Yo yo yo. Welcome back to the Further your Lifestyle podcast conversations on lifestyle passions and hustles. My name's Chris, I am your host and I'm super excited to be back here having the conversation with you, episode 160 today, and over the last few weeks I've had a I've probably bought it into the conversation two or three times talking about how I've been really leveraging the elements of video games or RPGs in this case, runescape to really help me level up in life, or bringing together the two parallels and helping remind me of how I can leverage that same mentality to help myself grow. Now, following on from that, I've got a similar topic and the topic is, let's just call it Life is an RPG and how do we master our main quest and how do we manage the side quests. And really this whole topic is if you've played any massively multiplayer online RPGs or if you've played any role-playing games. A good example of this would be the Elder Scrolls, like Oblivion or Skyrim, or even some of the newer ones that they've got out as well, or some of the other alternatives like Fallout and things like that or Starfield. You have a main storyline, right, and our storyline is what we're trying to achieve, our main ambition in life. But as we go through this journey, like you do in these video games, these side quests pop up. You can go over here and help that person. You can go explore that cave. You can go do a quest to find someone's lost diamond ring, or someone needs someone handled over that's been killing their sheep or cattle, or all these random and weird and wonderful stories. They're great. And then you go do the side quest and then all of a sudden you're doing the side quest and you see something else and you go over there and then all of a sudden you're on this mini adventure completely the opposite direction of where you wanted to go in the first place.

Now there's two parts of this. There's the element of well, maybe that's where you wanted to go in the first place. And secondly, it's like are we then losing focus on where we really should be going? And we're using that as an excuse to actually get what we intended to do, because maybe we're too scared to do it, or maybe we're procrastinating because we have imposter syndrome, or maybe because people told us we weren't good enough to do it. So we go do these other things to avoid doing the big thing that we really should be doing. So that's kind of like the analogy or the talk that I want to talk about today. I've pulled together a whole bunch of different points that we can get into this. So if this sounds like something that interests you, let's dive in.

So I guess if you're new to this whole world of questing or you know video games or anything like this, I guess the first thing I'll address is understanding your main quest. So in a video game, if we define a main quest as essentially it is your ultimate overarching goal, it is the one thing that you're meant to do. It is your linear path that is intended to complete the game. If I told you, yeah, I finished the game, it means I followed the main quest and I completed all the steps to finish the main quest and defeated the final boss or whatever the final achievement may be. That is our main quest, and in real life it's the same thing.

What is your life goal? What are you building towards? Is it a successful business? Is it becoming a renowned artist? Or maybe it's just achieving financial independence? Maybe that's what your goal is and that's fine. There's no wrong or right answer here, but that's essentially what our main quest is Now. With that comes relentlessness and focus, and what I mean by this is just like when we go on a quest on an RPG we're going out to achieve a major goal, and this requires major persistence, it requires a grind, it requires you to be relentless in pushing forward. And there's a really big, important part of this Sorry, this is such a big, important part of us getting to where we want to go, because if you want to achieve your level of greatness, the only way to achieve that is you have to create that greatness.

Now. That might mean building yourself up. It might mean getting new skills. It might mean going on a journey to find yourself. It might mean having to conquer a boss, and in this case, the. It might mean going on a journey to find yourself. It might mean having to conquer a boss, and in this case, the boss might mean not your boss at work. This might mean something that you need to overcome, a challenge. It might be getting over that mountain, climbing that hill, getting at sales pitch, winning a new lead. It could be finally selling your first piece of art. It might be finishing your first marathon. Whatever it is, there's a hurdle, and to get over that hurdle then gives us enough momentum to realize this is possible, but then, once you finish that hurdle, there's a hundred more right, that's the reality of it. So you need to be understanding that there will be this need for focus and a relentlessness as well. The other thing we need to really understand is the price of pursuit, and what I mean about this is, in every journey and every path and every direction that we go, there is a sacrifice of, I guess, high price, and what I mean by that is think of it from this way.

You see people that are out there like Elon Musk, and you know he is an outlier. He has achieved greatness, greatness, amount of wealth and he's everywhere and doing all the big ticket stuff. What I mean? He's got like a Starship business. He's got the boring company. He's got a, you know, a human implanting chip that enables people to be able to move things with their eyes and their mind. Like it's bizarre, bizarre, but he's doing all this stuff. That's next level. But he's also got a lot of money.

