5:41AM

Another day, another chance to learn. Yesterday, after posting my first blog, I decided to keep notes, what was I doing to advance my cause, solve my problem?

7:15 AM

I can’t believe I posted this blog to just about every chat group I am in. That’s crazy. But there it is. Now I guess I really have to do it.

9:15AM

I realize that this blog post series, is different from my other post in a very fundamental way. Most of the time I strive to provide answers. Hey, here is a problem and it’s solution. This series in contrast is really set up to be an intellectual travel journal. Here’s where I am trying to go, watch me fumble, stumble, and bumble as I find my way there. Well, I assume I’ll make mistakes along the way, as that is usually what happens when you do something you haven’t done before. So in contrast, this post shares questions.

One of my favorite cartoons, which I attribute to the Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson shows a picture of two signs in a building labeled “Department of Research”. The sign pointing to the right says, “Unanswered questions” but the sign pointing to the left, reads, “Unquestioned Answers.” My rule of thumb:

Question the answers.

BTW

The term “pat of butter” originates from the process of shaping butter. Traditionally, butter was shaped into small, flat, rounded pieces using a tool called a “butter pat” or “butter paddle.” These tools were used to mold and smooth the butter into a consistent shape, making it easier to serve and use. The word “pat” itself can refer to a light touch or tap, which is similar to the action used to shape the butter. Over time, the shaped piece of butter itself came to be known as a “pat of butter.”

So, I tend to live two lives. Well, at least two. One is the day I plan to live, the other is the day I actually live. I use tools to organize my intentions into actions which should result in the completion of my goals. I have other tools which allow people and opportunities to enter into my conscious awareness and take me on unexpected little side journeys (conversations mostly) that, while not part of my plan, add to the rich tapestry of my lived experience. Wow was that a convoluted way to say: man proposes but God disposes. I enter each day with a plan… then see how it goes.

Basically, my day is a dance. I think of it as a Tango. Sometimes I lead, sometimes life leads. I try to be on the look out for when life wants to make a move, and I also try to see if “life” is open to my moves. If I find a better way to live a day, I’ll let you know.

This means in practical sense that I need to strike a balance - I need a system that allows me to capture two things:

  1. What I intend to do
  2. What happens to me.

I recently thought of this as the dance between will and wonder. To do research, I need both. I have to be intentional about what resources I am going to investigate, but I also have to be open to discovering new things I did not expect to find.

10:30AM

Tools

The best tool I have found for managing this balance is to use a digital second brain. Sometimes called Personal Knowledge Management. The piece of software I use - or the “app” that helps me implement my digital second brain is Obsidian. (https://obsidian.md/)

It’s not so much the application itself as a system of thinking about how I work with information and turn it into knowledge. It might help you if I shared some definitions. You see knowledge and information, in my experience are suitcase words. You can pack a lot into them, and people tend to pack different things into them. For me:

  • Data - raw, unprocessed facts or ideas.
  • Information - Data organized in context so as to be useful.
  • Knowledge - Actionable information.

Examples might help.

A list of numbers is just data. like 22, 25, 27. To become Information they need to be about or related to something, say the ages of my children - Rebecca is 22, Matt is 25, and Ryan is 27. This becomes knowledge when I add their birthdays to my Calendar so I remember to call them on their birthday and buy them gifts. Or you could say it becomes knowledge because their age influences the kinds of gifts I can buy them, such as now they are all old enough to receive a nice bottle of wine as a gift. (but I’m more of a bourbon and beer guy, wine is my wife’s thing.)

In general, I believe:

knowledge » information » data.

So, I try to move up the value chain from data, to information, to knowledge. A second brain is the tool I use to help navigate that process.

That process for me is a blend of techniques. I use the PARA method, which I first learned about from Forte Labs (Tiago Forte), and a Zettelkasten.

Zettelkasten is German, combining Zettel (meaning “slip” or “note”) and Kasten (“box”), translating to “slip box” or “note box.” It refers to a personal knowledge management system developed by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who used it to organize his thoughts and research. Luhmann’s Zettelkasten comprised over 90,000 notes, facilitating his prolific output of more than 70 books and 400 articles .

PARA organizes data and information by actionability into:

  • Projects
  • Areas
  • Resources and,
  • Archives.

PARA gives data context turning it into information. Luhmann’s way of linking ideas into networks turns information into knowledge.

