I don’t expect to get much done today. Today is my EO Forum. If you are not in EO and you don’t know what form is, it is a little hard to describe. The Entrepreneurs Organization has a rather muddy value proposition, and yet we have almost 20,000 members in 220 odd chapters around the globe. It is easier to describe the requirements to become a member than to explain why you want to do this. You need to be the owner, founder, or have controlling interest in a business that generates at least one million dollars a year in revenue to become a member. But why do people become a member? The best answer I have heard so far is support. When you are the crazy fool who convinced everyone to join your brilliant idea for a business, it can be stressful. There are things you have to believe not because they are true yet, but because you are going to make them true. And while there are lots of schools, books, classes and coaches who will tell you what you need to do to start a business, there are very few people who will help you understand the emotional toll it takes to do those things. And here’s the problem - everyone of those previous solutions wants your money. It’s hard to have 100% confidence in someone who is paid to care about you.

But EO, for all its weirdness and cult-like reputation, is a peer to peer learning organization. We are organized into chapters which consist of forums that have 6-10 members each. No one in the chapter works for me. I don’t work for anyone in the chapter. No one is a customer (typically), nor am I their customer. In short, we are on equal footing. And because we are on equal footing the relationships have a chance to be more open, authentic, and supportive. All the usual tools I have as a business owner (pay & promotion) do not apply here. I just have to show up as me. I have described EO as a very human organization because that’s how you have to show up. It is more like high school than any other business organization I know because, you’re just part of the class. Who are you going to sit with? Who will be your friends? Who shares your interests?

There is however, one other thing. In software engineering we have this concept called “Rubber Ducking.”. It goes like this. You are working on a really hard problem and you are stuck. So you call over another software engineer, and here is the important part. The other person needs to be able to understand what the heck you are talking about without a lot of background. They need to be someone you respect, but do not fear. They need to be smart and safe, and able to follow along as you describe what you are struggling with. The magic of the “rubber duck” is that the other engineer rarely, if ever has to say anything. The simple act of describing your problem, to another person who you believe has the capacity to understand you nearly always leads to you solving your own problem. Hence, the other person just sits there and nods, like a rubber duck. You would think that talking to a rubber duck would be just as effective, but it turns out, it is not. You really do need the other person to be able to understand what you are talking about with little to no preamble.

Note: I actually have some clue as to why this is. It has to do with how Homo Sapiens evolved to argue. We are not just social, we are hyper social, and our internal powers of rationalization are actually pretty weak. Put another way, when you argue with yourself, you always win. Add to that, we are primed to want to share our thoughts and reasons. Hello self justification. This causes us to want to blurt out what we think. This is a good thing, because as humans we have exceptional reasoning ability when it comes to critiquing other people’s ideas. In fact, they have done tests where people produced reasons for behavior, then those reasons were disguised and later presented back to the study participants as if they came from someone else and nearly every shredded those reasons. Another example of this are the Cognitive Reflection tests. These are clever little problems that challenge your reasoning ability. If you take the suite of tests alone, you are most likely to miss ⅓ of the questions and more than half the people get ⅔ wrong. However, if you take the tests in groups of at least 3 people, not only will your team complete the tests faster, as a small group you will get 99% of the questions correct. Human’s reason better in small groups. We are not just social, but hyper-social.

This same effect appears to be true for Entrepreneurs, and hence the need for small groups of other business owners who can comprehend the problem you share with them. This also requires two other critical features to work. First, is 100% confidentiality. The second is vulnerability. There is a third element as well. No advice giving, only experience sharing. So what is that? Networking? Mastermind? We call it peer learning. But it feels like so much more. As I learned in Cape Town South Africa at the Global Leaders Conference a couple of years ago, one of the core ideas of Ubuntu, is that I have more access to myself because of my relationship with you. When we are connected and sharing our authentic self with others who do the same, life seems to be… better.

6:40AM

Daily habits complete. Well, mostly. I hate it when checks show up in YNAB. Hate is too strong a word. I find it annoying. I have to go look up what it was. Extra steps. I just want to check the boxes and keep going… but complaining about it doesn’t make it better. So just do it.