I'm not here to talk about the money, that's irrelevant, but he's crazy driven to be able to achieve what he wants to achieve. Like Tesla, he's been able to create, redefine the idea of the normal car with Tesla, and obviously there's pros and cons of all this and controversies of is this actually really the future of cars, and all that. But we're not here to talk about that. What I'm trying to say is, like with that, he's crazy driven to achieve what he wants to achieve, but there comes with a cost. You know, maybe at the expense of, maybe he doesn't have the best relationships with his family, maybe he's gone through multiple divorces, maybe he hasn't been able to do what an ordinary person would do, like an average Joe, and all of this is okay, right? We're not here to say that we're all going to be Elon Musk. The reality is we won't. But in your pursuit for whatever it is that you're chasing, there are a level of sacrifices and when we're crazy driven towards things I can speak on this personally Now that I've stepped away from the nine to five.

I'm not working for someone else. You drive for that because you know if you don't, you're going to get in trouble. You could get fired and then you won't get paid. The difference now is now everything that I do. I reap the rewards, whether it's satisfaction of just seeing the growth, whether it is actually money at the end of the day, whether it's actually being able to see something that I've put my hands to turn into something else. It's also the gratification of knowing that I now have a new skillset, that I'm able to do this that took me a year to be able to achieve, and now I can do it instantly, but at that cost. When I'm not doing anything else, like I am always on, I am always thinking about it because to me, it's not about its work, it's about this is my thing that I'm trying to create, whether it's a legacy, whether it's what I own, whether it's something that I want it to be bigger than beyond myself, and so I am driven towards creating that and making that happen. But also I have to be mindful of at what expense mentally, physically, emotionally, with my relationships and all those kinds of things. So you need to take that into account as well.

Now let's get into some of the distraction sides of things, and that is part two, which is the problem with too many side quests. The things with quests is the quests are there to help you build character. I help you to maybe get some extra skill points, maybe get some extra GP gold pieces or to get some special armor or whatever. However, when we play this back to the reality of life and how, if we all start to all of a sudden start to chase too many dreams, we start to dilute the efforts and resources in real life, meaning what we could have done. It becomes an opportunity cost because you could have chosen to go this way, spend your energy this way and you would have got this result. But because you've spread it out four different places, you're potentially only getting a quarter of what you could have got, but across four different things.

Now, I know this really firsthand because my areas of focus is my business, is this podcast, is my running and is my YouTube channel, and everything else outside of that kind of then doesn't get as much attention. You know, like in terms of my side hobbies and passions and things, I've now started to dabble a bit more into the Pokemon space. Back in the day, I was doing a lot of veggie guarding and I was even documenting that, but it fell off because I wasn't able to prioritize the time. It became a side quest. So we need to be mindful of how we choose our side quests.

For me, my main quest is building up my business to be a large enterprise which will have multiple people working for it and la-di-da-di-da. The reality is the way I've built my I guess my side quests or my hobbies or the things that connect together, is that they do they connect together. So, even though my business is the main part of it, my YouTube is about my business. I do my running to support me, you know, physically and mentally, to enable me to be able to get the best out of my business. But I also document on the YouTube as well, and then the podcast is bringing together all of my elements of life in me trying to achieve my business and me trying to help others strive to want to go forwards and build the life that they want, to further their lifestyle. So they all kind of work together, hand in hand. Everything that I'm doing is to inspire others to aspire further. That's my ultimate goal, but at the same time, it's to bring me fulfillment and to help me achieve the level of greatness that I want to find as well.

So you do need to be mindful of when choosing your side quests what are the ones? Are they going to enhance your main quest or are they things that are going to take a distraction or a turn which are going to not really support you in your greater cause or in your greater calling. And that's where we need to be careful and that's why prioritization and focus comes into this right. How do we prioritize our time to manage it effectively, avoiding the trap of biting off more than we can chew? And there's been a lot of things that I've put on hold because, you know, I would love to be able to play video games and stream them with my audience and just hang out, but for me it's not right now.

I have plans to build out a Pokemon business. I mean, I'm dabbling in building out my Pokemon fund at the moment, but I have other goals in that area. But I know at this point in time I don't have the flexibility, the time, the space and the ability to be able to execute that and deliver. Even I started up a membership accountability group, which was great, but I wasn't able to deliver on it because I wasn't able to give the time that I had intended, so I stopped doing it. I wanted to build out coaching and I still want to do all these things, but I have to shelve them and reprioritize based on the timing, the season and the current nows of what is needed to be able to achieve to me, to get to the next spot, to be able to enable the next thing which, in all in time, will enable me to then be able to reprioritize or be able to focus on some of these things.

