Rory Parle's Reviews > Level Up Your Life: How to Unlock Adventure and Happiness by Becoming the Hero of Your Own Story

I initially gave this book a lower rating out of embarrassment that my (virtual) shelves are becoming ever more stuffed with self help books. But there's no sense in bashing it for being what it sets out to be.

Nominally the book deals with making improvements in any area of your life, but as it grew out of the author's website Nerd Fitness it retains a strong bias towards health and fitness. There's a decent chunk of world travel and a smattering of starting your own business too, reflecting Kamb's own journey through life.

These are of course all well represented sub-genres of self help, but this book's new twist is to approach life like a videogame, considering the challenges you want to tackle in life as 'quests' made up of smaller 'missions'. The goal is to repurpose the techniques that make games addictive and apply them to achieving the things you really care about.

In that sense it's much in the same vein as Jane McGonigal's Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World , but with the advantages (if you consider them to be so) of being much shorter and more directly instructional.

It's too early to say whether I'll see any long-term benefits from adopting the strategies from this book, but I've started giving it a try and so far it has at least added a little bit of extra fun to my workouts.