Note: Chapter 5 of the book tiny experiments talks about learning to make procrastination your friend, that rather than power through our resistance we should listen to it and look for clues as to why are enthusiasm has fled… I have yet to make that process a habit. Through long years of practice I find it is easier to just get mad at myself and punch through my resistance. Maybe I’ll start another “tiny experiment” to test out her Head, Heart, Hands approach.

Posting pictures in the Micro.blog app is cumbersome on mobile. I wonder how I can fix that?

Trapped Young Men

Yesterday in the conversation with Ev we discussed the VEN Diagram of those who get trapped. They seem to have an overlap of at least three, and according to one therapist I spoke with last month, four challenges that contribute to them being stuck.

1. Heavy video game play
2. Porn addiction
3. Involuntary Celibacy
4. Heavy pot smoking/vaping

Ev theorized that if you could break one of those habits, the others would crumble as well, that they are tightly coupled. That’s an interesting idea, but not one I am sure is completely true.

I don’t know how many of these factors contribute to young men becoming lost, and I do believe most men do not want to talk about how porn is effecting them and their relationships. What little information I have is that women do not like it, and get angry about it. There’s not a lot of compassion there - which while I can understand on one hand, creates a sewer cycle of shame for the men. For this whole group there is sort of a compassionless trap. You should just “man up” and stop doing these things and get to work. And how is that working?

This is where the double standard for gender comes into society. While there is a belief that medical science only studies men, that has not been true for decades. The Federal Government has more than 60 agencies which provide health care and services to women and children. There are none for men. ZERO. What’s more, when women become indigent (not gainfully employed and can’t pay their bills), governments and communities at every level step in to help support them. When men become indigent, we throw them in jail. Especially if they are “dead beat dads.”.

We have a society that is kind and compassionate toward women who struggle, and harsh and judgmental toward men who struggle. Even I feel uneasy talking about these things and I by all measures would be considered a productive member of society. I own a business, I am a father of three, I am a home owner who pays my taxes. And yet, showing compassion toward suffering young men activates a response in me that vacillates between anger and sorrow. Why anger? Because of fear. I worry how easy would it be to just drop out?

Truth be told, I had that opportunity. When I left Rainbow Studios and before I joined Disney, I had the resources to just hang around for a couple of… not just days, years. I told myself I would play Blizzards (then) uber popular game Warcraft for a few weeks (or months), then figure out what I would do next. That lasted two days. One really. By the morning of the second day, I scared myself into turning off the game and never going back. I knew if I went down that rabbit hole I might never come out. I needed to do something, not just pretend to do something, but go out and make something happen. It took me almost nine months to figure out my path which lead to me starting GameTruck and being hired on as a Vice President of Hand Held Studios for Walt Disney Interactive. An impressive accomplishment. But for a moment, I looked down the barrel of withdrawing from life. Leaving Rainbow was not a pleasant experience. For me, as I suspect for most men, quitting a job is not a simple matter of finding more work. I quit my identity. In the book Zend and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Robert M. Pirsig was told that he “had a new personality” after leaving the mental hospital. He wrote, “they should have told me, I was a new personality.”. I felt like that leaving my job. I left behind who I was and I did not know who I would become next. In those dark days of uncertainty, video games seemed like a place to pause, to wait, but I knew after just one day it could be a trap I might never leave. The risk of building my identity around pretending to be someone of consequence was too high. I had to stop playing and I knew it. How many young men never get the chance to feel that they can have a positive generative impact on the world, and therefore they get sucked down the sewer cycle of gaming, porn, smoking and becoming lost?

I don’t fully know how I was able to break out, probably because I had a partner, I had a family, and I had already experienced what it was like to build a life. I could recognize the danger, if not consciously at least emotionally. I knew it was quicksand. I got out before I fell in. But how do you get someone out after they have fallen in?

This is one reason I want to focus on parents of young kids. I want to give them the tools to prevent their kids from falling in, in the first place.

