Ruthless curiosity, recreational obsessions and good views on gaming

Richard Mulholland, guest · [04:27]All right, so there's a couple of things and a couple of parts to this. The first thing is I think that we've been sold on a river, and the river we've been sold on is the idea that being successful is going to make you happy. And I actually don't think that's the case. In fact, what I say in that video is that you don't get to check the success box until you check the happy box. And I know that because I'm around entrepreneurs all the time, and I can't tell you how many of them on any metric of business success are more successful, way, way, way more successful than I am, but they're not happy. And they're constantly at work, and they're constantly putting their soul into their work, and they go home, and they always say, I just want to get home, and I want to switch off. But, you know, I've got the kids there, I've got to do this. I sit there, and I think, wow, this is so broken, because I have way less, maybe, financial resources than you, but I go home every day, I, you know, the end of the day comes, or maybe a bit early if I feel like it, and I go, and I engage with my hobbies, and I'm just generally a much happier person. Like, I'm a very happy person. And I realize that this role of hobbies was a big part to play with that. So I refer to them as recreational obsessions. Now, typically, what happens is people are only really obsessed with their work, with their vocation, but I have a number of obsessions that feed me. So, you know, again, when the lockdown happened, I, you know, I love, I love reading fiction, I love board games, I love riding my electric skateboard, like I, I like snowboarding, there's a lot of things, motorcycle riding that I'm obsessed with, and being able to move into one of those recreational obsessions and to shift my state, I think is what's allowed me to be happy. I don't switch off at the end of a workday, I switch on something else, and that's a big part of what I think where my, my enjoyment of life comes from.

Richard Mulholland, guest · [08:00]Yeah, so my first book I wrote is called Legacide, and I actually got to war with that idea quite early on. I, I really, really think it's problematic. If I did what I loved, I'd be a pizza delivery guy. You know, I would, I love motorcycles. You know, if I wanted to ride motorcycles all day, I'd go get a job for take a lot or something like this, right? That's not what I want to do. And in fact, what you invariably find is that people who do what they love end up not So my son wants to get into game design, and that's partially because of not so much the games he plays, but actually the board game stuff. They've been designing board games for me for my, for my birthday for years and these kind of things, you know, and so this is something that he wants to look at. But the, the people that he's been speaking to who are, who are in video games, they all tell him the same warning, just be, be ready to let go of your love, because you're not going to feel like playing video games when you come home after a day of video gaming. And he's okay with that. He's like, okay, fine, like I'm happy to make this my vocation and have another recreational obsession. And I'm sure there will be some times he wants to play, but I, I think that when you say yes to something being your primary vocation, then it's no longer your recreational obsession. You'll need to find something new. whereas instead of doing what you love, learn to love what you do. So I do presentations for goodness sake, like I make, help people be better at PowerPoint. I didn't get into that because I loved it, I got into it because I hated it. I thought presentations were so bad, and as entrepreneurs, we fix a problem or we fill a gap. You guys are changing the way people think about education, you're doing things differently. You didn't do that because you loved it and you felt everything was perfect, you didn't chase your passion, you chased your frustration, and you executed on that. And the other byproduct of that, by the way, is if you do what you love, then it already works. That means the opportunity there is, is somewhat less. If you find something that frustrates you and you fix it, well then there's a market there, because people, you know, can tap into that. So I always say chase your highest frustration, and then fall in love with solving the problem, and you can still love your work. Find something you hate and fix it, you will have the best day ever.

Richard Mulholland, guest · [11:38]I, I also think, you know, a lot of people worry about the, you know, this game design thing, and, you know, going to getting into video games, and this is just a, you know, it's, it's, first of all, we need to understand that what's big in our world isn't big in their world. You know, what's big in my world isn't big in your world, and that's, that's an important point of departure. This video game thing that they see as being a distraction for their kids. Video games are currently larger, so it's a seventy billion dollar industry, which is bigger than the fifty billion dollar Hollywood industry and the twenty billion dollar or nineteen billion dollar professional American sports industry. Getting into the video game industry, you can be an accountant, a designer, a writer, a set designer, a, you know, there's so many different things there. Your kids are training, they're learning, if that's a field they wanted to get into, you know, they're learning in their obsession at this stage, and again, this will hold them in good stead. So even if they become an accountant in this, in maybe a field that they're passionate about, they get a job at one of the big game publishers, and then they are able to make their recreational obsession work. That's okay. So right now, what I think at this stage, I think we should be encouraging our kids to chase anything that gets them excited. All I want is my kids, okay, and you're gonna have to probably bleep this, but we talk about having a gas tank. All I want My kid's gas tank, their give a shit tank to be full. The biggest problem with the world today is people that have an empty gas tank. If your give a shit tank is empty, you're not going to be motivating yourself to do anything. My son is very motivated by doing a destiny, getting onto destiny, meeting with his friends. You know, it took me ages to, to realize that, that the four kids, other kids that he's been speaking to online for the last five years are his best friends. He's met two of them in person. And for a while I was like, this is so crazy. And then I realized, you know, I speak to my best friends on Zoom all day long. And I, you know, one of them just moved to England. I don't see him every day. Like, like this is the reality we're in. So who am I to judge what his friendship should be like?

