The four principles

If you remember one thing from this guide, make it these four principles. No, wait, if you implement one thing from this guide into your daily life, make it these four principles. They are simple habits that hit all the important parts of the learning process. They are your “core game loop”, remember?

So, what are they?

• Do: do the thing you want to learn.
• Time: do it a lot, over a long period of time, with breaks.
• Feedback: analyze what you did
• Experiment: vary what you want to do next

When applied to any skill or activity, this will make you a superstar over time. Still, many people struggle. Even explaining this to some people caused them to grunt and complain immediately. Why?

• It takes time. People like to think there is some magical shortcut, some “secret method”, to achieve anything with no effort.
• People don’t like the uncertainty. Just do stuff? That’s it? Where are the textbooks, the tests, the grades?
• People are scared of the unknown. Truly, the words “experiment” and “try it” should rank higher on the fear index than “spiders”.
• Feedback can be hard to give, receive or ask for.

These are simple principles. Turning them into habits will take some effort, if you struggle with some of the above.

I, personally, struggled with time and feedback.

For example, when you make games, you need to let others play them all the time ( = “playtesting”). Your players will immediately show you what’s wrong or (not) fun. You can’t know this yourself, because you are making the game.

But where do you find these people? How do you set this up? At my first test session, I made tons of mistakes. I didn’t ask the right questions, leading to useless feedback. I got defensive, rejecting any criticism. You know, human stuff.

Similarly, my mind is always at the “next big idea”. I struggled to consistently put time into something, for maybe months or years, because I already wanted to be there. So I could move on to a bigger or more interesting skill.

And yet, I fully subscribe to the principles above and can guarantee they will serve you well.

The rest of this chapter gives some personal examples and anecdotes about these principles. The next four chapters dive into each one in detail.

But first …

A rebuttal

By now, you might interject: “but maybe this just works for you and nobody else! You clearly hate school!” (Well, you’re right about the second part.)

I discovered these principles through scientific research. They’re built on that foundation. And, when I look around, I see everybody uses it.

I studied Mathematics, for example. (Because I was forced to, I obviously wouldn’t go to university willingly.) Some of my friends do something vaguely related to what we did at our study. The others pursued something entirely different after getting their degree.

We’re terrible at most of the subject. We spent years studying math, which is not easy, and it was basically for nothing.

What did we end up doing? The thing that interested us. The thing we did in our spare time, all those years, while growing up. The thing we taught ourselves, without even knowing it. The thing we liked enough to do it over and over, to experiment with it and rise after failure.

We’re actually good at that. Because we applied the four principles.

I speak with actual teachers at schools, and they agree with most of what I say. They all know that schools suck creativity out of kids and don’t have as much value as society preaches. We usually debate about the actual solutions to these issues and how to move schools towards better methods of learning.

A real example

But the best example is always the one about sports. Somehow, we understand the principles perfectly when it comes to physical training, but don’t apply them to any other training.

Let’s say you play soccer.

• You visit training once or twice a week (Do)
• You do this for years before you even expect to be good (Time)
• You get feedback from coaches, from winning/losing a game, from yourself if you miss a shot. (Feedback)
• You try new techniques, new strategies, new positions on the field, new training exercises to keep improving. (Experiment)

Ta da! We already do this! It’s that easy! We know it works.

Nobody plays soccer for ten days straight, then stops and takes a (written) test. The best players usually grew up just kicking around a ball, for years, trying fun stuff. That’s why a player like Messi has such amazing ball control.

At the same time, we see why all the principles are needed. You may visit soccer training every week, but if you discard any feedback, or never try something new … it’s pointless.

Let’s say you kick the ball and it goes over the goal. If your process stops there, you will forever keep kicking the ball over the goal and not learn anything. Instead, analyze, give yourself feedback:

• “Hmm, maybe if I try a different approach, a different run-up …”
• “Maybe if I hit it with another part of my foot, the ball will go in …”
• “Maybe if I lean forward more, the ball stays lower …”

Always remember …

We are hardwired to have fun while learning and improving!

We love experimenting, trying something, seeing our own growth (potential). Focus on that. If something stops being fun, you probably fell into a pattern. One of too little challenge or the same one every day. One where you don’t analyze, so you don’t actually improve.

This website

Let’s start with the obvious example: I made this website. I programmed it, I wrote the articles, I manage the server and domain.

How did I learn that?

Did I read books about all these topics? Did I follow expensive courses on Udemy or whatever? Did I study it at university? Did I magically have the talent for this?

No! Talent doesn’t exist! (Or, well, it’s just a very tiny part of success.)

I repeated this loop for years:

• Try to make a website
• Try to fill it with content in English
• Try to host it somewhere
• Fail, fail, fail, fail
• Do it again, but better this time

The first 10–20 websites I made are long gone. Certainly not online, but usually also terrible (and non-functional) enough that I binned them long ago.

Yes, Pandaqi Tutorials was my first “serious / professional website”. But it wasn’t my first. It never is. An author’s debut bestseller is actually their twentieth book. A game developer’s first hit game is their fiftieth game project.

But I applied the four principles, as best as I could.

• Do something: start building a website
• Time and time again, with some downtime between websites
• Once I realized what a hot mess I made, I analyzed the website and looked for good and bad parts.
• Then I made a new website, experimenting with some new tools or ideas

Let’s have a fun time going over some of my failures.

Bad writing

At first, the English was just incorrect. I invented meaningless sayings by translating them directly from Dutch to English. Then I wrote sentences that were so long you couldn’t even decide if they were correct.

Bad hosting

The first one I picked cost 80 dollars a year + 10 a year for the domain name. It was also located in America, while I live in the Netherlands. This caused issues with support, server delay, unexpected costs, some missing functionality that I expected (because it was standard here).

Now I host five huge websites on a budget of less than 80 dollars a year, in the Netherlands, with no complaints.

Bad structure

The old Pandaqi Tutorials used a structure that was just stupid. A database, with code inside, without any organization besides a numerical “ID” in front of articles. Years later, it took me months to transfer that mess to this new website.

Similarly, the old website had a huge header that got in the way. The code was spaghetti and parts of it were just wrong. (In some situations, they didn’t do what they were supposed to do, leading to missing pages, images or navigation.)

Bad plans

In my enthusiasm, I started a website before I finished anything. And then I realized I didn’t know what to do with the idea, especially because there were clear issues. So I paid money to host … practically nothing for a year.

Bad design

The original website looked beautiful at times, ugly at others. Images were sometimes hard to see over background colors. Unimportant elements were too big and attention-grabbing, while the important stuff was hard to see. I tried to combine five different fonts in a futile attempt to break any and all established rules of typography :p

The result?

What did it cost me? A few years. Maybe a hundred dollars of “wasted” money.

But I’ve learned all the skills I set out to learn. Websites, hosting, writing, it barely has any secrets for me and I can work with those skills professionally.

At no point did I need or want a degree or another system.

The same is true for all the other things I do. Read any of my devlogs (on Pandaqi Blog)—especially the older ones—to see just how many mistakes you can make while developing games. But I’m now at a point where I have actually sold games. People started finding and recommending my page of free board games on their own!

I discuss this further in a later chapter about “self study”.