I am not an expert on preventing drug and porn addiction - but I am willing to learn. What I do know quite a bit about is designing interactive applications. Basically, video games. So one corner of this four-part problem. And if Ev is true, that breaking one circle can give you the resources to break the other four, then helping people break their video game obsession is a worthy goal.

Understanding the Risks

To understand the risks, I feel non-gamers (and probably even some gamers) need to understand the fundamental ways video games are designed. I look at video games as applied psychology. This is story telling in the second person. You are designing an experience for someone else to have. Since I joined the industry 26 years ago, the industry was split mostly into two camps. Casual games, and core games. About a decade ago, a new kind of “game” joined the fray, a game built not on creating awesome experiences for the user, but games whose purpose was to steal as much attention as possible from the user. These were companies who’s value were built upon user bases and usage hours. These were the always on, always connected internet games, and the vast majority of them were free. At least, they appeared to be free on the surface. Instead of trying to engage their users, like casual games and core games, these games aimed to hook their users, so they spent as much time on the platform as possible.

If that sounds familiar it is because these companies grew up at the same time as social media, and they both learned from each other, taught at major universities like Stanford (See The Anxious Generation). I still don’t fully understand the ethics of teaching engineers and designers how to exploit users but once the genie was out of the bottle as the saying goes… it must be okay because “everyone” was doing it.

What drove this demand was the arrival of the smart phone. Most console manufacturers sell their hardware at cost (and in the early days at a loss). They make money by charging a royalty to developers who create video games for their platforms. So they really had no desire to give away “free” games. But the smartphones became the way to distribute inexpensive and “free” games. The age of the smartphone ushered in the idea of “freemium”. Give away something free, then use design principles which “hook” users into wanting more, and more and more until they can’t put the game down and are happy (or desperate) to pay for in game items. This methodology spread from phones and tablets to PC’s and eventually Chromebooks.

These “free” games became ubiquitous.

But What About…

At nearly the same time, something else was happening at the very “highest end” of gaming. Excellent games that had been built to engage expanded to include online competitive modes. Some of these were called multiplay online battle arenas or MOBA’s. Along with the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG), players found new ways to engage that were driven by a new kind of incentive - virtual social validation. Players who struggled to find their place in the real world, could suddenly find themselves “ranked” in their game of choice. All they had to do was invest countless hours becoming proficient at their game of choice. It is a slightly more complicated to understand why these games became so compulsively attractive to gamers, but the underlying roots are there. The developers make more money the more people play, and the more invested them become in their platform.

Now, I am really far into the history of how we got here, and I want to do some more research into the risks and threats of these massively multiplayer games that seem to have sucked a generation of men down out of the workforce. I don’t know enough here. What I do know, when it comes to kids, is what is happening with the “free games,” the ones I call attention stealing games.

And so I’m going to focus on those for a bit, because there is one crucial difference. No one gets handed a copy of League of Legends, or Defense of the Ancients, or Valorant by accident. These do not show up on an inexpensive gaming platforms like Chromebooks and cheap linux laptops. But kids across America are being introduced to platforms like Roblox by well intentioned schools and educators who do not understand the risks and the dangers of these “free” games.

7:54AM

Time to ride. I meet up with a friend and we cycle for 10 miles every Wednesday morning. It’s time to get some exercise in.

9:17AM

Sixteen miles. When the ground is flat and the wind is at my back I feel like I could peddle for hours. I never feel like that when I run. I wonder why.

Morning breakfast time, and I’m still thinking about what I wrote this morning. How did we get here?

Morning breakfast, I am “borrowing” a habit from Corbin, one of my closest friends. Couple eggs, some sausage, cheese, (I like to dice up some veggies). All in about ~500-600 calories. No carbs. This will easily carry me through lunch. My “orange juice” is a Yeti 20 ounce tumbler filled with sparkling water and flavored with Mio Orange/Tangerine water enhancer. Zero calories. Deeeicious.

First morning call is at 10AM, then another meeting, then I’m off to Forum, so it is unlikely I will have more time to think, or plan, or research for the rest of the day.

