When I was a kid I was obsessed with playing Super Nintendo. A particular game that sticks out in my mind was Mario. I played Mario until the little cartridge itself practically broke 
. Looking back at my Mario years I realized something quite profound. I found that I always did much better and beat the most levels in the game when I had just one 1-up(life) left. With just one life left, I had to be conscious of every move Mario made and I turned all my button mashing into an art form. It was do or die or in Mario’s case, restart to the last saved level!
Then there was the times when I had an abundance of 4 or 5 lives, I found that I was a lot more wasteful and wasn’t very productive at beating the levels. I would sometimes spend 2 lives on one level! I didn’t take my time and focus on each boss like I did when I had one life, resulting in wasted lives. So really I found that having the false sense of security of extra 1-ups made me more careless, the strategy was faulty! I felt invincible when I had so many lives. This was because I knew that if I died, I could just use one of my other 1-ups that I collected. It was like an airbag that I felt “saved me” but really in this case I wasn’t wearing my seat belt, resulting in reckless injuries of wasting 1-ups.
My point
I know this might sound off the wall but the reason why I bring this up is because I feel that a lot of people are stuck in the multiple 1-up mode in real life. They are consciously taking every moment for granted, putting things off for later because they feel they have unlimited time to do so. They are essentially thinking they have extra 1-ups but they don’t. If you think about it, depending on your beliefs, we only have the life we live right now.
Multiple one-up mentality is common but if we all embrace that this life is all we have to do something great, I think people will take more advantage of their lives. People will begin to be more focused and careful, they will create dreams, satisfying their goals. Are you living like this, kind of aimless because you feel that you have all these extra chances to do things later rather than today? If this is the case embrace now, and live as if you only have one life left!
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I loved this article, possibly because I’m a sucker for video game analogies. Either way, you make a very good point though, in that we need to make the most of our lives and not just let them pass us by.
Excellent point and a very well-applied analogy! I particularly liked that last sentence…man you really tied that article up with a nice little bow
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