1: “There’s nothing in the world I hate more than asking for help,” Alex Goldman said.
Alex is a public radio producer in New York City who loves cycling.
“In the summer of 2011, he suffered a terrible accident when he was knocked off his bike and run over by a car,” Jane McGonigal writes in her book SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully.
“I had multiple fractures in my leg,” Alex recalls, “and I needed two surgeries to fix them.
“After my first surgery,” he remembers, “I spent three weeks with rods and clamps drilled into the bones in my leg. I had a second surgery to remove them, and then I spent six weeks on crutches.”
Eventually, Alex learned to walk again, but he knew recovering fully would take a long time.
“I walk with a limp now, and every step is pretty painful,” he said. “My leg swells up in the afternoons. I can’t do any of the exercise I used to do, especially riding my bike.
“The medical professionals looking at my injury have not been all that clear about whether this is permanent or not,” he said. “As you can imagine, this has left me incredibly depressed.”
At this point, Alex decided to try Jane’s SuperBetter framework, which uses game design ideas to help people face real-life challenges.
The SuperBetter game has seven main rules:
- Rule #1: Challenge yourself: Choose a clear, meaningful real-life challenge you want to tackle (healing, a habit change, a big life goal, etc.).
- Rule #2: Collect and activate power-ups: Identify small, easy actions that reliably make you feel stronger, happier, calmer, or more connected, and deliberately use them throughout the day.
- Rule #3: Find and battle the bad guys: Identify and name obstacles (thought patterns, situations, triggers) as “bad guys,” and practice strategies to avoid, resist, adapt to, challenge, or convert them.
- Rule #4: Seek out and complete quests: Break your bigger challenge into tiny, do‑able actions you can complete and treat each as a “quest.”
- Rule #5: Recruit your allies: Proactively enlist friends, family, or community members who know your challenge and agree to support, encourage, and “play” with you.
- Rule #6: Adopt a secret identity: Create a heroic alter ego (name, strengths, maybe a symbol or theme song) that captures how you want to show up while you work on your challenge.
- Rule #7: Go for an epic win: Define a realistic but ambitious long‑term outcome that would feel “epic” to you, and let that be the motivating north star that your quests and power‑ups aim toward.
2: When Jane explained the SuperBetter rules, Alex was convinced that recruiting allies would be the most difficult part of the game for him.
“But when we spoke again, six weeks later,” Jane recalls, “he had not only achieved his first epic win—a three-mile bike ride around Brooklyn’s Prospect Park—but to his great surprise, he also had a whopping eleven allies by his side when he did it.”
So how did Alex go from struggling to ask for help to having friends and coworkers cheering him on?
“It started slowly,” Jane writes, “with just two allies—his wife, Sarah, and his colleague PJ.”
Alex shared his goal with them and asked for their help in achieving it. To break the ice, he showed Sarah and PJ his list of bad guys,” he shares. “Stuff like not socializing, staying up really late but not getting anything done, junk food, generally things that kept me sedentary and lethargic and unhappy.”
Then he shared his list of power-ups, which focused on helping him stay active and connect with people.
“With PJ at work and Sarah at home,” Jane notes, “he had someone around essentially 24/7 to help him keep moving and avoid succumbing to the bad guys.”
Alex said he would never have asked for this much help if not for the SuperBetter framework. “To be quite honest, the process was hard for me,” he said, “even though the game rules made it easier.”
The flip side? “It was also really nice to have people hold me accountable,” he says.
“The behavior I’d developed after the accident was just to sit around feeling sorry for myself. Having people trying to push me to behavior that would make me feel better was super helpful.”
3: So much so that Alex chose to enlist others to provide support.
“But he didn’t feel comfortable talking to other friends or colleagues yet about his challenges,” Jane explains. “So he turned to online discussion boards and social media.
“As an avid player of Team Fortress 2, a popular online team-based shooter game,” she writes, “Alex felt comfortable recruiting allies from a pool of strangers online.”
Soon, more than a dozen people volunteered to help, even though Alex had never met any of them in person.
They began “sending him ideas for power-ups, bad guy strategies, and quests,” Jane writes. “They also helped him decide on the epic win he would try to achieve: Getting back on his bicycle and riding one lap (or three miles) around Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.
“I suppose this is a bit of a no-brainer, but I was shocked at how motivating it is to have other people designing quests for me,” Alex said. “The quests my allies have given me have been much more interesting and enlightening than anything I’ve come up with myself.”
More tomorrow when we will delve deeper into recruiting allies!
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Reflection: Who could become an ally in helping you achieve a goal that you’ve been trying to tackle on your own?
Action: Reach out to one trusted person this week, share a meaningful goal, and ask for one specific way they can support or encourage you.
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