But my final thought is this - for competitive video games, or Esports, there is a tricky divide. Some players do actually become professionals. And the money to be made in that space is staggering. It can be a combination of influencer and celebrity money. A few years back I met a guy who owned a professional esports team at the Waste Management Open. He pointed to the leaderboard (golfese for scoreboard) and said, “My lowest played player makes more money than everyone on that list except the top five guys. And my best players make more than they do.”. There were a few mega-celebrities in the space that made more money every month than Tom Brady made in a year at the height of his career. With money like that, no wonder the industry attracts so many players. But like professional sports, it ends up being a tournament with a wide base and a very short narrow top. For everyone earning a living it feels like there are 10,000 more barely getting by, and hundreds of thousands who have become lost, and tens of millions of casual fans. In 2019 the highest viewed hockey game of all time was the Game 7 of the Stanley Cup world finals where 11 million simultaneous viewers tuned in to see the game. That same year 45 million live simultaneous viewers watched the Overwatch World Championships, a game most people have never heard of. With prize money measured in the tens of millions of dollars for major tournaments, esports is a serious industry, and one where people can become internet celebrities. However, what is interesting about esports is that nearly everyone in the audience also plays and competes at those games. Imagine if only active baseball, basketball, or football players watched their sports? They would collapse. But with esports, that is the case. It kind of gives you a clue as to the enormous hidden audience out there. And with any group of humans that large, some are going to be hurting. Jonathan Haidt suggests 7% of heavy gamers have a serious problem. Meaning 93% are for the most part, just fine. But… 7% of tens of millions of gamers is a very big number.

Yesterday, I got a lot of great feedback from my network. I had an amazing conversation with Cary Bakker who does life coaching about the pros and cons of blogging, vs using social media. So plus one for sparking interesting conversations. Cary expressed that he is a huge supporter of what I am trying to do.

What it looks like

I took a snapshot of my Project folder on my iPhone so you can see what my Second Brain looks like working on this tiny experiment.

Two thoughts come to mind. First, if you look, you can see that my “vault” has over 10,000 notes. That’s a lot. However, Niklas Luhmann had over 90,000! In the 1960s! And they were all handwritten on paper! I can’t imagine what he would do with today’s productivity tech.

Luhmann published 400 peer reviewed academic articles - or about 2 a year in addition to publishing 40 books. Why has no one ever heard of him? Because he was a German Sociologist. Not a huge demand in the USA for German Sociology. But his productivity is what captured everyone’s attention in 2017 when Sönke Ahrens| wrote a book called How to Take Smart Notes. The concepts swept through the medical community and the creator community. Why? Because in medicine everything is connected. The other group latched on because the internet has a voracious appetite for content.

Note: What are those weird numbers in my file names? They are called Zettelkasten numbers, and they help make sure every note is unique. They consist of the year, month, day, hour, and minute the note was created. For example, if I made a note right now it the file would start with 202504290719 -. It is pretty rare to make more than one note a minute, so they usually don’t include seconds. These numbers act as a form of UID or Unique Identifier, only one that is easily decipherable. When you start getting thousands, upon thousands of notes, making up unique file names is not as easy as it sounds. Plopping a ZID (Zettelkasten identifier) on the front of your file makes this process much easier. I use templater scripts in Obsidian to automate the process.

In summary, I started a project folder called Project - Tiny Experiment 1 in my 1 Projects folder (I put numbers in front of my PARA folders so they sort correctly, otherwise I’d get AAPR), and then I made a project file _Project - Tiny Experiment 1 which serves as a kind of README file for the project. I call this the Home Note. I use a template for it, so all my projects start with a standard structure. Then I start adding, creating, and linking notes. I will create a folder on my OneDrive cloud drive that has the exact same name in the same PARA folder structure (OneDrive\1 Projects\Project - Tiny Experiment 1) to hold any PDF files, spreadsheets, images, videos or other assets I may or may not want to put into Obsidian. Though, Obsidian does a good job with PDF files. My OneDrive usually ends up holding MS Office files. I use a similar file structure on google drive (GDrive/1 Projects/Project - Tiny Experiments 1) if I have google sheets, slides, or docs. The path structure is exactly the same and I call this organizing by convention. I use the same convention everywhere so I expect to be able to find what I am looking for quickly - usually in one or two clicks. Occasionally, but not always, I will paste web links to these folders in the project home note. It is all about making life for my future self easier and reducing the cognitive load. The less I have to remember, the more working memory I have for thinking.

