Once in awhile, you stumble into a blog so good that you go ZOMG how come I never even heard about this before?!

SebastianMarshall.com is one such blog.

It’s written by a Sebastian Marshall (surprise surprise) and to be honest, I’m not really sure what he does for a living, except that he writes about very interesting things and seems to know ALOT about history and basically spends his life visiting other countries.

He’s not in the affiliate marketing space, he probably despises us lol, but he’s a staple in my Reeder subscription on my iPad.

Here’s one of his posts which I felt was really good and applicable to my life.

He makes a very “duh” point about the correlations that gaming has to do with life:

It takes far more time to research how to run a specialist economy in Civ IV than it does to optimize your personal finance infrastructure.

If you think about it, it’s true!

If I applied the enthusiasm I had about scouring the net about Warcraft 3 and DOTA onto my business and life, and spent the time I spent playing those games into building campaigns, I’m sure I would have hit 5 figures lol.

One last bit of his post I wanted to share here.

In a video game, you don’t personally identify with the results. If you get ambushed in Darklands and your party gets wrecked, you feel annoyed for a moment, then you reload or start a new game. But when you reach out to someone you don’t know and they don’t write back, you take it personally. At least, most people do. I think this holds people back. You can’t take things personally… there’s cause and effect. You have some influence over cause, and no direct influence over effect. You try to do interesting things in the world, and sometimes it doesn’t work. Shrug. Reload the game or start a new one. You have to look at it like this when you’re trying to meet people or do business or sell or whatever. If you invest all your identity and emotion and hopes and dreams into something, it becomes massively stressful and neurosis inducing. Try to dissolve that.

In a (well-designed) video game, you get an enjoyable learning curve. You get into the game, you start learning how to play, you gradually move up in skill and difficulty… in the best games, this is extremely fluid. You’re always challenged a little bit. Real life doesn’t work like this. You start off MASSIVELY terrible and ignorant and there’s a ton of things you need to know to even get started adequately. Once you get those down, you go through a really enjoyable growth phase… but then you plateau for a while, and need to work at it to get more gains.

So there, check out his blog, I think you’ll love it.