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:

Successful people are influenced by the desire for pleasing results. Failures are influenced by the desire for pleasing methods and are included to be satisﬁed with such results as can be obtained by doing things they like to do.

Why are successful people able to do things they don’t like to do while failures are not?

Because successful people have a purpose strong enough to make them form the habit of doing things they don’t like to do in order to accomplish the purpose they want to accomplish.

- Albert Gray

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

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please share it with a friend or two. And feel free to send anything you find interesting to me!

Leaving you in peace,

Chris

Unknown Unknowns

🤯Unknown Unknowns #75 - Gamification