Thinking is hard.

I use tools and systems to make it easier and to coral my ADD brain. I don’t have to remember details, my Digital Second Brain does that for me.

7:29AM

The calls start. Finished up my morning routine, now it’s time to talk.

8:30AM

Hey an opportunity came in. A possible speaking gig for New York City Schools. During COVID we did a lot of events for universities and colleges around the country. I also helped our largest franchise owner in Long Island host a bunch of educational after school programs built around games minecraft as well as some esports titles like rocket league and smash bros. They reached out to see if we could help with a program they are working on. I had to provide a bio. This is what I pulled together (my personal website which is focused on my speaking is at: https://scottnovis.com.) Maybe someday I’ll migrate these posts to that space, but for now, since this is unproven and that is all about “looking professional” I decided to keep them separate. Mistake? What do you think?

But here’s the Bio:

Scott Novis Bio

About Scott

Scott has two engineering degrees and 11 patents. His “gameology” consists of 15 published video games for Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo. He left the Walt Disney Company, where he served as the Vice President of their Nintendo Development Studio, to start his entrepreneurial journey by founding GameTruck, the original mobile video game theater concept. Since its founding in 2006, the GameTruck franchise system has delivered more than 500,000 events and has entertained more than 14 million players. Scott started GameTruck with the purpose of creating feelings of belonging through play. Through the Entrepreneur Organization, he mentors young entrepreneurs and lectures on innovation. He is an experienced international keynote speaker, author, and passionate advocate for safe gaming. He helps parents and educators protect kids from video game obsession.

9:15AM

Need to work on creating and queueing up some more cartoons. That experiment I set for 200. I am at 82 so far. I have the process down to something that only takes a few minutes… if I have an idea, and even if I don’t…

After I line out the action, then fill the color. I scan it, clean it up, then upload into a template I created in Canva. That is where I add the dialog, and get it ready to publish.

oh great… I want to get to work and Canva has hijacked my work environment with some new promo video. Thanks guys…

okay, it’s over… back to getting stuff done.

The final cartoon looks like this…

Work flow:

1. Sketch
2. Line
3. Color fill
4. Scan
5. Cleanup with Acorn 8 (I use a Mac)
6. Edit joke in Canva.
7. Download and save in appropriate PARA folder on OneDrive
8. Schedule posts in PUBLR.
9. Upload post to ComicFury

9:59AM

Blah. Parents are an amorphous economic entity. What I mean is that parents as a group have no specific shape or boundary. They are not a business, or a team, or members of a program. So how do I reach this audience? When I do get to talk with parents about video game safety, they immediately identify with the topic. And when I share my tools and tips, they appreciate it. When they use them, they always tell me it made a (positive) difference.

However, parents are not some unified economic entity. They are not a business or a specific community. To reach parents I need to work through groups that serve parents, and those groups don’t actually do much with the parents as a group. Take a community center, they tend to serve individual families. If you could get all of their clients together in one space you would have “parents”, but most of the time schools, churches, and NGO’s (non-governmental organizations) don’t want to do that. They deal with parents individually. I think some school districts will have meetings and hearings for “the general public” - which includes parents. But finding the partner who has an audience of parents is proving to be far more challenging than I imagined. Even Richard Walton, who runs outsell told me, “this is the longest sales cycle I have seen in a long time.” It is easier to sell a complex piece of software than a talk about parenting kids.

So, I put my outreach program on hold until I figure it out. That is another reason, I started this “tiny experiment”. Maybe you, or someone like you reading this will have an idea as to how I can reach parents. I’m definitely missing something.

What If: What if the problem is parents is too generic? What if I need to be more targeted, like I need to reach mom. Or Dad? (My gut tells me it’s mom.) How could I make the content more specific and relevant to mom’s? And what if talking about parents complicates the issue? Now I need to get both mom and dad involved. That could be a high hurdle. things to think about.

