I’ve been living by two mantras recently.  Or rather, I’ve been trying to live by two mantras recently:  "there is freedom in discipline" (Anna Lavesque), and "prioritizing goals over moods" (Adam Grant). The latter: "whether you aim to get in shape, learn the guitar, or write a book, the question is not whether you feel like it today. It's who you want to become tomorrow. Enthusiasm fluctuates. Consistent action accumulates."

Freedom is discipline means that consistent action and practice- doing the work- leads to an increased ability (more freedom) to do what you want to do. Like getting my butt out of bed each morning to stretch give me the flexibility and strength to do the things I want to do well into old age.  I mean, I paddled a river with a bunch 70+ year olds the other day and I thought, “yes!  I want to be able to keep doing this, and here is my model.” But it requires discipline to keep my body going and at my age, it require daily discipline in movement and lots of practice.

Remember when we were in our twenties and we could eat and drink whatever we wanted, stay up all night and sleep until noon, and be pretty much the same functional person?  Little did we know how good we had it back then.  I mean, I’ve found that while there’s so much more joy and much less angst in middle age, the body seems to feel every tiny little thing.  Oh, you drank 1 fewer glasses of water than you needed yesterday?  How about cramps, or a headache.  Oh, you gave in to pizza and beer yesterday?  How about constipation, or a headache, or general lethargy. You get the picture.

So even though I know how I will be affected by skipping out on the “maintenance”, sometimes the warm cozy bed just disagrees with discipline.  Sometimes, the mood dominates.  Because ultimately, no one is checking.  No one is holding judgement. No one is grading my performance.  Except, perhaps, myself, and I’m just not that harsh.  I rationalize, make excuses, justify, and just don’t harass myself as much as I probably should. Sometimes, it’s easier to live in the present (it’s all the rage after all), and forget, for a moment, who we want to be tomorrow, and think only of who we are right now-cozy, warm, and in bed with a snuggly cat on our feet. I can always pick up the mantras again tomorrow.  After all, tomorrow is a new day.

Herein lies the conflict of life lessons.  If we are to live each day as if it were our last, why on earth would we spend so much time on maintenance?  For what purpose are we maintaining? But if we don’t maintain, and do, in fact, live to see tomorrow, that tomorrow could feel pretty rough if we don’t maintain.  And so we heave a big sigh, remove our feet from beneath our snuggly cat, push ourselves out of bed, and do the damn maintenance, and plan a fun thing for tomorrow that will benefit from this maintenance.

​Here's what video games have to teach our children (or us, for that matter): growth mindset, skill building, persistence, and tenacity.
Yep, I said that. Video games have useful things to teach us. In the world of video games, you must constantly learn new tricks, routes, moves, etc. in order to move past the challenge. You must build skills through experience in order to level up. In this, you are developing a growth mindset. You don't begin a game expecting to be at level 6000. You know that you must "do the work"-complete the tasks of lower levels-to get to the big stuff. And you don't do that by playing one time.
Nope. You know that you will need to return again and again to the game in order to gradually level up. You will be persistent. Why? Because leveling up is the reward. You're not paid for this (or, at least not generally), you're not given a tangible prize. But just building the skills and being better than you were the day before is its own reward.

When I was a teenager, my brother obtained a Sega game system which came with the game "Sonic the Hedgehog". I played that game tenaciously, probably daily, for more hours than anyone would think was healthy. There were only the very basic instructions (this button does this, that button does that), but as I played again and again, I learned special tricks, secret routes, how to beat this challenge and that level-the dopamine surging every time I leveled up. Until eventually, I beat the entire game.

What did I do then? Declare myself a champion and bask in my glory? Nope. I began again, moving a little quicker through the levels each time, until I could beat the entire game consistently.

I'm sure this isn't the only thing that taught me a growth mindset, but I'm not about to discount the role Sonic the Hedgehog played in my brain development. Later in life, people marveled at how I moved through the stages of language learning, from babbling incoherently like an infant to carrying on conversations, but I learned how to do this from video games. I knew I wasn't inherently good at language learning (fixed mindset), but I knew I had to be persistent-tenacious-to "level up." I knew I had to complete the slow babbling beginner levels, build skills, learn the tricks and secrets in order to communicate. It was just like Sonic the Hedgehog. I had plenty of game overs on the way to successful(ish) communication.

I wasn't any more "natural" at it than others, I just did it more. I carried a notebook and pen on a lanyard around my neck to write down new vocabulary words. Instead of hanging out with the other English speakers, I would wander around and try to talk to the locals. I would fumble, stall, misunderstand, say inappropriate things accidentally, and fall into bed exhausted at night knowing that I was a tiny bit better today than I was yesterday.

​This practice has informed my entire life.  It’s how I farm, it's how I play, it’s how I paddle, it’s how I live.  So, poo-poo video games all you want, and I’m not saying we should live our lives inside a video game (that can’t be good for our eyes right?), but I do think Sonic the Hedgehog played a positive roll in my education.