On My Solo Leveling Journey
I love anime & manga; I have for almost my whole life and definitely since before Meg Thee Stallion made it cool to be an otaku. My mom worked for PlayStation in the heyday of Kingdom Hearts and later for ADV Films right as Neon Genesis Evangelion hit airwaves, and back when Bleach, Big O, & Inuyasha ruled on Adult Swim (if you could make it past Robot Chicken)—and yes, even before Toonami got its rebrand.
For long time, I kept this love on the DL. It wasn’t until adulthood that I began talking about anime and manga and Asian dramas more openly.
Anime, manhwa, donghua, and even K/J/C-dramas offer perspectives Western media rarely touches. They’re deeply character-driven. They’re expansive in scope. They allow absurdity, camp, rage, slow burns, redemption arcs, and straight-up chaos to exist simultaneously. And as someone who’s spent the last few years refining my systems for personal growth, wellness, and self-mastery — anime gave me something traditional productivity tools couldn’t:
A metaphor that actually makes me want to level up.
Villainess Solo Leveling
The Project
This isn’t just a cute title (although it’s still cute, no? 😉) — it’s a full framework I designed in Notion (naturally) to gamify my personal development. And before you say anything, yes, I did try some of the apps already out there like Habitica and whatever but they were too general for my taste. So, I built this one! Inspired by systems like Solo Leveling, My Next Life as a Villainess, Re:Zero, and so many more, this dashboard transforms my daily actions into XP.
Instead of just checking off to-dos, I’m literally leveling up my core attributes:
🧠 Intelligence
❤️ Emotional Intelligence
🛡️ Defense (aka resilience)
🍄 Mobility (physical ability & agility)
⭐ Creativity
🫀 Stamina
🍀 Luck
📈 Wealth
Screenshot of my Notion dashboard.
Each week, I log XP-worthy actions — things like solving a problem, completing a GRE quiz, sending an invoice, or publishing a blog post (like this one). It’s part journaling ritual, part RPG progression. There are level-up thresholds, boss projects, bonus XP for high-difficulty tasks, and even “titles” for when I reach milestones.
Because real growth isn’t linear. It’s not a checklist. It’s a questline.
Why Gamify Growth?
XP Actions Reference Database
Because life already feels like a game sometimes — but without rules you set for yourself, you’re just playing to someone else’s map.
The Villainess Solo Leveling framework lets me:
Visualize where I’m actually progressing
Notice which skills I’m neglecting
Feel rewarded for the work no one else sees
Make long-term goals feel less abstract
And yes, maybe I just wanted an excuse to build a productivity system that makes me feel like I’m living inside a shoujo-meets-slice-of-life-meets-epic-fantasy anime. Judge if you want, I really don’t care.
The Villainess Part
Why Villainess?
Because I’m not trying to be the plucky protagonist of someone else’s redemption arc, ykwim?
The Villainess archetype — in manhwa especially — is about reclaiming power, writing your own plotline, and doing it with flair. She’s often punished for being too ambitious, too clever, too powerful. And yet, she wins. She knows the game & plays it her way.
That’s what this system represents for me. Not passive improvement, but strategic evolution. Not perfectionism, but presence. Not “hustle culture,” but self-directed transformation.