This sounds like it should be easy but isn’t.

10:30AM

Prime time productivity declining, mental energy sliding. I’ll “take a break” by adding to some book notes. Specifically I want to pull the most interesting content out of the book Tiny Experiments and turn it into Second Brain notes. This process is based upon the The Feynman Technique. The core idea is that if you can describe something you learned as if you were talking to a 12 year old you know it. If you can’t, you have some more work to do. The act of producing or expressing information is part of what turns it into knowledge.

Note: If you want to see what a Book Note document looks like you can see check out my Tiny Experiments Book Notes.

12:00PM

Had an unbelievably energizing call with Evan Walton. During the conversation as we got to know each other, he shared a personal story that gave me an idea about a path I might be able to take to help kids.

What’s my problem? Parents are not an economic entity, they are an demographic - an attribute, but it’s not specific enough. However, when parents have problems with video games, this can lead to counseling. It can be family counseling, or marriage therapy. What if I target therapists and counselors? They need continuous professional education and they are not doubt being affected by these types of trama, and perhaps they could benefit from my content, and then they can help their clients who are also struggling with it.

That is something to look into. Also investigate Bowen Family Therapy systems. (I think this is the second time that has come lately).

• Under this project file I will create a note to hold information about Bowen Family Systems Theory.

Note: This is what I do when I learn about something new. I make a note. Do some googling, some ChatGPTing, and I capture information and I put it into the second brain.

Possible next course of action. Reach out to the Therapists I know and do some googling as to how I might be able to help them.

5:20 PM

Had lunch with a friend. We talked about business and managing teams. I shared my new favorite management tool, the Spotify Squad Health Check. Now I’m back home and I’m tired. I want to get more done, but I’m frazzled… My energy is 🪫 and I’m in that weird place where I don’t want to do anything. I don’t want to work out, I do not want to watch TV, even playing a game feels like too much effort. This will pass in a little while, but I miss feeling like I did this morning where I just sat down and got after my task list.

My best option right now is to journal. A little self reflection wouldn’t hurt. I journal with a fountain pen and quality notebook.

8:20PM

I did some reading on my kindle with warmlight on (reduces blue light). I try to stay off my devices after 8PM and definitely the half hour before bed time. No screens (kindle excepted) in the bedroom. No watching videos, no social media. The bed is for sleep. Well, sleep and and other activies that lead to sleep. I learned from the book Breath by James Nester that if I sleep with my mouth closed my sinuses generate an anti-duretic mist which is inhaled into my lungs. What this means is that as a man in my late 50s I don’t have to get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom any more which really helps my quality of sleep.

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…

Note: This entry starts day 1 of 15 consecutive days I intend to practice a tiny experiment, sharing how I am trying to learn how to help parents and educators with their kids video game obsessions.

5:39AM

I just woke up, grabbed my cup of bullet coffee (two “pats” of butter - why is a small quantity of butter called a pat? and not a blob, or a bill, or a slice? - well that and one tablespoon of MCT oil, and french roast coffee.) Then I sit down at the kitchen table to start my morning routine. The kitchen window is open, and the birds are a riot of joy outside. Chirping, hooting, tweeting, and singing. It is social hour in the Novis neighborhood for the avian folk. I love the trill of life and the cool air. Better enjoy it, the heat is coming soon. It always does, but at 5:30AM the sun is just up and the day has begun with a gentle fresh breeze.

My half of the kitchen table is a mess. That’s my mind externalized. I cleaned it up last night, but I have my iPhone, portable keyboard, four fountain pens (two black, two blue - sometimes there are more colors like green, red, and yellow), a bible, AirPods, and my morning pages journal. Strangley there is a business card from SportsClips with the name Marcia on it. I wonder why they give these out. I never see the same stylist twice. Partly because I don’t really care who cuts my hair (I’ve had the same “do” for decades and it’s simple), but partly because they never stay. It’s always a new crew there. The steady turnover at these places is remarkable. Why waste the time and cost of giving them business cards?

