Hey everyone, welcome to this edition of the Crossroads Newsletter! This week, a familiar and popular game, Super Mario, will teach us more about reaching our full potential more than we’d ever thought. This game holds a place near and dear to my heart. Let’s dive in!
Super Mario
The other day I was browsing through some videos on YouTube and came across this one: The Super Mario Effect - Tricking Your Brain Into Learning More. It is a TED talk by a famous YouTuber, Mark Rober, who creates viral content on science experiments and one of my favorite channels. You have probably seen some of his viral videos where he built the world's largest Nerf Gun, a rapid-fire snowball machine gun, and a bunch of other funky and epic experiments. In this video, he talks about how to trick your brain into learning more, and he demonstrates this using the popular game Super Mario—he calls it the Super Mario Effect. It is the idea that we should approach learning like how we play a video game, focusing on the task, and not worrying about failure. In this case, rescuing princess peach and not worrying about falling in the pit or being hit by a green shell. And even if we do, we simply adjust our strategy by anticipating the shell and pit for next time.
Mark’s experiment
He further illustrated this point by performing a simple exercise. To summarize, he ran an experiment for his subscribers to see how many of them could learn coding through a game. He segmented this test to have two separate messages for groups when they weren’t successful. The first group received the message that they were not successful, and to please try again. The second group received the same message, but also had five imaginary points deducted from every unsuccessful try starting with a balance of 200, effectively penalizing them for not succeeding (the points had no relevant value). There was a 16% difference for those who had no penalty compared to the group with the penalty. Moreover, the no penalty group had more than 2x the number of attempts at the game. Non-penalized participants saw more attempts and thus had a higher chance of success, learning more through the process.
Results from Mark’s Experiment
You have many tries
The experiment is fascinating because it further harps on the saying, fail hard, and fail fast. It shows that being penalized or the thought of being punished will affect our success rate. And even more so, if we care too much about failing and the negative implications associated with it, it will increase the chances of failure and decrease our likelihood of success. How ironic. This concept especially struck a chord with me as I’ve personally always approached learning or succeeding as such a serious endeavor—like succeed at all costs type of behavior. It immediately made me think about my experience of running a startup and why I didn’t have the same mindset or approach. When I was working on my startup VoiceHero, I felt like it was my one shot to start a company, and the whole world was watching. I put so much pressure on myself to succeed, and the truth was that people are not really watching, it was all in my head. Funny side note, before VoiceHero, there was an 8-month period I was using Alexa in senior homes trying to make this other idea work. I didn’t fail once—things were super slow, nothing got off the ground, and I eventually gave up on the idea resulting in failure. That took seven months too long.
Trying to convince an entire senior home to adopt Alexa, not a great idea
Every misstep felt like a failure kicking me down, and I never once treated it like a game with this mindset. Every action needed forethought, planning, and I accounted for how it would look if it failed. I also optimized for a lower number of failures because of funding, the effect on team morale, investors, friends and family who would ask me how my startup is doing every week. I didn’t frame it like I had many tries to play this game of building a company, but rather, only like I had one. This was a big mistake.
Life is not linear
I think this is how we should approach not only learning, but life, whether it be your career, learning a new skill, or even starting a company—you get many attempts at everything you do. Even Jeff Bezo’s wrote this down in his 1997 letter to shareholders; he calls these Type 2 decisions:
“They are changeable, reversible – they’re two-way doors. If you’ve made a suboptimal Type 2 decision, you don’t have to live with the consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through.”
The speed of which we learn and succeed is about making these Type 2 decisions. Yes, people will watch you fail, but people will also watch you succeed, and will root for you to do so. Being afraid of what the world will think of our moves or hesitation to take action will slow down learning and affect our chances to succeed. Don’t assume this advice from me, take it from Jeff or our favorite Italian plumber, Mario. Everything you do is like a game, there will be pits and obstacles that prevent you from reaching your destination, but that difficulty makes the journey fun, unpredictable, and worthwhile.
That wraps up this week’s post! If you or anyone you know are going through a tough time dealing with failure or having trouble getting started, remember I’m always just one email away and happy to start a conversation. Thanks everyone for continuing to support, subscribe and share below!