But what about tasks?

Nearly everyone asks me about how I keep a todo list. That is a topic for another day, but in my experience, tasks that don’t use knowledge or information are often trivial - (such as take out the trash). It is the interplay of what I learn, and what I do with what I learn that drives me to use a system like Obsidian. Working with, and in, my Digital Second brain is where I experience my greatest productivity.

Okay, I could nerd out about this all day (week or month) so if you want to know more check out this: https://publish.obsidian.md/scottnovis/.

12:24PM

For some reason, I felt compelled to make the hierarchy of data, information and knowledge visual. I think of them like this:

I share this because it I wanted to give you some context as to how I started to work on yesterday’s questions. For me what converts information into knowledge is how I connect it to things I already know, or projects I plan to work on. It is the connectivity that makes Obsidian so powerful. It is where I synthesis ideas and generate the content that will shape new output.

So, working on this:

  1. I created a Project in Obsidian.
  2. I start making note pages (I call them cards), to capture anything and everything that occurs to me on this topic. In general, one “card” per idea.
  3. I began connecting data and information to those cards.
  4. As the day progressed, I add to the notes, and the connections, working with the ideas.

Note: Working with means writing, connecting, or doing something Forte called progressive summarization.

Healthy Video Game Info

My day job is as the CEO of the video game party company GameTruck. It is a franchise concept that conducts tens of thousands of video game parties every year. I started the company on a wish to help my son and his friends play the best games with their best friends in person, together. Since I first had the idea in 2005, and then launched the company in 2006, I have seen tremendous changes in the video game industry.

We started our company with the XBox 360 and Nintendo GameCube (16 player Halo and 8 player Mario Kart Double Dash). I did not invent the idea of video games in a trailer, but I did innovate the idea of a video game living room in a trailer. If you googled GameTruck in 2005, all you got back were toy trucks and board games - basically trucks to play games with. Today if you google that all you get is mobile video game party companies, including mine (Https://gametruck.com). Our brand became the super-category for mobile video game theater businesses.

Since 2006 we saw the rise of the Nintendo Wii, Music Games (Guitar Hero and Rock Band - and their demise). A decade ago partnered with Nintendo who wraps our trailers every year to promote their latest and greatest games. (I am personally and professionally excited about the Switch 2).

But why talk about video game addiction if I work in the industry? Because first and foremost I am concerned about kids and their well being. Remember, I started this business to help kids play together.

At GameTruck, our mission is: To create feelings of belonging through play.

And, in my experience, if you do it right, a GameTruck Party is a great way to create those feelings. I have been very blessed to earn a living making people happy.

However, the wider video game industry has a problem with some, (but not all) video games.

In 2022, I was selected to attend the Global Speaker Academy hosted by the Entrepreneurs Organization. While attending, I casually shared what I knew about video games and kids with other members. My fellow entrepreneurs told me that I needed to get this information in the hands of parents.

That my friends, is easier said than done. (Hence this blog trying to figure it out).

I will admit that the book The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt lit a fire under me. Professor Haidt convinced me that attention stealing apps (including games and social media) on smart devices are harming kids. While video games can be a source of joy, engagement, and entertainment, there are some bad actors who only pretend to entertain users. Their real business is stealing attention and using it to drive up their company stock or sell it to advertisers. Some games are the opposite of fun, they are a trap. One of the worst offenders of this is the free video game platform Roblox.

Chipping Away At It

I spent some time this morning after our weekly L10 (a highly structured meeting that is part of the Entrepreneurial Operating System to make sure we stay on task and achieve our goals as a company), and dove into two articles written by different members of my team. The first one is a blog post written by my head of marketing to help parents understand Roblox. The other was an SOP / training document created by my team lead to help our video game party hosts (we call them Game Coaches) know how to handle requests to play Roblox at birthday parties.

My initial reaction? Both articles are great, and useful, but neither really touches on the risks Roblox poses. And this is a challenge. No one wants to be negative. No one wants to scare people away. However, if we don’t talk about the risks, how will people know?

Note: If you want me to attach the documents for reference I am happy to do so.

This will be a marathon, not a sprint.

Point of Process

When I get new information, like the Roblox articles, I copy the links to them and paste them into my SB Project. I always have a section called resources where I can keep links to google docs. Book marking is useless in my opinion because it lacks overall context. Saving the links in the context where I need it, is one small way to turn data (a link) into information.

