiness is harder to come by, requires more investment of time and energy and patience. Happiness also sometimes comes with momentary pain as you try to achieve that state of happiness.

Because of all these obstacles, many of us don’t even bother trying to work at it. It’s just too hard. And many times it’s not even guaranteed that you’ll achieve happiness at all that work. While pleasure, even though it’s momentary, it’s guaranteed.

So that begs the question… Is the pursuit of happiness worth it? 

Why not just have many spikes of pleasure along your life which is definitely much easier to attain rather than pursuing happiness which is harder and not always guaranteed?

That’s a very good question indeed.

Let’s look closely at the problem with pleasure.

Pleasure is temporary of course but the bigger problem is that once that sense of pleasure is gone, it drops you right back to the state where you started. Sometimes even lower because of the expectation you had that it was going to last. And when it doesn’t last that long and the euphoria fades away, you have that feeling of dissatisfaction which stays with you longer.

Happiness on the other hand is incremental and sometimes exponential depending on how much you invest in it. Happiness builds on top of the previous state you were in.

But once again, the challenge with happiness: it takes work and intention. And that’s the reason that most people opt for quick pleasure instead of pursuits of long-term happiness.

I personally think there’s room for both. Sometimes you just want a quick hit of pleasure and that’s okay. As long as we don’t get addicted to those spikes of pleasure.

I truly believe that if we want our lives to be worth it long term, we should incrementally be investing in our happiness. And sometimes that investment requires payment in the form of sacrifice of momentary pleasure.

 

Get your thoughts out of your head

Have you ever found yourself thinking about something over and over without coming to a resolution? And then you have a chat with a friend or colleague about the same matter and as you are speaking about it, you come up with a solution yourself…?

I’m sure you have experienced that and you’re not alone. That’s a pretty common phenomenon that all of us have gone through one time or the other.

So why not just speak out our thoughts?

Why not give voice externally – audibly – to your thoughts that are driving you nuts in your brain?

You will find that once you give voice to your thoughts, many times the answers will appear automatically just like you were talking with a friend.

Give it a shot. And if you’re doing it in public, consider putting one of those cool earbuds in your ears and then you will appear like everyone else talking to themselves 😉

Slow down to go faster

Your phone pings. It’s a new Instagram post. You click on it and go there. Check out the picture your friend posted and some comments underneath and then you try to return back to the article that you were writing on your laptop.

5 minutes later you get a text message from a friend asking what you’re up to tonight. You immediately respond back to him. Then once again you try to refocus your mind on the article that’s due today.

A few minutes go by and an alert on your phone tells you that Chick-fil-A is offering a bonus chicken sandwich when you buy one and that the deal is only valid today. You’re hungry. You love Chick-fil-A. You click on the notification and check out the offer and start thinking about heading over to Chick-fil-A in a couple of hours for a quick bite. Then once again you come back to the article which you know you have to get done by end of day today otherwise you’re going to be in trouble with your boss.

Altogether an hour has passed by now and you look at how much you actually got done writing the article. It’s just two short paragraphs.

What the heck just happened?

Where did the time go? You were moving so fast between your phone and your computer back and forth. How come it doesn’t feel like you really accomplished anything?

Moving fast doesn’t necessarily mean you’re getting a lot of stuff done. Moving fast and doing stuff might sometime fool you into thinking that you are multitasking but we all know that’s a myth. You’re just switching from task to task really fast.

Why do we do this?

The reason that we switch from activity to activity and get that feeling that we are moving fast and getting lots done can be blamed on our amygdala. We get that spike of emotional satisfaction with these quick hits of pleasure. Not always good for long-term but definitely feels wonderful for a few minutes. Same can be said for vices like smoking or drugs. People who do it report being satisfied in the moment and craving for it but they know that it’s not good for them long-term.

Many of us go through these types of quick interactions on a daily basis. The hours, days and sometimes weeks just get away from us and then we wonder why can’t we get around to doing the things that really need to get done and really matter to us long-term.

The switching cost

There’s a cost to this “context switching”. It’s kind of like when your car switches gears. In the automatic transmissions these days you can’t even tell but there’s an actual slowdown that happens after each gear is changed.

Once you’re going from one activity to the other activity, your mind has to reset the context. It decelerates from what it was doing and accelerates into a different topic then decelerates from that topic and accelerates into the other topic. All of that costs time but even more importantly it has an energy cost to it as well.

Then what should you do?

If you had turn off your phone or at least put it on do not disturb mode, you would have not seen any of those distracting pings. Would you have missed out on something time sensitive? Usually the possibility of that is very low. Would you have gotten more done with your article that you know is very important and must be done by tonight? The chances are high that yes you would have made measurable progress on your task.

Life is short. If we want to truly accomplish things in life that matter, it is worth it to slow down the chaos in our lives to be able to speed up progress on things that matter.

Your body is not a garbage can

When I was growing up, I remember my parents telling me that I must finish everything on my plate. Wasting food was just not acceptable.

I have never liked waste and continue to look upon it unfavorably when I see anything wasted – time, money, food, etc.

But having said that, my views on finishing my plate of food has changed over time.

Let me explain…

When you leave food on your plate, it goes to the garbage can. Chances are that many of us reasonable people will feel bad about wasting food, as we should, since we know in the back of our minds that there are people going hungry around the world. We should be thankful and blessed for the food that we have received and wasting it is definitely not a good thing. Agreed.

Having said that, there are times when you just get to a point where you know that you should not be putting more food in your mouth. You are full.

So why did you end up having more food on your plate then you could eat?

Sometimes it’s just not avoidable. For example, at a party where you are served food on a plate. For times like these, you just don’t have a choice as to the plate that was put in front of you. Or sometimes you just made a mistake and took too much food. You’re human. It happens.

The only choices you have at that point are:

  1. Do you put it in the garbage can knowing that you are wasting food?
  2. Do you put it in your body knowing that it’s not good for your body?

I used to be the person that would religiously finish his plate and would tell my kids to do the same.

As I have grown older, I have learned to respect my body more.

Your body is not a garbage can.

It’s true that it’s not good to waste food by putting it in the garbage but it’s worse to treat your body like a garbage can by ingesting food that your body doesn’t need

Same could be said for any other substance that’s not good for your body. The fact is that we have been given only one body and if we don’t treat it respectfully, we will suffer the consequences as we get older.

Be good to your body and be considerate of your future self. You deserve it!