Environment & Mindset

We’re nearing the end of this guide. I’ve told you everything you need to know. You have the tools to supercharge learning anything. Hopefully, my examples clarified this and my tips made it easy to apply this in practice.

These last few chapters will summarize and conclude the guide. I’ll give some more examples, overarching concepts or consequences of these ideas.

Mindset

This philosophy for learning is really more a mindset. It’s similar to the “growth mindset”.

It’s the idea that …

• Your current state (talent and mind) can change and grow
• That you can influence this through hard work and good habits
• And that failure isn’t a reason to stop—or even “failure” at all. It’s a necessary point on your path to improving.
• Which means that effort and doing is rewarded, never the end result of said action.

If you’re interested, I recommend reading more about that when this guide finishes.

Because in the end, mindset is everything. If you tell yourself you can’t do something, guess what, you can’t. They are self-fulfilling prophecies.

Remember the element I stated in the introduction:

Whatever you give attention will grow. Both the good and the bad.

Wake up each day and tell yourself positive, actionable thoughts. I will write a chapter of that novel today. It doesn’t matter how good my writing is, it will improve if I take action and work on it.

Don’t allow negative thoughts. Not about your learning process, or about anything.

It’s fine to be realistic! Notice when your work isn’t good enough. Notice what you can’t do … yet. That’s the third principle: feedback and analysis.

But always formulate thoughts in a way that I call “fail forward”

Fail forward

This is a concept I learned both when developing games and when writing stories.

When telling a story—or when doing improv—they adhere to this golden rule. Let’s say you have a scene. Your character tries to achieve something. They either succeed or they don’t.

But answering that question isn’t enough. If you just say “yes, we did it”, the story is over, and it feels too easy. If you just say “no, you failed”, the story stagnates in a similar way, and the scene feels pointless.

Instead, say …

• Yes, but something else went wrong
• No, and this extra obstacle appeared

When creating a board game, you want to do the same thing. Let’s say a player tries something on their turn. If they just fail and that’s it—that’s not fun, that’s punishment. They stagnate. There’s no progress, no growth, and they are punished for even trying.

Instead, fail forward. Even if somebody does a stupid move, makes an incredible mistake, gets shut down by opponents, they still progress in some way.

Apply this to your mindset.

“Yes, I crashed and burned this time, but I learned X and Y. Next time, I’ll be sure to try Z.”

“Okay, I wasted fifty dollars on this. But now I know where not to spend money and how to prevent this from happening again in the future.”

That’s all life is, really. Failing forward. Always forward, always failing. The more you fail, the more you learn.

Environment

And all this feeds into one thing: environment. What you do and think during the day is 99% informed by the environment in which you live, work and move. The people with whom you surround yourself. Even the lighting at your desk, or the speed of your computer.

I’ve mentioned how the brain learns through association. It’s helpful to associate anything you want to learn with other information and other input. Where will those associations come from most of the time? The environment! The setting in which you spend your days.

If your environment is suboptimal for this growth-like mindset, it will break you down piece by piece, every day. It’s like poison. At first, you can work through it. Using perseverance, discipline, motivation. But after a while, all those negative, fixed, rigid influences on your learning process will drag you down.

I found it hard to apply these principles while still at school. Because I could only do this 5% of the day, and the other 95% I was told to do the opposite. (Both at school and at home.) Once I was done, the transition to fully embracing this philosophy was relatively fast. Surprisingly fast.

I talk more about this in the Productivity course. Because motivation is fickle, discipline can be even worse, so the best way to achieve anything is to design your environment to encourage it.

If you had to list priorities to optimize learning, it would be …

• Physical fitness
• Environment
• Habits (create good ones, remove bad ones)
• … everything else …

The first two are complete topics on their own. That’s why I mention them this late, and they have their own courses. (Besides, your environment can be out of your control.)