1: When Phillip Jeffrey was 25 years old, he was diagnosed with a rare, incurable blood cancer. For the next six years, he underwent many rounds of chemotherapy.

Then, he had a stroke in the area of his brain responsible for vision.

“Losing vision is traumatic for anyone, but it was especially so for Phillip, whose greatest passion in life is photography,”  Jane McGonigal writes in her book SuperBetter: The … continue reading

“If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?” —T. S. Eliot

1: You have a goal.

You will likely encounter obstacles or challenges that you must overcome to reach your goal.

Game designer and PhD Jane McGonigal calls these “The bad guys.”

Bad guys test us and make things tough, creating challenges to overcome.

There are always bad guys in the games we … continue reading

“After ignoring months of warning signs, I suddenly could not get out of bed,” Terry Looper writes in his book Sacred Pace: Four Steps to Hearing God and Aligning Yourself With His Will.

Terry was thirty-six years old.

“It felt like the oxygen had been turned off in my brain, making it impossible for me to even lift my head from the pillow,” he recalls. “This was more than … continue reading

1: Turns out anxiety and excitement are the exact same emotion.

Physiologically, that is. Which just means how your body operates.

“Whether you are anxious about something or excited about it, your body responds in a nearly identical ‘high arousal’ state,” Jane McGonigal writes in her book SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully.

How does your body react?

“You have excess energy, you may feel butterflies in your stomach, … continue reading

1: How do you personally respond when adversity strikes?

Do you see adversity as a challenge you can meet, or as a threat that could overwhelm you?

Your perspective on adversity significantly impacts your life.

Good news: There’s a proven way to shift from threat to challenge. Read on to learn how.

“In a threat mindset, you focus on the potential for risk, danger, harm, or loss,” Jane McGonigal writes … continue reading

1: Ready for an interesting fact about games?

When we play them, we almost never feel hopeless.

“It’s true,” Jane McGonigal writes in her book SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully.

“Psychologists have studied the top emotions during game play, and genuine anxiety and pessimism are extremely rare,” Jane notes. “Even when we’re losing or struggling, we’re vastly more likely to feel determined and optimistic than panicked or powerless.”… continue reading

How does creating a game help someone recover from a brain injury?

1: “How could a game so seemingly trivial, so admittedly simple, intervene so powerfully in such serious, in some cases life-and-death, circumstances?” Jane McGonigal writes in her book SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully.

Following her 2009 concussion, Jane was at her lowest point, plagued by suicidal thoughts.

Then, suddenly, she had a thought: What if … continue reading

1: In the summer of 2009, researcher and game designer Jane McGonigal hit her head and got a concussion.

“It didn’t heal properly,” Jane writes in her book SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully, “and after thirty days I still had constant headaches, nausea, and vertigo.”

Reading or writing was only possible for a few minutes at a time. “I had trouble remembering things,” Jane notes. “Most days I … continue reading

1: “We managers like to talk about change, so much that embracing change has become a cliché of management,” Andy Grove writes in Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company.

But not all changes are the same.

What Andy calls “a strategic inflection point is not just any change,” he notes. “It compares to change the way Class VI rapids on a … continue reading

1: Then Intel CEO Andy Grove was sitting in a conference room with other members of the Intel team.

The topic? “Evaluations of a certain highly touted new software from a company whose other products we already use,” Andy writes in his legendary business book, Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company.

Intel’s head of Information Technology shared the challenges her team … continue reading