On second thought, looking at the kitchen table, this is not so bad. Yesterday my cartoon drawing kit was out here and bunch more keyboards. For me, keyboards like pens are an obsession. If I can find the perfect pen/keyboard/notebook/device I can write the perfect story… or so the distorted thinking goes. On a “good day” I can cover every inch of my half of the table with piles of papers, journals, pens and electronics. Today I can actually see the placemat and the kitchen - what do you call it? cloth? cover? Let the caffein set in, it will come to me.

So, usually I begin the day with several steps.

1. Open Obsidian on my phone and make sure it has the Daily Note populated.
2. Glance at my Habits list, and then start working my way through the top three “chains”

The list looks like this:

Habits

• Daily Devotional
• Readwise Review
• Bible Study
• Write
• Yoga
• Exercise
• Walk
• YNAB
• Meditate

I don’t know why Daily Devotional is first and Readwise second because I always start with Readwise. It has my current longest streak. 450 days. Readwise (from readwise.io) is how I get my book highlights from my kindle to Obsidian (my digital second brain). Every morning it surfaces six quotes. I often copy a few of those quotes and paste them into my Daily Note. Spaced repetition and connection to relevant information is a great way to enhance learning. Or so the theory goes. Seems to work for me. But it is only part of how I learn.

You may notice there is both Bible Study and a Daily Devotional. The Daily Devotional is really my reading streak on Kindle. Every year I pick one or two books that I can read a page a day. One of my all time favorites is [[The Daily Stoic]] by [[Ryan Holiday]]. But past books have included, [[The Intellectual Devotional]], [[A Calendar of Wisdom]], and sometimes I will take a book that is just very hard to read and chip away at it over a year. Such as [[Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain]]. This year I have two, [[Jesus Calling]] by [[Sarah Young]] and [[The Daily Laws]] by [[Robert Greene]]. Bible Study is really about reconnecting directly with my faith through reading the Bible - I have read a lot of the “good book” but not all of it. For this, I usually go to the App Our Daily Bread where I pick up a passage for the day and a short story. I like this for two reasons. The obvious one is that it connects me with my own religious heritage and upbringing - my family was “loosely” Presbyterian. And second, they tell stories in five sentences or less every single day. I find that fascinating.

So there, I read to start the morning, then usually comes the writing. The Morning Pages. Started by [[Julia Cameron]], I have modified my morning pages to be 2 pages (instead of three), making it easier for me to find a notebook that is thin enough to travel with me. Twelve weeks of three pages a day at 8.5"x11" paper is a thick notebook. But this is my best chance of the day to use my fountain pens. I rotate them every day, so I get a chance to use some small part of my collection (horde - if you curate it’s a collection. If you keep your stuff in an unwieldy pile, you horde - I do a little of both. The very best pens make it to the kitchen table. The rest sit in display cases or cookie tins - waiting to be sold some day on ebay.) I tell myself a lot of stories about the things I’m going to do. For some reason I find that easier than dealing with the reality that 1. I have wasted money, and 2. I am never really going to do that, and 3. I should probably clean up my mess and let this stuff go.

Did I mention I have ADHD? Well, I’m not hyper, so I like to think of it as Attention Deficit Disorder instead of Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. And according to [[Gabor Maté]], it’s not really a disorder, it’s more of a deficiency, like if you are not strong, we don’t say you have strength deficiency disorder. I think the word disorder for ADD folk like me is more literal, as in we struggle to achieve order, so it’s short had for “our attention deficit produces disorder.”. I never use the term Neurodivergent to describe myself. That to me doesn’t really help anyone know who they are dealing with, including myself. Hey, I am this hard to understand unspecified thing! Good luck. No, if I share that I have ADD people get it. And it reminds me to use systems to constrain some of my less charming habits. However, I also recognize that with that “big beautiful brain” of mine, comes some gifts, like creativity, energy, and some serious focus when I’m chasing thought rabbits down dark and twisty holes.

