This One Question Made Me Addicted To Learning

On Christmas Day, a newly qualified junior doctor named Ali Abdaal found himself alone, managing an entire hospital ward. His consultant’s parting words over the phone, "Merry Christmas, Ali. Try not to kill anyone," left him with a daunting responsibility. He was in this predicament because he had forgotten to request the holidays off three weeks earlier.

The day began disastrously and only got worse from there.

As soon as Ali arrived at the hospital, he was bombarded with a deluge of patient histories, diagnostic reports, and perplexing scan requests that might as well have been ancient manuscripts. Within minutes, he was thrown into his first crisis: a middle-aged man suffering from a severe cardiac arrest. Shortly after, a nurse urgently needed his assistance with a patient requiring a manual evacuation.

By 10:30am, the ward was in utter chaos. Nurse Janice was dashing along Corridor A, her arms full of IV drips and medication charts. In Corridor B, an elderly patient was vehemently demanding his missing dentures. Meanwhile, Corridor C had been taken over by a drunk patient from the emergency department, aimlessly wandering and shouting “Olive! Olive!” (Ali never discovered who Olive was.)

Panic began to set in. He'd been an effective student who always managed tough situations by simply working harder. This method had previously helped him get into medical school, secure academic publications, and even start a business. That usual strategy was failing him.

Since beginning his medical career, Ali felt like he was drowning. He couldn’t keep up with patient care or paperwork, and his mood was deteriorating. The joy he once found in his training had been replaced by the constant fear of making fatal mistakes. His health and personal life were suffering, and working harder only seemed to make things worse.

That Christmas day, Ali knew he had to make a change. He dived into his past research on productivity which largely boiled down to, work harder and be smarter. But this time he tried to look for alternatives.

Slowly, Ali came to a revelation: everything he had believed about productivity was flawed.

He realized that hustling harder wasn’t the answer to becoming a good doctor or finding happiness. Instead, Ali discovered an alternative approach centered on well-being and sustainable productivity. An approach that emphasized fun over discipline, play over work, feeling good over sleepless nights.

He called this new method "feel-good productivity" and wrote about it in aptly named book Feel Good Productivity (2024)^[1].

You might be confused how the crisis of a medical doctor can inform our own learning endeavors.

There is a key insight Ali Abdaal made through his Christmas Day massacre. An insight that the game industry has known for decades and utilizing to get people like us as invested as we are.

We perform better when we feel good.

The reason I have played thousands of hours of Minecraft, Terraria, Civ 6 and more isn't because I want to gorge my eyes out while playing--it's because they're fun!

Of course, games don't make us feel good all the time. Some games purposefully make us feel bad through failure--like in Dark Souls--but eventually, we feel good during moments of victory and growth.

There's one main question we can ask to apply this into our self-learning quests. By asking this question yourself, I'm confident you can make your self-learning quests more addicting than any game:

"How Can I Make This Fun?"

The trick is making a learning endeavor so enjoyable you would want to do it without extrinsic reward.

This is what makes video games, TikTok, and YouTube so enjoyable. They are so fun you do it for the sake of the activity itself.

The question is, how can we make productive learning endeavors this fun?

I won't lie to you, it's not possible to make a productive learning endeavor as fun as video games. But there are a few principles we can use to make something more fun. Let's go through these principles and how I applied them to learn something as seemingly boring as notetaking.

Firstly, find a way to tie it to something you care about.

Humans don't learn through knowledge transfer but through emotional connection. So, a great way to learn more effectively is to tie new information to something you care about.

I'm interested in writing, psychology, content-creation, gamification, meta-learning, psychedelics, video games, and more. I try to tie any learning endeavor back to one of these interests.

I did this for notetaking and came up with this: Notetaking helps you think more effectively, remember more, and create novel insights which connects to meta-learning. Notetaking serves as the foundation to great writing. Plus, I can share my notes with others to help them learn more effectively--like I'm doing in this lesson!

Secondly, define a breakthrough moment.

A breakthrough moment is a major leveling-up moment in pursuing your learning endeavor. For example, attaining a new strength, skill, or achievement.

For notetaking my breakthrough moment was this: create a course for gamers on how to have fun and effectively self-learn. Wonder if I succeeded? I have been interested in the connection between these two things for years but never had the notetaking system to allow me to flesh out my ideas. By learning to take better notes, I could finally write the course I dreamed of!

Thirdly, create a challenge.

Framing learning obstacles as challenges makes us more energized to tackle them. In games, boss fights often serves as challenges which motivate us to improve our skills.

To better my notetaking, I gave myself the challenge of taking notes on at least one thing every day. There were multiple days where I almost quit at the end but the challenge of making all thirty days kept me going.

Fourthly, listen to music while doing it.

Listening to music is inherently enjoyable. By associating a difficult learning activity with music, you hack your brain into finding it fun.

I like to listen to Terraria, Witcher 3, or Civilization 6 while writing. Right now I'm listening to some of the background music from Balder's Gate 3! If you're going to do the same, I recommend music without lyrics because lyrical music can make it harder to focus.

Fifthly, do it with others.

Getting positive feedback from friends, especially early on, is a fantastic way to stay motivated. To learn note-taking, I got my best friend John Maverick to learn to take effective notes alongside me. We eventually partnered up and crystalized our learnings into Obsidian University.

You can do the same in your self-learning quest by asking someone to do the learnings alongside you. Or, if they don't want to participate, you could regulalry check in with them and tell them how your learning is going.

How Can I Make This More Fun?

Using these five principles to make something more fun, you can hack your brain to become addicted to learning.

This will help you learn more in less time, remember more effectively, all while having more fun.

If you want to get Feel Good Productivity yourself you can here.

And if you want to learn to take more effective notes like I did, you should check out my Obsidian Beginner Resource List.

Obsidian is a revolutionary linked notetaking tool that allows you to upgrade your thinking to a new level. Save yourself countless hours of time and energy looking for the best Obsidian learning resources. The resource list includes all of the resources I wish I had on Obsidian 3 years ago, including the best creators to follow, links to immerse yourself in the community, and my most popular curated content on Obsidian.