What to Do During Your Summer Break Instead of Gaming

With summer here it’s common for us to spend all of our time gaming. But now that we’ve quit we realize we don’t want to continue to live this way, but what do we do during the summer instead of gaming?

Press play and find out:

I totally relate to this because this is exactly what I used to do. During the school year I would go to school and then come home to game at night and on the weekends. But during the summers I would be so excited because now I had all day to game for months.

And I felt totally justified to do this because I had just finished school for the year, so all year I had been told that I had to go to school to fulfill my obligations, so now that I had done that I had full control over my summer. It was my time.

And I think this is a really important insight because this really speaks to why we justify gaming during the summer but gaming in general. And it has to do with specific mindsets we have as they relate to how we see our obligations and how we see our free time.

We all have obligations we have to take care of and these obligations we may not enjoy all that much, we never choose to go to school or choose to have to work a 9-5 job to pay our bills. These are just things we have to do.

So what happens is when we see our life from a lens of our obligations and our free time, we start to feel trapped within our obligations, so we do them from a place of resentment and that causes us to feel that much more freedom and power to do whatever the fuck we want during the free time we have.

And because of this perspective you have, you can easily justify spending your entire summer gaming.

So if you don’t want this to happen you need to have a mindset shift. And the mindset shift you need to have is the value of your time. Your time and energy are your two non-renewable resources, they are things you never get back.

You need to start seeing your life from a lens of how can you invest your time, instead of how you can kill your time.

One of the ways we justify gaming is because it’s a good way to kill our time, but this is a flawed mindset because your time is not something to be killed, it’s something to be lived.

Now when you start thinking about investing your time it’s natural to start thinking about doing something more productive. And that’s totally right, but I bet when I said “do something more productive” it may have triggered you because you associate it with negative experiences.

When I was younger and someone told me to do things that were more productive I found them to be super annoying, and there are two mains reasons why this happened:

 

• Shaming

 

 

When your parents or friends tell you to do things that are more productive, it’s coming from a place of shame and guilt. They think you’re wasting your time playing games and this just makes you feel bad about yourself. Ironically you use gaming as an escape from these kind of emotions so it only makes you want to play more.

 

• You don’t even know what you would do.

 

 

You don’t have other hobbies or passions, so even if you wanted to do something more productive, you have no idea what you would do. So you do what you know, you game, especially because it’s something you’re really good at.

So here’s the truth:

Up until now, you’ve been living a life designed for you, not something you’ve designed for yourself or had much of a choice in. So you’ve just been going through the motions, going to school, going to work and fulfilling your obligations, and then doing whatever you want during your free time: gaming.

So even though you’ve been living your life based on something someone else has designed for you, it’s only up to you to change that, and start designing your own life.

Games give you a mission and a sense of purpose, so now that you are on your summer break you need to apply the same concept, and a great way to do this is to launch a project, and design it in a way to become the type of person you want to be.

Here are a few good examples:

Say in the future you want to become your own boss, you could use your summer to start developing a skill in making money online or entrepreneurship. An example is from 30 Days to X where he learned how to sell t-shirts online.

Another example is if you wanted to learn a new instrument. You could commit to performing at an open mic night in the next 30 days. Or if you are into programming, what is something you are going to ship in the next 30 days.

The most important thing is to design this project around becoming the type of person you want to be, because it’s not just about launching a project, but about becoming the type of person capable of living the type of life you want to live.

If you want to spend your summer becoming the type of person you want to be, take the Game Quitters Challenge. This is a 30 day challenge I’ve designed intentionally with the latest scientific research to help you become the type of person you want to be, by developing skills in Courage, Discipline, Social Intelligence, Contribution and Tenacity.

It’s definitely my best work yet and I know you’ll get a ton of value from it. Take the challenge here.