What exactly is Mindbloom? Is it a mind mapping application? Is it a goal-setting motivational tool? Is it a social network? Or is it a game? By the time we finish this article, let’s hope we can swap all these questions with a few exclamations.

Mindbloom is actually a bit of all these, but primarily the concept of the Mindbloom life game seems to follow the old adage that a giant oak grows from a tiny acorn. Mindbloom believes that the journey of life or at least its planning should be fun. Mindbloom says it’s a fun, simple and effective way to improve the quality of your life.

The Metaphor of a Growing Tree

Mindbloom uses the image of a tree to symbolically show that like a tree which grows from an insignificant seed, life improvement is the result of continuous actions – little by little. Each positive step nourishes our life and fills it with passion and purpose. Thus the building blocks of life growth can be set with goals and goal setting exercises.

But all this need to be an exercise in drudgery; it can be turned into fun with motivational boosters like music, images, social support, and a little bit of play. Mindbloom is designed to be an interactive platform for such life building activities. Just how it does all this is the moot reason for this article.

Grow the Life You Want With the Step By Step Animated Game

Start growing the tree of your life by choosing an area that you would like to improve. You can just as easily choose multiple areas. Each area of life (for example, health) is represented by a young sapling. Music and the super cool interface help to make this an exercise in fun.

Just like a real sapling, you have to nurture this too with the right ingredients like sunlight (music, images); and water (simple actions). The music and images are the motivational boosters for simple actions.

The basic tutorial continues and you are then introduced to the Enlightening Bug who helps you through the registration and log-in process with your first ‘tree’. Careful attention to detail and the fun element marks this life tracking app out. For example, check out the following screen which selects your gender. Isn’t that a bit different from the humdrum!

At every step, you can choose to get inspired (nourish the tree with sunlight) or take an action (remember, water). Just like a real tree, proper nourishment will require a balance of both. If you decide to start off with a bit of inspiration, you didn’t do wrong as the browser fills up with beautiful high-resolution images related to the life area you had chosen. In my case it was health, and I got this to perk me up:

You can personalize the slideshow with your own images too.

Now, Take Some Actions

The little helpful bug says that you can create your own actions or get some help from the community. Every action you complete helps to water the tree and unlock points. Earned points give you new stuff to look at and play around with. For instance, I earned a few points and unlocked for myself a package bundle of images and action packs. A typical action pack looks like this:

And this is how you can get inspired:

I hope you understood how Mindbloom balances action with inspirational tidbits to help you along the path of self-improvement. Better still you cannot just waltz through as you have to use your actions to unlock the advanced stages. The rewards of achievements could lead to more discoveries at Mindbloom. You can even buy "seeds" and unlock more inspiration packs.

The Circle of Life…and Friends

Self-improvement need not be a solitary exercise. That’s where Mindbloom’s own community and your friends who are on other social hangouts like Facebook come into the picture and form the “forest of friends” around your growing sapling.

The community serves two purposes – Firstly, it introduces social accountability and secondly, it builds your support group when you need a push up the motivational path. For example, you can post inspiring images in the gallery and invite comments over it.

The Mindbloom Life Game Is Fun

Mindbloom is sheer eye candy but beneath the beautiful design everything comes together, well – beautifully. It is a mind mapping application but a zero effort one. It is a goal setting tool but one which forces you into a fun game. And yes, it is a social community too, one which you have to ‘answer’ to for motivation.

Join in and tell us if you think that the Mindbloom life game is one of the best personal development tools out there. It certainly is the most fun. I haven't been able to cover all the interesting sidelights of the application, so do explore it and tell us yours.