17 thoughts on turning life into a fun video game:

1. To-do lists = Anxiety inducing. Video game levels = Excitement inducing

2. I'm convinced video game designers know more about human psychology than 99% of psychologists.

3. The "laziest people" you know can focus on a video game for 12 hours straight.

Are they lazy?

Or is reality just a badly designed video game?

4. How to turn life into a fun video game: Measure things from where you started.

5. How to turn life into a terrible video game: Measure things against an ever-changing ideal.

6. When Elon Musk wanted to speed up the production line at Tesla, he had live monitors with up to the minute output of cars and components.

7. If you ask business owners, what's a more important video game to them: Their business or their health? The majority will say their health.

If you ask the same people for their business metrics: Revenue, Profit, Staff -- they can tell you immediately.

If you ask them for their health metrics: Testosterone, Vitamin D, Resting heart rate -- most look at you with a blank expression.

Do they care more about their health? (Via Gary Brecka)

8. The single easiest way to lose weight: Measure yourself everyday.

9. The simulation hypothesis is just a boring low agency version of the video game hypothesis.

10. "It doesn't take much to convince us that we are smart and healthy, it takes a lot of data and facts to convince us of the opposite" - Dan Gilbert

11. How to turn failure into a fun video game: Price in failure:

“I’m going to bomb 500 times before I become a good stand up comedian”

“I’m going to fall off the surfboard 100 times before I become competent”

“I’m going to stall the car 50 times before I can drive”

Failure becomes a video game level.

12. Think deeply about how often you should check metrics.

Rule of thumb: If checking regularly results in good decision making, do it more often.

If checking regularly causes negative placebos or bad decision making, check less often.

The optimal time to check your sleep metrics is probably not every morning -- it's probably once per week when you're detached.

The optimal time to check your investments is definitely not everyday -- it's probably once per year.

13. According to Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister of the UK has no metrics or dashboards guiding long-term decision making. They check the newspapers each day -- and randomly react to things.

Why is the homeless rate, obesity levels and GDP per citizen not a metric the Prime Minister or President reports in on every month?

14. Have a pairing metric against every metric that you track. If you only track reduced fraud rate without tracking customer happiness, you'll end up treating every customer like a fraud (Via Keith Rabois)

15. Turning qualitative feedback into a number is an incredible tool.

If someone says they are a 6/10, ask why it's not a 4/10?

And then ask, what's the gap between now and an 8/10?

This helps to turn fluff into something more concrete.

16. Bryan Johnson says one of his biggest regrets was not being more numerically focused earlier on in life.

On his decade he spent depressed: "If storytelling wasn't my primary skill set for problem-solving, what would've happened in my life?"

17. You can probably get in the top 1% by using basic arithmetic and tracking the most important metrics.

Most people are too focused on stories (Certainly one of my biggest regrets)