The Book That Changed Our Lives

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Our goal is to explore the science of self-improvement and grow an audience of people that want to do the same. 

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About 7 years ago we read a book that changed our lives. 

The book is called Actionable Gamification by Yukai Chou—and while we actually don’t remember much about the rest of it—the first few pages introduced us to an idea we haven’t been able to stop thinking about since…

Today we want to share this idea with you. 

Here’s what we read all those years ago, from Yukai Chou…

“In 2003, like many students of my generation, I was a heavy gamer. In each game I played, I was very competitive and always strived to obtain the highest score. 

As part of my obsession, I would generate complex spreadsheets to help me determine the exact combos I would need for playing optimally. I would read strategy guides while in the restroom and post regularly on forums, becoming a known leader within various gaming communities.

Back then however, most of my time was heavily invested in playing Diablo II. My friends and I would spend hours every day leveling up. I had more than 5 characters above Level 90 and a couple above level 96. In the game world this means I’ve likely logged over a thousand hours on this one game. If I played for two hours every single day for two straight years, it would still just barely exceed fourteen hundred hours. Quite intense, I know.

But at one point, as most gamers do, my friends began to quit playing Diablo II and moved on to other new games. Eventually I decided to quit as well since I didn’t want to play alone. It was during this transition that a sudden sense of weariness caught me by surprise.

I felt depressingly empty. I thought to myself, “I’ve spent thousands upon thousands of hours getting more experience, leveling up, accumulating more gold, collecting better gear…and now I end up with nothing.” Was there really no meaning to all the hours I had spent playing in the past few years? What if I had spent all this time learning a new language, or playing the violin instead? I would be “high level” in real life, instead of in some digital world of escapism.

This emptiness brought a rude, but important awakening. How could I instead, play a game that everyone is playing but the outcomes would actually mean something in the real world?

I realized the game I was looking for was simply life itself.

If I were my own role-playing game character, I would never just stay in town, be idle and do nothing – the real life equivalent of watching TV, “hanging out” and leaving dreams unfulfilled. Of course not! I would go out into the wilderness, defeat monsters, gain experience, learn new skills, accumulate resources, ally myself with those who have complementary skills, learn from those who were of a higher level than I, and seek to conquer exciting quests.

The only problem is, unlike most games with a computer interface, life does not have clear objectives, visual cues to tell me what to do, or feedback mechanics to show me how I have advanced in it. I had to design my own game, along with clear goals, meaningful quests, and creative feedback systems. Effectively, I had to transform life into an entire adventure where I, the player, could advance and grow.”

(Source: this blog - https://yukaichou.com/gamification-analysis/diablo-ii-changed-life-introduction-actionable-gamification/ -  from Yu-Kai Chou.)

Let’s run a thought experiment together. 

What would it look like if you had a chart that monitored your skills, habits, and behaviours and ranked them in an easy to understand fashion? 

For instance, what is your score for reading? What about running? Sleeping? Weightlifting? Writing? Communication? Enthusiasm? 

If we could track these in a way that was fun and accurate—surely it would actually be quite satisfying to see where we are and where we're going? 

(It would also be helpful to know with exact clarity how to play to our strengths and avoid our weaknesses.)

The idea of gamification is to leverage what makes games compelling—competition, achievement, progress tracking—and attach those concepts to real life in order to make it easier and more fun to improve at the most important and vital skills. 

It’s also about asking ourselves a simple question: what would I have myself do, in any given moment, if I was controlling myself as a player in a video game (and therefore wouldn’t have to actually experience the difficulty of the task)? 

In video games it’s easy to make our characters do difficult things to level up and gain resources because we get to sit on the sofa while they do so. But as soon as it’s actually our body that has to get up and move, we start finding reasons why we shouldn’t. But asking this question helps us remove personal bias against doing difficult tasks and get perspective on our behaviours. 

I’m sure we’ll talk more about this in later emails but for now we just want to share a few easy tools you can start using today that will help you instantly gamify key aspects of your life. 

Remember, not only is gamification helpful, it’s supposed to be genuinely fun.

Whoop

Now at first—when you start measuring your sleep, resting heart rate, exertion levels and more—it can be pretty annoying. 

However, as you start to learn what you need to do to achieve better and better scores the Whoop dashboard can act very much like the dashboard you’d have in a video game. 

You can take satisfaction in green sleep scores, enjoy seeing positive trends with your resting heart rate and impress yourself by moving more and more workouts into easier exertion zones. 

Flora

This is a really fun app based on a very unique concept. For each focused work session you do—you grow a tree. 

If at any point you go on your phone to do anything else, you kill the tree, meaning you’re FORCED to focus. 

This is a fun way to gamify and track an abstract skill—focus. 

Self-tracking hours

There’s no app for this, but if you very roughly imagine every skill takes 10,000 hours to master (some people disagree with this rule but here’s why we still think it’s valid - https://whatcounts.io/p/the-truth-about-the-10-000-hour-rule-and-why-it-still-matters) and maybe one tenth of that to start being reasonably proficient then you can quite quickly plot a graph for many of life's skills. 

Simply record the hours you put in and then graph them against the 10,000 hour rule to get a feel for where you’re at. We all love seeing numbers go up so this is a fun way to quantify your practice.

These are just a few suggestions. 

Please feel free to reach out with your own ways of gamifying your life.. 

We hope you enjoyed reading. 

Jacob + Benji.

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