When I am done with my daily reading (and keeping my three streaks alive), I will then engage in a variety of other dialy-ish habits, such as walking around the block while listening to an audio book, or doing yoga (I need to get better at this), meditating (again, could do with some improvement), using ynab.com (You Need a Budget) to keep my finances from going off the rails. I can’t have my bank accounts looking like the kitchen table. And yes, while walking is technically exercise, there is some strength training that will help extend my health span. According to [[Peter Attia MD|Peter Attia]] author of [[library/Outlive|Outlive]], maintaining your strength is a good way to stay healthy longer. For example “grip strength”, your ability to hold your own wait or carry weights is unexpected highly correlated with longer healthy life spans. Why? Because the theory goes, you can catch yourself if you start to fall. Breaking a hip is nearly a death sentence. The mortality rates skyrocket after a hip break and many are dead within 10 years. Plus, my Uncle Tom passed away in a fashion I do not want to replicate. Put another way, I’m not going out like that. I want healthy bonus years, not artificially protracted medically induced suffering in the name of staving off death at all costs.

Don’t want to die. Don’t want to suffer while I wait to die. Let’s keep this life as healthy and energizing as possible for as long as reasonably possible. That’s the plan.

So, a day starts with:

• Deliberately taking in content and ideas I find interesting, spiritual, and reflecting.
• Moving my body to keep it healthy.

You may (or may not) notice, that what is missing is a few things many people do when they first wake up. What I don’t do is

1. Check social media (Facebook, Insta, LinkedIn, TikTok, X)
2. The news (Ground News, Wall Street Journal, Apple News)
3. Email (Seriously I postpone this as long as possible.)
4. Messages (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger)
5. Watch any video (TV, YouTube, TikTok, etc)

The one exception is texts. Texts sit at the top of my communication hierarchy. I now have a family extended by love that includes four Gen-Z kids and talking on the phone is a rare and special occurance for me, a torture for them. But texting is how we all stay in touch. So those get a special pass. Hearing from people I love fits my above criteria to only ingest healthy, loving, interesting, stimulating, positive content first thing in the morning. The outrage porn factories can wait. They get enough of my mindshare as the day goes on - much more than they deserve.

This is how I start my day, and since this tiny experiment is about how I learn, and I started this blog post to focus on questions, I haven’t gotten to the important part, what exactly is it that I am trying to learn? Well, I’m going to save that for tomorrow. This post is already extremely long, but it gives you a glimpse into how I deliberately, and intentionally set about my day. The great thing about a morning routine is that my morning always starts the same (so far). I wake up. And I nearly always wake up at the same hour of the day - between 5am and 6am (that’s why I hear the bird song every morning, the hour after sunrise is peak song time in the Novis neighborhood.). This lets me begin my sequence with a surprising amount of consistency for someone with ADD. Evening routines are much harder because my days rarely end exactly the same way leading up to sleep. The trigger to do an evening routine is just not as consistent.

But, it is within this context, of deliberately trying to learn, and improve myself in small quantities daily that I will try to tackle a few big questions. These are:

The Big Questions

1. How can I become a better story teller?
2. How can I reach parents to help them with their childs video game addictions (or avoid it all together without giving up on video games completely.)
3. How can I help the hundreds of thousands of young men who have failed to launch and become lost in video games (what the Japanese call Hikikomori, and Europeans called NEET - Not Employed, in Education, or Training).
4. How can I connect with other people trying to push back against how some big tech companies are stealing young kids attention to fuel their business model and leaving anxious, isolated, depressed, suicidal husks of humans in their wake?
5. How do parents think about, talk about, and experience these problems?
6. How do educators experience, talk about, and think about these problems?

Story telling is top of the list, because humans respond better to stories than facts, logic, and reasoning. (I have spent years trying to understand why and I think I have a handle on that.). And when I can see the problem through the eyes of the person I am trying to help, it makes it easier for me to come along side them and give them useful tips and tools to help them solve their problems.

Okay, good start. It’s not perfect, but it’s a snapshot of how I think, how I work, and what I am trying to learn. And if you’ve read this, I hope I successfully painted a picture for you minds eye to visualize as you join me on this journey.