I just finished my 3rd cohort as editor in Write Of Passage. I gave feedback on 227 essays in 5 weeks. People are amazed but it's not complicated.

There are two reasons.

The first is, I’m naturally curious, and Write Of Passage students have fascinating ideas. I treat every essay as someone telling me a story and I get to ask for clarification and follow-ups. Anytime I'm confused or curious I point it out and ask questions.

And then I tell people how to explain it to me in a way that I'll understand.

That being said, while I enjoy giving feedback, 227 essays are a lot. It's a large cohort, and Write of Passage guaranteed feedback by an editor this cohort. But the second reason I did that many was because we had a spreadsheet tracking the essays. Gamification and extrinsic motivation! Scoreboards can be like Pavlov’s bell. I open up the Airtable and I automatically start salivating.

While I don't think my quality went down because of the volume, I am a little disappointed with how susceptible I am to gamification.

What do you think of gamification? Good? Bad? Just a tool to get the job done? I'm reminded of this essay by Derek Sivers. "Choose whatever belief makes you take the action you want."

Discoveries:

I'm going to share one last set of essays from Write of Passage:

1️⃣

The quote, "A Single Death Is a Tragedy; A Million Deaths Is a Statistic" is attributed to Stalin. Camilo Moreno-Salamanca seeks to add humanity back to the numbers we hear every day.

🔗 The Yous that Died

2️⃣

We all try to shortcut life by using lessons from other people's lives. Silvio Castelletti points out the shortcomings of this approach:

People seem to be overly fixated with advice-seeking practices -- they send cold emails to billionaires, spend tremendous amounts of time trying to deconstruct their lives and habits, and would give a kidney to get the chance to talk to them even for a few minutes.

🔗 Go out and err

3️⃣

I love standup and I'm always excited to hear about new comedians - that is, comedians I haven't heard of. So I was really happy to hear of Fahim Anwar from Rachael Tiss. I've already listened to one of her recommendations, and now my playlist is full of his jokes.

🔗 The Engineer of Jokes

Quote of the week:

Questions, suggestions, complaints?  Email me at chris@iswong.com.  Feedback welcome.

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Leaving you in peace,

Chris