Part three of this conversation is around strategies of how do we successfully complete a quest right, and I think it's good to have smaller quests like sub quests within a main storyline, so like if I'm building a business having one, a three, a five and a 10 year plan. It doesn't have to be that, but you get my point. It might be monthly, quarterly, yearly or every couple of years. So, having those goals around the ambitions that you wish to achieve, and the idea is we want to aim high but we want to be realistic. So for me, like you know, once I know that I can do $100,000 in revenue, well, the goal is to obviously continue to do $100,000 in revenue, but also aim for that next level, because if I can get to somewhere between the $100,000 and that next level let's say $160,000, well then I know I'm growing, I've grown. But it's also nice to be able to have stretch goals, because I think sometimes we sell ourselves short because if we box ourselves in this, say, okay, I want to do 150,000, that's it, you're only going to work towards 150,000. So aim a little bit higher. If you aim for 200 and you get less than it, you get 180, but you originally aimed for 150, you're winning. So we need to be mindful of how we set the goals, and there is a level of this also around. You want to make it easy, but enough to be growing you as well.

So for me, one of the secrets in enabling me to be very consistent this year is last year I was meant to be doing 20 to 25 listings per day. I struggled to do it because I was doing it myself. Now I'm paying someone to draft them, to have them ready to go, and it forces me, forces my hand, to go in there to make sure they're right and to make sure they're live. Because I'm paying someone, I'm putting skin in the game and it's starting to well, it already is. It's paying me dividends because the work that they do is very rewarding. I'm able to show up and actually be consistent in making sure it happens because I've got skin in the game, and if I don't, I'm going to lose money. So that's one way of being able to do it is really make it accountable. Make yourself that if you don't do it then there is going to be a bad result.

The other way we can look at this is the one thing per area rule. So if we divide our life into, I guess, different sections so whether it's work, health, hobbies, relationships, et cetera, et cetera, it's different for everyone and assign one major goal for each thing to maintain focus on. So for me, for the business, obviously, I've got the larger goal of what I'm trying to achieve per year, whether it's revenue or profits or whatever. For health, mental health as well. I've got the running element, which is physical as well, and I've got my ultra marathon this year. I want to come back and I want to do it bigger and better. And then, when we talk about hobbies, I do. I want to play some video games. I want to spend that time doing that, my downtime, building relationships, my time with Carla, my time with family.

Having goals in each of those areas is going to enable you to thrive. Great, because there's going to be times where one area is really low and you'll be higher in another. Sometimes you'll be high in all three and the fourth one is low. Sometimes you'll be low in all three and the fourth one will be high, and the beauty of that is it helps keep things stable and balanced, and that's a really good key to have. The other thing is adaption and change. I think we need to be willing to be responsive in terms of changing and how we adapt to the environment as things happen In the RPG world.

If you go to a certain environment, you need to handle certain enemies monsters, dungeons in a special way. It might be a particular set of armor, the types of spells that you're using. You need to work against their weaknesses. Just because your strength might be fire, their weakness might actually be water, so you need to use more water things to be able to bring down their defenses and actually do damage to them. It's the same thing in life. You need to find sometimes you the same thing in life you need to find sometimes you need to do things differently. We need to work with people differently. We need to apply ourselves differently in order to get the best outcome in that situation. You need to be willing to adapt.

The other thing is eliminating distractions. Just as you know, when playing a video game, we get caught over with oh, what's that cave over there? Oh, what's that treasure chest over there? Oh, we can go over here and find this. The same thing happens in life. Don't get distracted by too many shiny things in the corner of your eye or the squirrel trying to chase the nuts, because, look, it's good to do that as a break, as a way to refresh and regroup. But I think we need to make sure we are still keeping our focus on the thing that truly matters and discard the less important desires.

The final part of this conversation is embracing the journey. I think one of the key things of any journey, especially in a video game, is we get bored if we're doing things and it's not exciting and if we don't love it. So we need to find a way. How do we love this experience? How do we love this game? And that's the beauty of mastering an RPG is when you enjoy the process, you're willing to spend the additional hours getting into it, you're willing to level up your character, you're willing to spend four, five hours, up until midnight, playing these games because you know that it's going to give you the long-term success to go conquer or go compare to your peers, or, when you're playing with your mate, be able to beat him in a quest or whatever. It is right. The same thing applies in life when you love what you do and you enjoy it, you will put a lot more passion and love and focus into it. Therefore, find a way to love the process.

