Work / Life Balance: Are we learning even when we play?

I came across a post on social media earlier today, about a father and son playfully debating what education value or skillset a video game would provide to the son. The son unfortunately could not answer the father, and possibly lost him a brand new video game device.

Reading this got me thinking about my own considerable experience playing video games as teenager, college kid and for a few years after as well. I wondered what I had learnt from all those hours invested and I realised that I had learnt a lot!

A simple example was a kingdom-building game from the 90s called Caesar, where the player would pretend to be a Roman administrator and run a city. The player would be responsible for growing a flat empty piece of land into a prosperous part of the Ancient Roman Empire. The objective was to achieve various metric targets (economic, social, health, safety etc) through strategic management.

This was done by managing a small opening budget, attracting a population, creating an economy to work, grow crops and trade goods locally and abroad via ports. The player needed to build various health, entertainment, academic and religious venues while keeping the population safe with the armed forces (that needed to be formed from scratch as well).

I was 19 when I first played this game; and it taught me concepts like managing a P&L, basics of trade, budgeting, financial responsibility, investing and strategic planning. 

I didn't realise it at the time. But those skills have set me apart and I've used them both in my personal and professional lives on countless occasions. There is a point I'm trying to make here, and it does NOT involve badgering anyone for money to buy games.

I believe that active learning involves two parts - the first is actually learning, and the second is realising we've learnt something. 

Thinking moment to ask ourselves: #personalhomework (You better do this!)

• How often do we learn something while we do not even realise it, like I did with Caesar?
• Is the new lesson always a good learning, or could it be a bad one that is pushing us away from our FEMPS goals?

For example, I was a project manager in a different life long ago. I had to unlearn some of those tools when I kicked off my startup because one cannot be as rigid and structured in a startup environment

• Finally, how often do we learn things in our personal lives that can be used in our professional lives?  

The third one is most important because we are trained to compartmentalise our work & family & hobbies & managing our inner self. But we fail to realise how much the skills we learn in one place can be useful in the other areas of our lives. These are called 'Transferable Skills', and they are not actively discussed. But these are truly the Future of Work, our livelihoods and future depend on them.

The example with the Caesar games that I just mentioned was one situation. Another example is when I got married, I truly learnt what 'Active Listening' meant. I have since began using that at work, and I see the impact it creates when dealing with people. On the opposite side, the communication and customer success skills I learnt at work, have done wonders for my relationships.

The idea here is to not just gain skills in one space and assume it belongs only there. We need to begin working towards thinking laterally and transferring these skills to different situations in our life to elevate our way of life.

The key to doing that is having balanced FEMPS goals in our lives.