Experimentation And Gaming
Hi, it’s Bog.
I recently made a few videos exploring the Linux operating system and got a few comments about my willingness to learn new things.
This got me thinking.
I sometimes notice myself (and other people) fall into the trap of thinking:
“Ah, I don’t know how to do this; therefore, I can’t do it.”
“This is going to take too much effort.”
“It will be a waste of time anyway.”
“Other people are already better than me at this, so it’s not worth trying.”.
This is the definition of having a fixed mindset.
My goal is to get as far away from a fixed mindset as possible and get as close to a growth mindset as possible.
But it’s not so black-and-white. I realized that I have a growth mindset in some areas of life and, in others, a fixed one.
But why?
Ideally, I’d love to get rid of the fixed mindset entirely.
And so one thing that I noticed was that in areas where I have a growth mindset, I approach them like a game or an experiment.
Looking at things as an experiment or treating them as a “game” has helped me learn so many things that would otherwise seem boring and annoying.
There’s something about treating new, unknown, scary things as an experiment that takes a lot of the pressure off. You don’t have to “get it right the first time” because it’s an experiment.
It hurts our egos to fail. And learning something new is essentially failing over and over again until you learn what not to do.
So the biggest barrier to learning isn’t intellectual. It’s not how smart you are.
It’s emotional.
It’s how much you're willing to fail.
That’s the annoying part. Nobody likes feeling stupid. And that’s how trying to learn something new makes us feel.
Because learning is just a byproduct of failing. It doesn’t exist without failing.
So in order to prevent my ego from getting hurt which prevents me from learning new things, I try to treat learning something as an experiment or a game.
This alleviates all the pressure.
"It’s just an experiment, and it’s okay if it goes wrong."
“It’s just a game, and I’m having fun.”
For example, with my YouTube channel, I treat the whole thing as a game. I keep experimenting with videos and failing, which teaches me what not to do, and because of it, I slowly rank up.
So treating new, scary things as games or experiments has helped detach my ego from the learning process and thus allowed me to learn a lot more skills than I otherwise would.
Thanks for reading 👋!
❤️ My Favorite Things
⚙️ My favorite tool - Obsidian.
I started using Obsidian for taking notes quite a while ago, but the more I use it, the more I start to enjoy it.
Over the past couple of months, I’ve been creating a bunch more lessons for my YouTube course related to mindset and strategy, and for most of them, I make slides using an Obsidian plugin called Advanced Slides. I found a way to export all the slides as PNG images, which I can then easily import into my editing software. It’s so nice to be able to take notes and create slides within the same app.
I also started scripting some videos inside Obsidian and not Google Docs since Google Docs tend to become slow once there are more than 300 pages in one document. And Obsidian feels snappy and fast, which is a huge plus for me.
⌨️ Cool keyboard shortcut:
Command + Shift + S - shows and hides the sidebar in apps like Obsidian or Finder.
I try to eliminate as many distractions as possible while I do things like script out lessons for the YouTube course, so having the ability to quickly toggle the sidebar that houses a bunch of other notes in Obsidian is really nice.
✍️ Quote of the Month:
“It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent." - Charlie Munger
🍿 My New Videos
The ULTIMATE MacOS Keyboard Shortcut Tier List
🎬 My Online Courses
Manim For Beginners: How To Create Stunning Animations With Python Code
I switched to Obsidian a few months ago and I love it. I found a script where I can share articles directly from the internet to obsidian which works great for saving blog posts and the like for future reference