Why I (Still) Play Videogames Everyday | 37yr Old CEO

December 31, 2022December 31, 2022 by NelsonQuest

Why I (Still) Play Videogames Everyday | 37yr Old CEO

Written by NelsonQuest
December 31, 2022

If you’re someone who enjoys playing video games, but feels like they’re negatively affecting your personal development – this video will give you a reason to keep playing.

For most of my teenage years, the characters in video games were my only friends, and while that may sound like a negative thing on the surface.

I actually credit them with saving my life, and giving me me the exact models and archetypes that I’ve used to transform from a weak pathetic loser, into my own character.

From my experience, there is a ‘correct’ way to play video games that can play a massively positive role in our lives – and if you give me just a few short minutes, I’ll show you how.

Early Influences

My VERY first introduction to videogames was around 6 years old.

My friend Tas had a nintendo in his basement and it was there that I discovered Super Mario 1, 2 and 3, Contra, and my favorite by far – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Back then, EVERYONE watched the ninja turtles- and EVERYONE had a favorite turtle – which I realize now actually says a LOT about the ideals that we aspire towards when we’re young.

Raphael is brave, fearless, resourceful – the alpha.

Michelangelo is funny, social, and the center of attention – the joker.

Donatello is mathematical, philosophical, and calculating – the thinker.

And Leonardo – my favorite turtle – is loyal, brave, and responsible – the leader.

Playing the video game allowed me to step into Leo’s shoes in a way that went beyond what I was able to simulate with friends or action figures –

In the video game – I had the beautiful April O’neil and wise Master Splinter to support me as I defeated bad guy after bad guy on the long journey towards defeating the pure evil that was Shredder…

Getting a taste for these things at such a young age and in such a visceral way made the ‘dream’ of one day being able to embody the ‘ideal’ that was Leonardo… so much more real.

How Video Games Saved My Life

Fast forward a bit to when I Was 13 years old and… puberty hit me really hard.

My face was so covered in acne and I was hideous – so at school, nobody wanted to be my friend or even so much as be seen talking to me.

And then at home, I had a father who I was perpetually afraid of.

And so between school and home I found myself trapped in what seemed like a never-ending cycle of OVERWHELMING anxiety, fear, and depression – and after enduring this for a few years… I started seriously looking at how I could self-delete.

And then – like a gift from God, an older neighbor of mine who was going away to college and wanted to get rid of some stuff, gifted me a game called ‘Chrono Trigger’ for the Super Nintendo –

And with that, I was given a path to escape my pain that I never knew existed.

Thrown into a new world where I gained incredible friendships with a diverse group of individuals as we worked towards a shared goal.

And..for the first time in my life, I felt, purpose.

Early on in Chrono Trigger, the party learns that thousands of years into the future – the earth will be turned into a virtual wasteland because of the inevitable arrival of an inter-planetary parasite named Lavos.

This fate has no IMMEDIATE bearing on their lives… saving the future won’t affect them here in the present…

So why do it? Why risk their lives, incurring unbelievable physical and emotional hardships in the process – to protect a future disaster that is thousands of years away?

Here I am all of these years later, and with each passing year, I more and more understand my OWN purpose as being to fight to protect a future that I will never live to see –

Is that a coincidence? I don’t think so.

Chrono Trigger for me was the light in a life that was otherwise mostly darkness – I got each of the games 13 possible endings –

And despite all of the pain and sadness I was experiencing in my ‘real life’ – it was because of these games that I remember the years that followed as some of my happiest.

Next came Final Fantasy 7 for playstation 1 – my favorite RPG of all time.

Cloud – the game’s main character suffers from a case of mistaken identity.

He believes himself to be a legendary soldier – and then midway through the game comes to realize that the legendary soldier he BELIEVED himself to be, was actually someone else.

Someone that Cloud.. A failed soldier… looked up to and idolized.

Yet the BELIEF that he WAS this legendary soldier allowed him to accomplish incredible things… how?

In the book “psycho-cybernetics” – Maxwell Maltz states that.

“Our self-image and our habits tend to go together. Change one and you will automatically change the other.”

How often do we prioritize the creation or changing of our own habits – without consideration towards our self-image?

In my experience – to develop the habit of meditation – I had to actually SEE myself as someone who meditates – instead of seeing myself as ‘someone TRYING to meditate’

Later on in Final Fantasy 7 – in what is considered to be one of the most famous events in all of gaming history – one of the main characters – Aeris – with whom I was deeply in love with.

Is murdered… permanently.

I remember crying for about an hour… and getting progressively angrier as it became clear that Aeris wasn’t coming back.

Cloud’s journey to save the world – and by extension MY journey to save the world – was now a matter of revenge.

