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Interesting article. I liked it. I think you could take his basic premise - "staying out of a routine and breaking habits makes life feel longer and time pass

Interesting article. I liked it. I think you could take his basic premise - "staying out of a routine and breaking habits makes life feel longer and time pass slower" - and expand on it to also achieve more worthwhile pursuits. Instead of changing habits randomly, instead aim to always be at the threshold of your competence. I've spent a few years looking into this, and the best thing I found for myself is aiming to always be at a 70% success rate on my daily, weekly, and monthly goals/targets. If I'm succeeding higher than 70%, I increase the difficulty level or add new challenges. If I'm below 70%, I scale back and pare down until I get to the essentials. It's good, because I'm succeeding more often than not, but I'm always at the threshold of my competence. I think a lot of people set goals too low to get to 100%, or they get discouraged when they fall short of ambitious goals. Me, falling a bit short is part of my life, so I'm always pushing and expanding, failure is part of my life and gets easier over time, and there's always new things. I'm about to add a new set of targets - either I'm going to start doing bodyweight exercises and set some fitness goals, or I'm going to take up drawing and make more art. Or both? I'm doing this to replace "surfing the internet" with either drawing/painting or bodyweight exercises/balance/martial arts as entertainment time. Thus, life stays fresh, new, exciting. And whatever my goals are for strength training or art, I'll be falling a bit short of them - which is to be expected and embraced, always on the edge and threshold of my capability. But still, a 70% success rate, which is encouraging and I'm succeeding more often than not. Wholly recommended if you haven't tried setting goals and targets this way - if anyone has questions on setting something like this up, feel free to drop me an email, I try to make myself pretty freely available to people working on achieving things.

mortuus 16y ago
Seems like an interesting idea to push into an education system. This is concept behind harder versions of classes (e.g. honors, AP) where you can increase the difficulty level if you have shown you are capable. However, the timeline is too long. Perhaps content tracks that included advanced reading/homework assignments and exams could be used to keep students engaged. Would embedding game-like achievements (next track unlocked, toughest unlocked, stump/teach the teacher etc.) be of benefit here or just a distraction? Has anyone had experience with teachers/professors that use these concepts?
- lionhearted 16y ago
  Good comment, yes, I've looked into this too. If you look at game design, incremental variable rewards are one of the most addictive possible things. Incremental means you unlock them gradually, and variable means you don't always get the same thing. That's why getting an awesome item in Diablo II was always more addictive than getting an awesome item in Baldur's Gate. In Diablo, you never knew what you were going to get and how valuable it'd be. In Baldur's Gate, the Hammer +3 was always with this guy, the dagger +2 was always buried down in the southeast tomb, etc. Mixing variable and incremental rewards does increase addiction, which can be positive or negative. It's positive if you're harnessing it. I think this could definitely work for teaching people things - one of the ways I learned how to type really fast was playing a text-based player vs. player game way back in the day. Getting semi-unrelated rewards (like you said next track, toughest unlocked, stump the teacher, or more commonly badges, ranks, points, etc) can be a massive boon to learning something. There's also the "head fake" element of teaching while not looking like you're teaching, which I got from Randy Pausch's Last Lecture (highly, highly recommended if you haven't seen it). With all that said, I haven't found quite the right way to harness it in my own life. A lot of the tracking I do gives me a way to get numbers and feel good, but assigning myself badges or points seemed like a little more trouble than it's worth. Just setup and maintenance time of that systems seems like it wouldn't be worth it, but if someone else built a good one, I'd use it. I've played with various software that tracks goals/habits/etc, but I keep coming back to minimalist, flexible stuff, that lets me do what I want with it. But I think sooner or later someone will build something that works well for either general education or other skills training, and I'd be all over that.
  - rfugger 16y ago
    Interesting related article about goal setting also on the front page right now: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1750680 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1750680 Pretty hard to get the benefit of variable rewards when you're giving them to yourself. The only way I can see this working is if you just go out and let life give them to you.
  - mortuus 16y ago
    This video on Khan Academy's "Vision and Social Return" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRf6XiEZ_Y8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRf6XiEZ_Y8) seems to be putting some of this into practice (requirement of 10 in a row with visual feedback). Also the feedback for the teacher (in terms of attention span and student proficiency) is amazing--it has to spread.
Xurinos 16y ago
I think this is noble, achieving worthwhile pursuits. However, we cannot forget the value of play. "We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing." --George Bernard Shaw

mortuus 16y ago

Seems like an interesting idea to push into an education system. This is concept behind harder versions of classes (e.g. honors, AP) where you can increase the difficulty level if you have shown you are capable. However, the timeline is too long. Perhaps content tracks that included advanced reading/homework assignments and exams could be used to keep students engaged. Would embedding game-like achievements (next track unlocked, toughest unlocked, stump/teach the teacher etc.) be of benefit here or just a distraction? Has anyone had experience with teachers/professors that use these concepts?

lionhearted 16y ago
Good comment, yes, I've looked into this too. If you look at game design, incremental variable rewards are one of the most addictive possible things. Incremental means you unlock them gradually, and variable means you don't always get the same thing. That's why getting an awesome item in Diablo II was always more addictive than getting an awesome item in Baldur's Gate. In Diablo, you never knew what you were going to get and how valuable it'd be. In Baldur's Gate, the Hammer +3 was always with this guy, the dagger +2 was always buried down in the southeast tomb, etc. Mixing variable and incremental rewards does increase addiction, which can be positive or negative. It's positive if you're harnessing it. I think this could definitely work for teaching people things - one of the ways I learned how to type really fast was playing a text-based player vs. player game way back in the day. Getting semi-unrelated rewards (like you said next track, toughest unlocked, stump the teacher, or more commonly badges, ranks, points, etc) can be a massive boon to learning something. There's also the "head fake" element of teaching while not looking like you're teaching, which I got from Randy Pausch's Last Lecture (highly, highly recommended if you haven't seen it). With all that said, I haven't found quite the right way to harness it in my own life. A lot of the tracking I do gives me a way to get numbers and feel good, but assigning myself badges or points seemed like a little more trouble than it's worth. Just setup and maintenance time of that systems seems like it wouldn't be worth it, but if someone else built a good one, I'd use it. I've played with various software that tracks goals/habits/etc, but I keep coming back to minimalist, flexible stuff, that lets me do what I want with it. But I think sooner or later someone will build something that works well for either general education or other skills training, and I'd be all over that.
- rfugger 16y ago
  Interesting related article about goal setting also on the front page right now: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1750680 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1750680 Pretty hard to get the benefit of variable rewards when you're giving them to yourself. The only way I can see this working is if you just go out and let life give them to you.
- mortuus 16y ago
  This video on Khan Academy's "Vision and Social Return" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRf6XiEZ_Y8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRf6XiEZ_Y8) seems to be putting some of this into practice (requirement of 10 in a row with visual feedback). Also the feedback for the teacher (in terms of attention span and student proficiency) is amazing--it has to spread.

Xurinos 16y ago

I think this is noble, achieving worthwhile pursuits. However, we cannot forget the value of play. "We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing." --George Bernard Shaw