Living the computer game life

Have you ever sent a message to someone important only to discover to your horror that those predictive features of your smart phone replaced your words with something else and it turned out to be very embarrassing?

It has happened to me often and I would rectify the mistake and then send a text that says, “Sorry for the message, my smart phone is smarter than me…” And I would usually get a smiley as a reply.

Well, that’s the life we live today with our smart phones.

One person says: “I can still remember a time when I knew more than my phone.” Tara Price from Georgia shared her experience and she said: “I was showing my kids an old rotary phone when my nine-year-old asked, “How did you text on it?” My 15-year-old daughter roared with laughter, until a thought occurred to her: “Wait, where did you store your contacts?”

Here’s one more story. An exasperated father said: “Trying to explain to our five-year-old daughter how much computers had changed, my husband pointed to our brand-new personal computer and told her that when he was in college, a computer with the same amount of power would have been the size of a house. Wide-eyed, our daughter asked, “How big was the mouse?”

Today we have a huge workforce of people who have grown up under the computer age and technology has actually made our lives different. Most changes are for the good but unless we understand life and its philosophy, the computer age has also programmed many young minds from being so detached from the realities of life.

We now spend a great deal of time behind our screens. The smart phone we are talking about is actually a mobile computing device and our eyes are also glued to its screen. And to add to this the presence of computer games have radically altered the way young people think and as such have a great bearing on the way they act and behave.

To many young people what I am about to say possess no surprise. But what I would recommend towards the end of this material may provoke them to think harder about the realities of life and living.

First let’s take a look at the benefits of life lived under a computer programmed world especially under the heavy influence of computer games.

What are the advantages?

Computers are programmable. What you put in it you have it.

There are avatars. You can live your life pretending you are someone else. 

No matter how difficult the degree or level of your computer games, you will always win. 

If it is hard for you then you can always get a cheat sheet. 

You may die. But then you can always get reborn.

And then the young kids grow up (hopefully). And they enter the workplace and discover it to be a totally different environment. The realities of life are so different from the concepts and scripts of what they see in their computer games. And life becomes extremely difficult for the young when they bring the computer game mentality into the workplace.

And then they discover the following:

Life is not easily programmable. What you put in may not turn out with the results you expect.

You cannot create an avatar and hide behind it. You are totally exposed and that includes your strengths as well as your idiosyncrasies. Instead of your avatar you have your 201 file.

Life and work is extremely difficult. It does not guarantee that you can always win. Truth is you need to go through so many different challenges in order to set yourself to win.

There is no cheat sheet to shortcut your way to success. Your KPI and KRA have replaced the cheat sheets.

You cannot die and be reborn.

Your difficult bosses refuse to die.

And you are not allowed to kill your boss.

Life is not easy. So you need to live with that fact. Success does not come instantaneously. It requires patience. Kim Kardashian is famous for just being famous, you and I are not Kim.

We have to slug it out, hustle, do work with excellence and at the end of the day thank God for giving us the privilege to grow and enjoy the happiness of a job well done.

This is Life Reality 101 and every kind needs to know this. If not, then early in life they might come across the words they hate and fear in computer games which will be magnified a thousand folds in terms of intensity and impact and the words of course are: “Game Over.”

(Very few seats left. Rizalyn Mantaring, Hidilyn Diaz, Jodi Sta. Maria, Carlo Ople, Randell Tiongson and Francis Kong will share lessons on how to achieve peak performance. Attend this one-day seminar entitled Power Up for Peak Performance! on January 20, 2017 at Samsung Hall SM Aura Premier. For tickets reservation contact April at +63928-559-1798 or Michael +63916-187-1506)