The other thing is, you know successful people, the people that are doing what they do. Like if we think of all the greats I'm sorry when I say all the greats, I'm generalizing, but if we look at Elon Musk, if we look at Jeff Bezos, if we look at Bill Gates all these people that were the iconics back from the 90s and the early 2000s who found that success, mark Zuckerberg all these people, look, they've been successful because, yeah, they've had a level of craziness to be able to achieve what they wanted, but they've effectively been able to stay the course to what they want to achieve and build that out as a monopoly, and they haven't been distracted, they haven't diluted from their ambitions. I think the only example that is probably different to what I've just said is Elon Musk. He does have his hand across multiple things now, taking over Twitter and with you know, now it's called X and he's got his hands in multiple things. Now taking over Twitter and now it's called X and he's got his hands in multiple things. That's dangerous, but he's crazy, right, and he's doing it with this level of. He has a bigger idea. He wants to change the world. He wants to take people to Mars right, he's doing it for the sake of humanity. That's his idea of his level of love, his level of craziness and his level of passion. So when you understand what that is for you, it will make the difference in how you go about executing.

The other thing maybe we can talk about here is failure. Don't look at failure as something meaning like it didn't work out. It's a redirection to where you want to go for a more fulfilling outcome. I think that's fair. Like if something doesn't work, you go to the next thing that does work and yeah, you failed here, but really it's just a redirect to what is working better for you. So how do we balance this? Crazy, you know, like diving in.

Some people think if you play video games you're crazy. Like go do something with your life, but the reality is, video games are great. Like I love video games, but the reality is is like they're not going to get you the things necessarily in life that's going to help you pay bills or all those different things like adult things, but they will bring you happiness. So the key thing here is how do you find something that is crazy to you know, not crazy to you, crazy to others, but that you love and have joy for and really appreciate and bring that into your life? That is going to enable you to build something that you're proud of, that is your lifestyle, that is your own. And then it's about then finding the balance between those ambitious goals and maintaining a health and healthy relationships with others in doing so. Right, because at the end of the day, when we go for our quest of main story or our main life or our life, there's going to be things that come at us from all these different places. But if you're not enjoying the process, if you don't love the process, if you're not crazy enough about it, then you will. You'll get pulled across to someone else's story, someone else's quest line, someone else's dream, and that might be what you want. You might be happy to be the guy that helps, the guy that gets this or gets that or does this or does that, that's fine too. But you need to be the one to define that right. And even if people are calling you crazy for doing this or doing that, it's your crazy and it's your love and it's your passion and it's your life. If it ticks off all the boxes for your main story of what you're trying to achieve, then that's beautiful.

I'm not a big quester in video games. I like to kind of do the main story and I might do certain quests. That is, you know, I'm forced to do because it means that I can level up to get the next thing in the main quest. But I don't usually like to go venture off and complete everything because I don't have the luxury of that time, because I'm working on my other things. But when I do have the time I want to just go through, play the game and be able to say I've finished the game. Everyone's different on how they play the game of life or how they go about their main story quest line. It's up to you to define. But you really have to be willing to make the decisions and live with those responsibilities as well. So we've spoken about a whole bunch of different strategies and ways that we can go about managing our main story or also managing the side quests that pop up along the way.

My call to action for you, if you're still here, if you're listening, is what is your main quest and how do you leverage side quests? Do you think they're good? Do you think they're bad? But I would also encourage you that you know. Talk to people about this. You know, tell people what you want to achieve. Don't have to go into detail. Seek the comfort of understanding that you know we all have a crazy idea, that we all have a crazy dream, and they're all possible to achieve, but you need to be willing to make that happen, right? So that's where I want to leave you. If you enjoyed this episode, drop a comment down below, continue the conversation.

If you're here on YouTube and if you think someone else could resonate from this, send it to them. Share it with them and tell them why they should go. Listen to it. That would mean the absolute world to me. It does help with the channel. Yeah, that's it from me. That's it from me. Really, really appreciate you being here. I'm so grateful that we've been able to hit 160 episodes as well. We'll be back here next week same time doing it all again. You have a wonderful day, cheers.