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Every Project Can Be A Playground
In his book The Game Changer, Dr Jason Fox says that a game is anything that has goals, rules, and feedback. A good game balances all three of these against one another, to make an experience that can be so good it can be addicting. Work is often the opposite. Unclear goals, arbitrary rules, and confusing feedback (if there is any feedback, at all) can lead us to resent our work, procrastinate doing it, and only contribute the minimal effort required to stay on [...]
From Boring to Scoring: Turn Chores Into Games
The house was a wreck. That’s what happens when six young boys spend Saturday morning running amok. My two brothers and I were often left with another family when we were young. This other family had three boys the same age, making us six boys under the age of ten. Containing this hurricane of activity into one house meant the tidiness level dropped quickly (and significantly). To clean up the mess, the household matriarch invited us to use what was, [...]
Polymath problems
I’m a polymath, so you may have been surprised by the variety of topics you see me write about. Depending on what phase of my interests I was in when you started following me, you may be a little confused about who I am and what I do. To give you some context, I’ll give you the bullet-point rundown: I’m an American digital nomad living in New Zealand I moved with my young family 11 times in 11 years I blog a [...]
The 2 Types of Attention: Deep and Shallow
When the psychoanalyst Carl Jung was challenging the philosophy of Sigmund Freud, he needed complete focus. Freud had become the leading voice in psychiatry, and Jung supported him early in his career, because of their shared interest in the subconscious mind. But as Jung grew older, and saw more patients in his Zurich office, he found flaws with Freud’s approach that did not align with what he saw in his patients. When Jung publicly challenged the Oedipus complex, a cornerstone [...]
Play is a practice, and practice is how you improve what you play
When I spent a year attending the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre, we spent a lot of time working hard on our ability to play. Class of 2001 The program was intense. Dozens of students from all around the world came together in a small town in Northern California, high up in the Redwood forest, and met in a renovated Odd Fellow’s Hall. (It’s sort of like a Masonic Hall, but for weirdos.) We studied and practiced and [...]
What is Web3? Here is a simple explanation.
I spend a lot of my time beyond the cutting edge. If the Early Adopters in the 'Diffusion of Innovation' theory of Everett Rogers are the ones on the Cutting Edge, the Innovators are on the Bleeding Edge. 'Diffusion of Innovation' image by Wikipedia Web3 is on the bleeding edge right now. It's messy. It's new. It's the butt of a lot of jokes, because it's built on the blockchain, and cryptocurrency has a bad reputation at [...]