Lesson 5: How To Make Learning More Fun Than Minecraft
Welcome to the fifth and last lesson of Self-Learning Quest!
Continuing on your journey through the Island of Trolls you finally enter the Hellfire Mistfields. Hotspots dot the ground around you sending pillars of purple flame into the air at random intervals. The air is charged with a sense of mystique, like walking into a room of strangers with no idea how things will go. The hairs on your arms stick up even though it's not cold whatsoever.
Legend has it Demonstrates, The Wizard guards the Key Of Learning somewhere in these fields. Thankfully, he’s not that hard to find. You just follow the general sense of evil coming strongly from one direction until you stumble across him. The man looks like he bicep curls his breakfast, every day.
As he sees you he says in the most cliche evil voice you can remember hearing, “You’ll never have the Key Of Learning!” You don't think the man has ever smiled in his life. You'll have to show him how to have a little fun.
To defeat your foe, you must read through the lessons and complete the action items.
Todays Challenge: Integrate One Or Two Insights To Make Your Learning More Fun
"The right way to win is to make it fun." - Sonic, Sonic the Hedgehog
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].
From The Medical Room To Self-Learning Quest
You might be confused how the crisis of a medical doctor can inform our self-learning quests.
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?"
Let's go through a few principles for making things fun and how I applied them to learning to take better notes, possibly the most boring thing I could think of learning. If I can make this fun, you can make anything fun.
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.
Fun As A Way Of Life
We play games because they are fun in themselves.
When's the last time you had to "force yourself" to play a game. The very sentence sounds wrong.
Through applying these insights you can make your self-learning quest and even real life as a whole into the most fun game imaginable. Like Ali Abdaal you can make even serious endeavors into more playful activities.
🎯Take Action Today
- Take one or two of the things above which resonated most with you and journal or converse about how you could integrate it into your self-learning endeavor.
After an epic battle, you manage to trip Demonstrates onto his back. Sticking your sword out, you swear you will vanquish him unless he promises to never pick up magic again.
"Yes, Yes! Just don’t kill me!" He hands you his trident and hat looking a little less buff than before and runs off into the Mistfields.
Smiling you look toward the chest holding the Key Of Learning. It glows with an aura of light and seems to call you to open it. So this is what it was all for, you think. Opening the chest you find…
No key.
There’s just a note that reads: For the adventurer that finds this, I’m sure you have gone through a lot to get here. I applaud you. You might be disappointed, but there is no Key Of Learning. The key is you. The key is loving learning for the sake of learning in itself. You had the key the whole quest.
The key IS the quest.
Signed — anonymous wise person.
Smiling, you close the chest and think one thought: what am I going to learn next?
Because this course was free, there is one thing I would like to ask in return. Could you please take ~3 minutes to fill out this post reflection survey.
Doing so will help me refine and improve the course for all the future students taking it. Most people who finish the email course fill out the survey.
If you think a friend would benefit from taking this course, send them the link to the landing page and tell them why you liked it so much.
References
- Abdaal, A. (2024). Feel Good Productivity: How To Do More Of What Matters To You. Macmillan Audio. https://amzn.to/3UbeEa6 ↩︎