1: Meg was in a bad place.
“I hated my job, and I saw little hope of anything in the future,” she recalls in Jane McGonigal‘s book SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully.
At twenty-six, Meg was living in Boston and working for a large company that didn’t share her values.
“I took the chance to sign up for SuperBetter,” she recalls.
A key element of the SuperBetter framework is choosing what Jane calls “an Epic Win,” a goal that is “realistic but challenging; energizing but forgiving.”
“Every epic win,” Jane notes, “should provoke at least a little bit of curiosity and wonder: Can I really do this?”
Meg didn’t know what her Epic Win should be. Then she heard a coworker mention an upcoming charity walk.
“It seemed like the perfect opportunity to take a step in the right direction,” Meg remembers. “She might not feel that her employer was a force for good, but she could do something individually to make the world a better place.”
Before the charity walk, Meg had never walked more than six miles.
“My goal was to get as far as possible before my legs simply gave up and detached themselves from my body,” Meg said. “I figured on that happening at roughly Mile 10.”
Meg started the walk with some coworkers and friends. By Mile 10, most of them had decided to stop.
“But Meg wanted to keep pushing,” Jane writes. “At Mile 12 her final remaining teammate decided to go home.”
That was hard. “It was the most demoralizing moment of the entire day,” Meg says.
But she didn’t stop, even though she had a calf cramp, a sore knee, and blisters on her feet.
“By Mile 18, the aches in my body were breathtaking,” she recalled. “I was sunburned and exhausted to the point of tears.”
Looking back, she isn’t sure what helped her keep going through the pain. “Part of it was wanting to do as much as she could for a good cause,” Jane observes. “Part of it was a growing curiosity. Had she completely underestimated what she was capable of?”
Meg ended up crossing the finish line in the Boston Common.
“I distinctly recall shrieking, through my tears, ‘I did it! I walked twenty miles! I [effing] did it!!’”
Meg says, “I hardly recognized myself.
“And that’s a good thing. . . Even now I remember every sympathetic and amazed expression I encountered at work the next day. No one, including myself, seemed to believe that I had managed to make it. That I was the one who went the distance, who didn’t quit.”
More than two years after the walk, Meg told Jane, “I am not exaggerating when I say that walking twenty miles and achieving that epic win changed my life. My entire self-concept had to be rewritten to acknowledge that I could meet that kind of challenge.”
Meg used that breakthrough as a springboard to change her career. Now, she works in health care, helping people get the care they need when it matters most.
“I’m loving every minute of it,” she says.
2: Meg’s twenty-mile walk wasn’t just a physical achievement. It was something Jane calls “a breakthrough moment,” a big, positive turning point in your life.
Epic Wins come in different forms. Last week, RiseWithDrew explored “measurable wins.” Yesterday, we looked at Epic Wins involving physical or athletic achievements.
A breakthrough moment is “an event you can aspire to and plan to do that will show off your strength and resilience,” Jane writes. “It can also be a way to demonstrate and celebrate your commitment to your goals.”
There’s power, she notes, “in actively planning for and vividly imagining your next breakthrough moment.”
One benefit is that when you aim for a breakthrough moment, you naturally reflect on your strengths, values, and goals.
“This reflection can lead to important self-insight,” Jane explains. “What counts as success to you?”
Another benefit is that picturing your breakthrough moment can motivate you, as you imagine how it will feel to achieve it.
That, in turn, becomes a pathway to developing powerful new strengths.
“The ability,” Jane writes, “to identify turning points in your own life’s narrative is a key predictor of post-ecstatic or post-traumatic growth.”
3: Jane puts forth the following brainstorming questions to help you create a breakthrough moment:
- What big step could you take in the next week that would signify a major commitment to your goals?
- What is one thing that you’ve been unable to do due to injury, illness, or extreme stress that you would like to be able to do again soon? Could doing it for the first time again be a breakthrough moment?
- What’s something that scares you but that you could reasonably do in the next thirty days?
- How could you show off a new skill or strength you’ve been developing—in public, or to friends and family?
- What have you been procrastinating about, or avoiding doing, that you really want to get done once and for all?
- What good news would you want to yell from a mountaintop?
- Could you do something to honor, remember, or commemorate an important event in your past, or a person who influenced your decision to get superbetter?
- Can you think of any other major leveling-up moment for you in real life?
- What could you accomplish in the next ninety days that would tell the world (or even just yourself), I am so much stronger than you had any idea!
Jane offers three additional suggestions regarding Epic Wins. First, be sure to tell your allies [hyperlink: https://risewithdrew.com/the-secret-to-achieving-big-goals-recruit-an-ally/] about the epic wins you plan to pursue.
Second, telling others about your goal makes you more likely to achieve it.
Third, if you don’t succeed, be open to trying again. “You’ll achieve greater triumphs if you’re open to failing the first time,” Jane observes. “Imagine how boring games would be if we played only games that were so easy, we were assured of winning.”
Two years later, Meg was still using the SuperBetter framework. “I still set myself up weekly for a Do something that scares you quest, and I complete a Take pride in something about yourself quest every single day,” she says.
More tomorrow!
____________________________
What did you think of this post?
