Why do we spend hundreds of hours grinding inside video games, yet struggle to apply the same effort to our real lives? What do games offer that real-life achievement so often fails to provide? And more importantly: what would it take to bring that same sense of motivation, clarity, and momentum into everyday life?
Those questions led me to a simple realization: real life is poorly designed as a game.
What games get right
After analyzing several games through this lens, three elements kept showing up:
- A clear goal
- A clear course of action
- An expected, immediate reward
Games rarely ask you to guess what to do next. They don’t punish you with vague feedback. Progress is visible, quantified, and emotionally reinforced.
Real life often withholds feedback until it’s too late — or never provides it at all. So the obvious next step was: what if I built a system that treated life more like a game?
Effort over outcome
The goal wasn’t to “win” at life in some abstract, externally defined way. Outcomes are noisy and partially uncontrollable. Games can control outcomes; real life cannot.
But there is one thing I can control: effort. So the core rule became simple:
Maximize effort toward self-defined dimensions of a good life.
Since this is an ongoing game with no final boss, consistency had to matter more than isolated bursts. To reflect that, the system tracks execution quality across multiple rolling windows: the past 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, and 365 days.
Short-term effort feels good. Long-term consistency wins.
Defining the playing field
Next came the question: what does “winning” actually mean in practice?
I defined broad life categories using Neil Strauss’ L.A.S. V.E.G.A.S. framework. For example, L (Looks) breaks down into: Health, Fitness, Grooming, and Fashion.
Each category contains concrete, recurring actions — things like: Sleep, Hydrate, Exercise, Cut Hair, and Study Current Fashion.
Each action has a desired frequency and a default score (applied when it is ignored). When I do perform an action, I manually enter an execution score from -2 to +2.
Sleep, for instance, runs on a 24-hour cycle and carries a default score of -2, because poor sleep hygiene actively degrades performance across everything else. Studying fashion is a monthly action with a default score of 0, because inconsistency there doesn’t meaningfully drag down the rest of my performance.
That distinction turned out to be crucial: not all neglect is equally costly.
From theory to system
Beyond looks and health, the system expanded to include actions like:
- identifying new skills worth acquiring
- deliberately leveling up those skills
- improving one aspect of personal presentation
- working on business fundamentals
- planning discomfort (and actually executing it)
- revisiting goals and setting new ones
I ended up with 43 well-defined, recurring actions.
Executing an action well immediately boosts the score. The feedback is instant, visible, and emotionally satisfying. Ignore enough actions, and the score drifts from green to yellow… and eventually red.
Crucially, doing everything in one day feels good, but barely moves the yearly score. There are no shortcuts. Consistency is enforced by design.
Removing guesswork: the next-best-action list
One feature ended up mattering more than I expected: reducing the decision fatigue. Knowing what to do is often the real bottleneck. Even with a score, you can still stare at a list of actions and think, “Okay… but what should I do right now?”
The app solves this by computing top ROI actions — a dynamic list of what is most worth doing next. It ranks actions based on their impact and on how overdue they are, instead of treating all missed actions as equally urgent.
This prevents obvious distortions. Not recording a workout on the first day it becomes overdue should not overtake sleep as a priority. Some actions are foundational and time-sensitive; others are valuable but can slip a bit without compounding damage.
The result is a “next best action” feed: fewer guesses, fewer excuses, more momentum.
Results after two years
Nearly two years later, the system looks like this:
- Last 24 Hours: 73.37%
- Last 7 Days: 50.80%
- Last 30 Days: 22.20%
- Last 365 Days: -7.51%
The numbers aren’t meant to impress. They’re meant to be honest.
I’ve used the system continuously. Along the way, some actions and weights needed adjustment to better reflect their real-world impact. But the core idea held up. The system didn’t collapse under long-term use. It adapted.
That’s the real test.
From personal tool to public engine
At this point, the experiment had proven itself. What started as a personal framework for disciplined execution had become something more robust: a working willpower engine.
So I decided to share it.
I called it Forjd.me, because you’re not tracking habits, chasing streaks, or farming dopamine. You’re forging a new self, one executed action at a time.