Experience points: through cultivation you can get 100x the value from the same activity!

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

Reading time: 6 mins

Summary: for most tasks it’s possible to take something from menial to meaningful. Doing so isn’t just rewarding, it’s also a great strategy to get good quality!  

“The more you know about something the more interesting it is.”

• EG 1: Sport. If you know nothing about a sport it’s not very interesting. If you have master level knowledge about the sport it’s likely very very interesting! Watching the same sports game could have 100x the ‘experience points’. 

• EG 2: A TV show. I could watch a TV show and have a bit of escapism, relaxing. Or I could watch a TV show and appreciate cinematography + costumes + character development + moral conundrum + character dialog etc. 

For the purposes of this blog let’s just say there are two types of tasks:

• Tasks with a ceiling: factory worker making standardised widgets, hit play on a TV remove, open a door

• Tasks without a ceiling: making a coffee, writing a book, being a friend

I’m going to argue that you can massively increase the experience points you get from tasks without ceilings.

• Watching a sports match can go from ‘-1 experience points I would rather not be doing this’ to ‘the most rewarding and important thing in your life +100 experience’. 

  • I had friends for the AFL Grand Final in 2019 vomiting from worry the night before the game. 

• To reiterate, the exact same experience can go from ‘-1’ to ‘+100’ experience points! 

• Also, 100 points is an artificial number here, there is no ceiling! 

The best things in life get better… because you make them better. 

• “Every year of your life should be the best year of your life.” 

  • For me, the main way I try for this to be the case is not to have a more expensive car or a higher paid job, but better relationships and more rewarding work. 

• Scrumptious = Delicious + Nutritious 

  • The best things are delicious and nutritious

  • The best things are laughing and learning

  • Then best things are selfish and selfless

• My relationships get better not because I have a new friend, but because with my existing friends we jointly figure out how to make our time more delicious and nutritious. Eg talking about more topics in more depth with more fun! 

• Work improves not because I’ve gotten a promotion or paid more, it improves as I find ways to make it better with others around me! 

• In effect I am the limit. My life improves as much as I am able to improve it. My life is as scrumptious as I make it! 

• Friendships

  • 20 year old Duncan got bored after a period of speaking to someone, now for my good friends each hour gets better as we develop more and more fun things to chat about. 

  • 15 years ago a good friendship was 1-5 experience points per unit of time. 

  • Now a good friendship is 20-50 experience points per unit of time. 

  • Same people, same amount of time, 10x+ the enjoyment :)! 

• Work

  • 20 year old Duncan thought work would be like school / university, a tax I had to pay so I wasn’t homeless. It would be ‘-1 experience points’. 

  • Then I found that work could be interesting, something that I would do not only if I was getting paid. Work was ‘1-5 experience points’... but it was still not as good as holidays. I wanted to retire ASAP! 

  • Now Edrolo has 5x the ceiling for ‘experience points’ it did 4 years ago. 

    • Honestly the highest experience I have is Edrolo, something like 100-200 experience points per unit of time. (Aside: there are highs and lows, work currently gives me the highest highs and the lowest lows)

    • I think the ceiling 4 years ago would have been 20-40 experience points. So Edrolo work is ‘5x the experience possibility / ceiling’ of before. 

I used to think that life was about ordering from the menu well. Now I think life is about making new items for the menu. 

• I didn’t know that I could massively improve my relationships. 

• I thought a job was ‘set’, the amount of experience points possible couldn’t change. 

• I’m not saying that others can’t help you, IMO the best is an infinite massive multiplayer game. It’s just that I now believe the world I inhabit is mainly built and defined by myself and those I interact with. That we can make things as awesome as we want! 

• Life is so much better than 5 years ago it’s not funny. But on the outside it looks pretty similar:

  • Same friends

  • Same company

  • Same job title

  • Similar pay

• I honestly now believe I can make my life 100x better and I don’t need anything money can buy to do this! 

• There are two people that live to 80 years old. But one might have had 100x the experience of the other. 

  • Is it possible to double the amount of experience points you have had every year? Ie each year have as much experience as all of your life up to that point? I don’t know… but it’s worth a try ;). 

From ‘menial’ to ‘meaning’:

• Coffee

  • Menial = making coffee can be a repetitive minimum wage job. 

  • Meaning = making each coffee is an opportunity for creating art. Little changes here and there, enjoyment and reward for all! 

• Wine

  • Menial = repetitively making alcoholic grape juice with the same process again and again.

  • Meaning = people come and watch others making alcoholic grape juice, when the winemaker has a holiday they go to Bordeaux in France to see how other winemakers do things for fun. Yes on their holidays they go look at people doing what they do for work! 

• Writing a book

  • Menial = very painful with lots of writer's block and low quality product

  • Meaning = after JK Rowling has finished a book do you think she thinks ‘hmmm, i’ve made a book now, what is my next challenge?’ IMO for Rowling making a book is as challenging and rewarding as she makes it. 

• Making content for a textbook :) 

Enjoyment => quality

• Is it your job to make your job enjoyable? 

  • I think it is your job to do this… I also think it is your coworkers job to do this as well… it is everyone’s job :). 

  • Enjoyable jobs aren’t just some ‘nice to have’. IMO they are an key way to get quality outcomes! 

  • Edrolo content specific: IMO it’s everyone’s job to figure out how to build the systems to repeatedly make high quality theory and the language and models for which to communicate so that collaboration is also rewarding. 

• I love this framework from Neri Oxman.

• Science => make quality tools / ingredients, frameworks, etc / language

• Engineering => assemble tools into logical recipe with machine to make content

• Design => make the machine work smoothly and consistently

• Art => enjoyable, beautiful end content

• So effectively done well being ‘SEDA’ means you go from:

  • Menial work => Meaning

  • Low quality => High quality

  • Not enjoyable => Enjoyable

  • Low quality collaboration => High quality collaboration

• Effectively you can increase the ‘experience points’ you can get per unit of time.