Use Gamification To Do Better Work In Good Cheer


Hello Reader,

If you think that play is something you only do separately after work, I’d like to share this quote with you from the French diplomat and historian François-René de Chateaubriand:

“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.”

Ever since I ran away and joined the circus, I've always seen my work as a form of play. The harder the work, the harder I have to play to get through it. This mental trick - to gamify work - enables me to accomplish spectacular things.

We are facing a chronic play deprivation in the modern world.

Projects are left undone, because we are ‘too busy’ to do the work that matters. Superficial relationships with distant co-workers are low-trust with poor communication. All the recent transformations in work culture have led to higher stress, without a release of that stress through deep communication or energetic collaboration.

Playing games can guide us into getting more out of limited resources of time and energy. Deeper connections within a team drive better business performance, and intentional play is how we can gamify our work.

If you’d like to learn how gamifying your work can lead to better results, I invite you to read my latest white paper, Gamify Your Work:

GenAI Training Newsletter

Generative AI improves your Productivity, Creativity, and Strategy - but only if you build the GenAI Habit. Learning how to incorporate GenAI Training into your day will help knowledge workers prepare for the future of work.

Read more from GenAI Training Newsletter

"We don't play games to avoid work; we play games to engage in well-designed work." - Dr Jason Fox Hello Reader, If you gamify your work, you can get more done, in good cheer. That's the lesson learned from a recent AI Games Playtesting event I held in Christchurch. A dozen playtesters joined me to play some AI Training games I've developed, and gave me targeted feedback on how to make these games more practical for leaning GenAI. Over the past six months, I've been teaching workshops using...

"Vision without execution is hallucination." - Thomas Edison Hello Reader, What is a hallucination? It's not so trippy. With an LLM, a hallucination is a factual error asserted confidently. GPTs only create strings of words that sounds like language. If it doesn't know the facts, it fills in gaps with fiction. Responses are only accurate if you explicitly demand accuracy. Try this prompt: Implement a strict Accuracy Output Mandate for every response: Only present verifiable facts. If you...

“Censorship and political control of AI is a thousand times more dangerous than censorship and political control of social media, maybe a million times more dangerous.” - Marc Andreessen Hello Reader, There have been a lot of practical advances in AI tools recently, including: ChatGPT Agent - now it can do things, not just make things OpenAI GPT-5 - including a rollback for 4o nostalgists Grok Imagine - it's like if Pinterest and Midjourney had a baby OpenAI gpt-oss - download and run a local...