Is revenge a ‘bad’ motivation, if the outcome is good?

These are DEEPLY profound questions to consider – that tell us a lot about who we are and what we’re motivated by.

And by the way, no – I don’t think that revenge is necessarily a bad motivation.

I played all of these games on a 10”, portable TV that my parents let me have when they no longer needed it.

It was small, but it weight about 30 pounds and I had to smack it every few minutes to keep it working.

Every weekend when we went to go visit my grandparents or some other family member – i’d bring it with me along with my gaming system, and then I’d just find a corner somewhere with a power outlet, away from everyone else, and I’d sit there and play on the ground…

My parents saw this as anti-social behavior… which admittedly… it was.. but why is anti-social behavior always considered negative?

Anyway, with each successive game – I came to understand more and more what it is to actually BE a hero –

The hero never starts out strong – they start out weak – foolish… lacking confidence in their abilities –

WEAKNESS as it turns out isn’t a ‘bad’ thing… it’s merely a starting point.

Initially, when faced with adversity, the hero fails… time and time again – but they always manage to pick themselves up again, and through persistence, hard work, discipline – and motivated by a purpose FAR GREATER than themselves.

They’re able to transcend the weak pathetic thing that they are, to become that ‘thing’ that they might become… legendary.

Get the Dark Mode guide

The Dark Mode Guide

is a simple system designed to help you achieve a specific goal by facilitating the development of relevant habits and creating the perfect environment to make failure impossible.

This guide is about actually walking the path. It creates a perfect environment devoid of excuses and forces you to face who you are and what you need to do in a way that’s sustainable.

This is the same exact path that I’ve followed to transcend the weak, foolish, depressed little boy that I once was, into the man I am today.

It’s one thing to hear these things as I’m describing them to you – it’s something else entirely to EXPERIENCE these things, and video games have the potential to simulate this experience in ways that no other medium can.

Shortly after Final Fantasy 7 came Xenogears – a game that drew huge inspiration from famous psycho-analysts like Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose beliefs now form the foundation of my own personal philosophy.

The game’s main character, Fei Fong-Wong, has memories from his childhood which he has repressed because of the pain they represent.

This repressed pain ends up manifesting into a ‘separate’ personality with Fei – named ‘Id’ – one of the game’s strongest enemies!
The idea for this was all rooted in what Carl Jung termed “the Shadow self”.

According to Jung, the ‘Shadow’ – also known as the ‘id’ – is the ‘dark side’ of our personality – it is everything that we repress or deny about ourselves… our collective unconscious.

Jung believed that through a process he called ‘shadow integration’ – that we could bring this ‘shadow’ side of ourselves INTO our consciousness.

And in doing so, that we could discover an immense HIDDEN power within us… our TRUE potential.

In the exact same way that Fei, through Shadow Integration, was able to defeat Id, and realize that potential in himself.

At the age of 26, when I hit the lowest point in my life and was forced into my own process of shadow integration – where I brought years of repressed pain into my consciousness –

It was there that I gained the ability to channel that pain into power that I have previously thought was impossible.

Anyway guys – when I was a young kid playing these games – I obviously didn’t understand the deeper significance of these themes –

But with the passing of time – I learn more and more how much these themes rootedthemselves into every fiber of who I am and who I continue to aspire to be.

I’ve often heard that we are the average of the people we spend the most time with – well for me that was Leonardo, Chrono, Cloud, Aeris, and Fei Fong Wong –

And that’s a pretty solid fucking group if you ask me.

These days, I still play video games for almost 1 hour every day in the afternoon when I train on my bike –

Which gives me *massive* motivation to train, while also allowing me to escape into a fantasy world that still nurtures my personal development –

When I’m done playing – even though I’ve just exercised – I feel rested and ready to get back to work.

More recently I’ve really enjoyed games like Breath of the Wild, Persona 5: Royal, and FF7 Remake.

My general suggestion here is that if you’re looking to continue playing video games while maintaining high productivity – stay away from games that don’t have endings.

And stick to games that have rich stories and interesting characters.

This is a really ‘personal’ video for me – if you guys would like me to make more videos like this, please give a like and let me know in the comments below.

If you want to see what games I’m playing next you can check me out on Instagram @nelsonquest.

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Why Self Improvement = Endless Procrastination

December 21, 2022December 21, 2022 by NelsonQuest

Why Self Improvement = Endless Procrastination

Written by NelsonQuest
December 21, 2022

‘Self-improvement’ is a great idea – I mean who doesn’t want to feel better, learn new skills , advance in their careers, and look as good as god damn handsome I do –

But if we can just take a step back for a second and look with our own eyes at the territory that surrounds us, we can clearly see that this good idea is an absolutely disastrous reality.