If these articles had been web articles and not google docs, I would have clipped them (adding the words to a file in a Clippings folder), then I would link those files to my project resources section using Obsidian’s WikiLink method.

Bottom Line: When I get new data, I turn it into information by saving it and connecting it in my second brain.

Today’s Questions

So what information do I need?

  1. Connections. Who do I know or might I meet who is already interested in this area?
  2. Resources: What are the best tools for protecting kids online? Like firewalls, and phones.
  3. Solutions: What solutions already exist for young adults who are addicted?
  4. Podcasts: Get the list of all the podcasts I’ve been in, and what is coming up.
  5. Get my latest webinar videos and post them to YouTube.
  6. Confirm with Dalton that we are still on for video recording Friday.

3:30PM

Okay, what I do is intense, I get that. But it is not as intense as it sounds, because I have somewhere to keep all the information when it comes to me…

Question How Do Parents Think About Video Game Risk?

I once heard this concept called, “the voice of the expert.” The problem is that once you become an expert, you tend to look at the world through that lens. But the person with the problem rarely thinks like an expert… or they wouldn’t have the problem they are having. In practice this means the person with the problem will usually describe the problem in their own words. And in my experience these words are hard to guess. You need to have a lot of conversations to find the common thread.

I want to grab parents attention, so they can immediately recognize my content as a solution to a problem they know they have.

When parents are anti-video game, they usually take a hard line. All video games are bad. Unfortunately, this does not protect their children from brain hacking by digital platforms. Worse, their kids have no skills to deal with the thread and therefore end up totally unprepared to handle it when the parents are not around.

To make matters worse, most of these platforms empower the kids help each other undermine parental safeguards and protections. It truly is like a mind virus. A friend of mine found out her son had a burner phone so he could talk to his friends on Discord. That’s right. For chat.

Note: Discord is a messaging platform like slack by started by gamers for gamers. It began as voice chat for gaming and rapidly grew into one of the largest community management platforms in the world.

It is unlikely that parents to completely ban video games will be interested in my content. I know because when I meet them they are very happy to tell me in no uncertain terms they don’t have a problem because they don’t allow their kids to play video games.

Not thinking is easier than thinking.

I get it.

I just wished that worked for the parents as well as they believe it will. But trying to “help” this group usually leads to pointless frustrating arguments, and those don’t help anyone.

But who is most likely to be interested in what I have to say? Who do I have the greatest chance to help?

My Hypothesis

I believe that parents who are relaxed about video games but worry that they are being too lax is my ideal target group. They are likely to let their children play games, without understanding the dangers.

They are open, and curious, but they don’t realize there is a danger until their child starts to demonstrate negative behavior issues. When I talk to parents from this group they genuinely want to learn what I have to share, and nearly all of them immediately put the content into practice - seeing rapid benefit.

These parents use the following words to describe their fears, and concerns about “too much video gaming”:

  • Addiction
  • Obsession
  • Fixation

I can’t really talk about addiction because it is a medical condition and I am not a doctor. Therefore, I should do some more testing around obsession, and fixation. (ChatGPT also suggested “Compulsion”)

8:53PM

Time to shut down. I’m too tired to think about doing an evening routine… but overall, I feel like it was a productive day. Tomorrow, frame out the GPS - the goal, the problem, the solution.

One final task. I grabbed a story from Our Daily Bread to analyze.

Story analysis:

As his daddy cast his fishing line out into the lake, two-year-old Thomas mimicked his father’s actions with his own toy fishing pole. Later, as he stood on the shallow edge of the lake, Thomas also tried imitating his father’s example of throwing fish back into the water by dipping his pole in the water and “catching” weeds. After each “catch,” Thomas held the weeds up for his daddy to admire before releasing them back into the lake.

Tools:

  • Starts in motion - casting a fishing line.
  • Paints an image of a location: fishing in the lake, the shallow edge of the lake.
  • The boy has a goal - to mimic his father
  • What’s the obstacle? He’s pretending, we the read know he has a long way to go but…
  • The payoff: he hold’s them up for his father to admire before “releasing them.”

We know, and the father knows the boy has a long way to go, but he’s doing his best, with what he has to work with, to imitate the man he admires. There’s something courageous and endearing in that. It sparks emotion.

Time to sleep…