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 Power of Living Gamefully.
After his stroke, his doctors took him off his cancer medications to avoid potential complications.
“Phillip had been off chemotherapy for a year, and his cancer levels were rising slowly and steadily,”
Then he learned about Jane’s superbetter framework, which applies game design principles to real-life challenges and opportunities.
“He was looking for a way to stay optimistic and engaged with the world,” Jane says, “even though he felt very sick and was running out of treatment options.”
Jane outlines seven rules to create your own “SuperBetter” game:
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 a bit 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: Phillip’s journey is a testament to the life-changing force of the SuperBetter framework and the resilience of the human spirit.
“He transformed himself from Phillip the cancer patient to Phillip the Creative Cancer Fighter (rule 6), and he vowed to not let his vision problems keep him from photography,” Jane writes.
He began his SuperBetter path with a simple quest (rule 4): “Take a creative self-portrait, somewhere outdoors, and share it online before midnight.”
His goal was to take a photo every day, for ninety days (rule 7, an “epic win”). “I wanted to spend time being creative,” Phillip explains. “But I also wanted something that would force me to leave my apartment. . .
“Some days when you’re living with cancer, you just won’t want to get out of bed. You think, ‘I have my laptop, I have my cell phone, I can hide out from the rest of the world, never engage with life beyond the four walls of my place.’ That’s how I felt.
“I was exhausted from the cancer treatment. And I was depressed. Partly, it was not being happy with myself and how I looked. It was very humbling for me, how cancer changed my appearance. I got so much weaker, I lost my hair, and I just wanted to hide it from the world. I needed something to help me reengage with the world around me.”
Sharing photos online empowered him.
“I have a shorter lifespan than most, so I’m thinking of a legacy,” he explains. “I’m taking pictures that I hope will be around online for a long time, maybe twenty, thirty years.”
During his 90-day photography quest, Phillip shared his SuperBetter journey publicly, through his blog and a series of online videos.
Here are some of what he wrote: “The first thing I’ve noticed with this quest is that I’m now ending every day on a positive note. I’ve been taking all my self-portraits during magic hour in the evening, which is the final hour before sunset when the outdoor light is the best.
“So I’ve actually gone outside for every sunset, every day,” he notes. “And I’ve been exploring the city, to find a new interesting location each day, different spaces I’ve never noticed before.
“I take my shots until I find one I’m satisfied with, and then I go back home, and before midnight, I upload it online. I have that sense of accomplishment in taking a picture, feeling satisfied with it, uploading it—and boom, I did something today.
“And that makes me happy, to have a sense of purpose and accomplishment every day. I don’t think long term—I don’t have illusions of retiring in the Grand Cayman Islands. Instead, I’m happy each day that I wake up in my own bed and can go through the day without feeling overly tired or sick, while making progress on my photography quests.”
As the days and weeks passed, Phillip’s quest inspired him to also take on several quests around physical resilience: “Because I’m taking a self-portrait every day, I’m paying more attention to how I look, and I’m wanting to look stronger in my photos. This inspired me to do something I haven’t done in a long time, which is working out regularly. I’m up to five to six times a week, and I feel like I’m getting in better shape.
“Staying in shape is important for cancer,” he writes, “especially with multiple myeloma, because I need to keep my bones strong. If the bones in my legs become brittle, I can have problems walking, I can break my legs very easily. I haven’t been doing as much to keep my legs strong as I should.
“The photography quest helped me kick-start this whole other area of my health and well-being.”
As he took on additional quests, his upward spiral continued. Several weeks later, he wrote: “Every day I’m feeling more confident about what I’m learning. I’m understanding photography better, self-portraiture better, my camera better—I realized I hadn’t even used all the features before. I’m developing my skills, and it feels great.”
His learnings prompted him to make a surprising decision. “As a direct result of getting superbetter, I’ve decided to restart a major photography project that I had to put aside earlier during cancer treatment.
“I didn’t think I would ever restart it, or do something this ambitious with my photography again. But having a camera in my hand has energized me to pick it back up. It’s a big project. I know that it will take me another year to complete. I’m excited that I’m now actively planning to stay creative and active past these ninety days.”
Phillip achieved his ninety-day epic win. He took a portrait every day, missing not a single one. On day ninety, he shared the following reflection: “This has been amazing. I’m not feeling depressed anymore. I have more energy. I’ve seen real improvement in my photography. I’ve used SuperBetter to understand my world better and, through that, to understand myself. It was just what I needed to kick-start my life again and to focus on remaining positive, happy, and living each day to the fullest.”
3: Phillip continued his cancer fight. “Approximately one year after reaching his goal of ninety creative self-portraits, he received a new and experimental treatment for multiple myeloma,” Jane writes.
“So far the results have been outstanding. His cancer has gone into remission for stretches as long as nine months at a time—and he’s still making time to be creative each and every day.”
In a more recent post on becoming superbetter, he reported: “I’m feeling great and enjoying life. I have blood tests every five weeks, and my cancer levels are still low. I feel so alive every day, focused on extending my ‘between chemotherapy’ periods of life for as long as possible. And I’m continuing to use photography quests as therapy for health and healing.
“Every day,” Phillip writes, “I enjoy chatting with people around Vancouver, taking photos, and just stopping and reflecting on how amazing my life is.”
You can find Phillip’s photography at www.flickr.com/photos/tyfn.
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: What small daily practice could help me reconnect with purpose, creativity, or hope right now?
Action: Create one simple daily quest that moves you toward greater health, creativity, connection, or meaning—and commit to it for the next seven days.