A rapidly expanding multi-billion dollar industry marked by masses of people who are no more capable of improving themselves than they were before they devoured their first self-help book or walked bare-foot over flaming coals.

We know who these people are because they’re all over our social networks – frantically seeking external validation for the IDEA of an improved version of themselves that doesn’t really exist.

In this video I’ll show you EXACTLY why self-improvement has become such a breeding ground for self-delusion.

And more importantly, the 3 critical lessons that anyone seeking AUTHENTIC personal development need to understand.

Let’s begin.

Lesson 1: Understanding Why We Are So Dependent on The External

The most important thing to understand when it comes to WHY the overwhelming majority of people who embark down the path of self-improvement don’t actually improve can be boiled down to a single word: Assgoblins.

For some reason everyone thinks that’s two words, but I can assure you it’s one.

Just kidding. The actual word is profit.

To illustrate this point – I’m going to share with you guys a fun thought experiment that I designed a few years ago.

I’m going to describe two types of people and as I do that, I want you to consider for yourself which one you think is more “profitable”.

Person A is gullible, weak, impulsive, and unhealthy – all of which are beyond their control and can only be remedied via external means such as products, services, and medications – or whatever promises the quickest fix.

Person A believes that everything is either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and as such, they believe that struggle, discomfort… and even human emotions such as sadness, loneliness, and rage, all belong in the ‘bad’ basket – which must be avoided at all cost.

Now let’s consider Person B-

Person B is informed, strong, resourceful and healthy – all of which they are in control of.

They fix problems by addressing their underlying root causes.

They see ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as two halves of the same whole and as such, they perceive struggle, discomfort, sadness, loneliness, and rage as necessary and important parts of the human experience.

Now I know this is going to blow some of your minds, but Person A is more profitable to society. Far more profitable.

Can you imagine, just for a second, what a disaster it would be for industries around the world if everyone was like Person B?

The reason there are 99 of Person A for every 1 Person B is because we EXIST within societies, where profit is the highest goal –

And so the system is designed and continues to evolve to become more and more efficient at getting us to consume, which ironically, is the process by which WE are consumed.

This is why when it comes to our own personal development.

We don’t ponder the deep questions of life by ourselves – we ask Google.

We don’t spend time alone with ourselves (which is where actual growth happens) because we’re afraid to be alone.

We fill our every waking moment with some external form of distraction because to us, being alone carries with it the risk of possibly having to confront those thoughts and emotions that reside deep within our internal world –

The system programs us to fear our internal world because there’s no profit there.

The ‘industry’ of self-improvement only cares about profit – and for every 1 person that truly understands the complex psychological mechanisms behind authentic personal development, there are 99 good looking, charismatic, self-help zealots with relatable rags to riches stories who will happily forego the difficult required to have original thought.

And instead choose to recycle the same tried and true, superficial self-help ideologies that are guaranteed to generate garner massive praise (and subsequently revenue) from the masses of consumers desperately seeking to confirm an interpretation self-improvement that allows them to develop confidence, learn to love-themselves, and become action-takers, without doing ANY of the actual work required to earn those things.

Lesson 2: The Dark Paradox Of Self-Improvement

Ok so what exactly happens when we manifest this IDEA of self-improvement – when we try to become our best versions – WITHIN a system whose primary goal is profit?

Well for most of us, the process looks something like this:

We spend most of our lives just sort of following the ‘script’ that’s been laid out for us.

We go to school, make friends, work 9-5 jobs – and then at some point we have a ‘revelation’ that we don’t have to follow someone else’s script – that by taking control of our actions we can actually take control of our destiny.

This revelation manifests itself as a desire to improve… and that’s precisely where the problem begins.

Because at this point the overwhelming majority of us don’t do what we should do – which is to descend into silence for a while as we begin to exercise this newly discovered control by taking more and more action based on what we inherently know to be best for us.

No, instead, the second we experience that first flicker of a desire to improve, we immediately cast the nets of our consciousness out into the external world.

Because a lifetime of programming has conditioned us to ALWAYS look to the external world for the solution to everything.

Motivational social media posts designed to externally validate a version of ourselves that doesn’t actually exist.

Books and books and more books, fully believing that the next sentence we read will contain within it the sacred knowledge that will finally unlock within us the ability to suddenly take infinite, effortless action.

And so the great paradox of self-improvement is that it promotes EXTERNAL solutions to problems that can ONLY be solved internally.

To me the most glaring example of this is how so many people try to think themselves into taking action… which is completely absurd.

It is IMPOSSIBLE to think ourselves into taking action. Action by its very nature requires us to stop contemplating it in order to take it.