0.1% Ideas: Turning Life Into A Video Game
What idea do you think is true AND underpriced?
Here’s mine: The most productive people design life like a video game.
I had this red pill moment when I saw the following:
The laziest person I’ve ever met play a video game for 16 hours straight, 7 days per week.
My brain began to hurt: The laziest person I knew just did more focused work than I’d seen anyone ever achieve.
I’d hit level 100 of cognitive dissonance: The laziest person in my life is also the hardest working person in my life?! I needed a software update for my broken worldview:
I realised this person wasn’t lazy… Instead, their reality was just a poorly designed video game.
If the 3D video game of reality was organised in the same way as his video game: He’d be one of the most effective human beings on the planet.
A great example of a video game designer for his life: The Sci-Fi Author Brandon Sanderson. He’s the most prolific and successful author of his generation.
“Being successful in life is about being able to hack your brain. And being an adult is learning how to make yourself do the things you wanted to have done”. - Sanderson
Sanderson managed to hack his brain by having a live tracking word count that looks like a progress bar on his website.
He’s turned writing books into a video game — and is the most prolific and successful author of his generation.
My conclusion from thinking deeply about this topic:
Video game designers know more about human psychology than 99% of psychologists… Because their domain is falsifiable.
Video game designers are to psychology what the UFC is to martial arts. It’s a specific domain of psychology that works because it has to work.
If the video game fails, the company goes bankrupt. But if a psychologist fails, they can always blame your childhood.
The beautiful thing about video game design is that you can see the tools if you look hard enough.
Here’s some ideas from the video game designers took kit:
TOOL KIT 1 - LEVELS
If you had to design a terrible video game — It would be a video game that puts people on level 100, with no mini wins along the way.
Ironically - this is how most human beings operate.
Most projects we procrastinate on are a terrible video games because it’s always on Level 100. E.g. Build a website.
There’s about 100 mini-steps before you “Build a website” — which means you’re in a constant failure mode at all times until you complete it.
Terrible video games are dopamine vacuums.
Who wants to start a video game that puts them on level 100 from the start?
That game would not sell well. Instead, break it up into micro levels: You want to stack as much dopamine along the journey.
Level 1 is the same each time: Dump down thoughts about the project. No matter how difficult the project is — you can always achieve Level 1.
Even if my goal was to invent a new law of physics, I could still achieve the level 1 of writing down my thoughts.
Boom. Now you’ve got momentum!!!!
CAN YOU FEEL THAT DOPAMINE?!?!?! LET’S GOOOOO!!!!!!!
TOOL KIT 2 - USE NUMBERS + PROGRESS BARS
Pick a number. Turn it into a progress bar. That’s exactly what Brandon Sanderson does. He reverse engineered that a book will be 100,000 words.
He then turned that into a progress bar which sits publicly on his website (check it out) that everyone can see each day.
Momentum begets more momentum.
If you have a falsifiable number to hit every single day — things can get crazy really fast.
E.g. Writing 500 words per day doesn’t sound too crazy. But if you apply that over a 1 year time frame, that’s 178,000 words.
The best selling book Atomic Habits is about 80,000 words. So you’ve shipped enough words to produce 2+ books every single year. That’s the raw word count for 100 books shipped in the next 50 years.
If you had the goal of shipping 100 books in your life, you’d probably faint. But with the goal of 500 words into your mini progress bar each day, now that’s a fun video game!
Most people wait for the dopamine of the outputs… But that’s such a painful long wait that people quit way before then. (And ask anyone who’s got the output: The dopamine fades so fast)
Instead, use numbers to get so much dopamine from the inputs… You’ll end up with greater outputs — and enjoy it more because you stacked that progress bar every single day vs waiting for some mystical moment in the future.
TOOL KIT 3 - PAIN AND PLEASURE
If you do good, you get pleasure.
If you do bad, you get pain.
Jerry Seinfeld encourages comedians to have a calendar.
Everyday they sit down and write: They get to put a huge Red Cross through that day.
As soon as you have enough red crosses, the pain of not writing that day is greater than the pain of procrastinating because you don’t want to kill the video game streak.
You also begin to crave the the pleasure of adding a red tick to the calendar like a crack cocaine addict getting their next hit.
Take this to the next level by stacking more pleasure and pain
E.g. More pleasure - Schedule the morning coffee after you achieve level 5 of your build website project — or after you’ve shipped 500 words for the day.
E.g. More pain - If you don’t wake up within 1 minute of your alarm going off, you owe a friend £20.
I did this throughout the whole of 2024 — and it immediately fixed my alarm clock snoozing habit. It’s the best potential £20 I’ve ever spent.
Remember the golden rule of designing a great video game: Lolapooloza. Always Lolapooloza.
Stack as many video game control mechanisms that you can.
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