Richard Mulholland, guest · [14:52]There was a great book I read years ago, maybe when my, my son's eighteen now, he's in matric, I, I read it when he was maybe, I don't know, seven or eight, and it was called Everything Bad Is Good For You. And the entire premise was they explained, and this was already back then, the amount of thought processes. And so in board game, I rate in board games my enjoyment based on a decisions per minute scale. How many meaningful decisions do I have to make in a minute? And if I try to compare that to what my son is doing, he has to make decisions per second. But he is making decisions per second. That guy just ran out there. He is using this weapon. He's got that armor. This weapon I have is not going to work with that armor. I'm going to be jumping up across this. I've got to move out of the way of his weapon. I've got to switch my weapon to a different thing. And I should probably be moving forward. And I've got to time it because my weapon is optimized to do something at, you know, 0.3 seconds after he moves into my range. And fires it and then gets a headshot and makes a video of it and shows it to me at dinner. Now that's the computational processing that video gamers are doing. And parents are getting upset with them that they're just vegging their life away. My son's ability to compute and make good decisions under stressful situations, because it is stressful for him, is very real. This is not bad for you. This is a very, very lean in hobby. And it's a cooperative hobby, so he can't do it by himself. He has to work with other people. I think we are going to see a very positive upswing of behavior because of the level of decision making that this generation is having to do. And then, by the way, while he's doing that, he's watching YouTube videos on the side with other guys streaming. And invariably, if it's a break, he'll be checking out, you know, an anime, as you mentioned, or something like this, or a manga.

Richard Mulholland, guest · [28:11]So first of all, the most important hobby that I've ever had in my life that led to everything was reading fiction. So I started reading fiction, then I started reading fantasy. So I was reading a bunch of game books. The series I got into was a series called Bloodsword, and you would read a book, and it wasn't just a choose-your-own-adventure, you actually had to roll dice and make choices and go and fight things. From there, I decided that, okay, I want to get Dungeons and Dragons. And the funny thing about, so I was at quite a big school, and a lot of people don't want kids to be at big schools, but, you know, with lots of, so my year had ten classes. And the one advantage of that is that there are more outliers, there's more space for the outliers to fit in. everybody went to Feld School, and I didn't go, and I took my new, brand new red box of Dungeons and Dragons there, and two of the other kids who didn't go to Feld School, there was five of us in total, walked up and said, oh, we love that you're playing Dungeons and Dragons, but you bought the wrong box, you need to buy second edition, AD&D second edition. I started playing with them, we became friends for years and years and years and years, we role played all through into probably, I stopped for a couple of years while I was touring, but basically up until my late twenties. Dungeons and Dragons then led into Magic the Gathering, that was my most expensive obsession I've ever done.

Gershom Aitchison, host · [29:27]Tell me about it.

Richard Mulholland, guest · [29:29]Yeah. And then, and then there was a few years where it was very, very much like I would, I would always take a little game on holiday, and I would play on occasion, and then I took my son and my daughter to, Rage. Oh, it must be about eight or nine years ago now. And at Rage, they had a board game stand. And Richard Garfield, the founder of the guy who did, you know, created Magic the Gathering, he had designed a game called King of Tokyo. I bought that game, and the obsession just reignited. But my most consistent is reading fiction. Sorry, sorry, just, and a lot of people don't think this is, this is a hobby. I'm a deep introvert. For me, reading fiction is like my, probably my favorite, favorite, favorite thing to do, and I think it is the thing that's made me the smartest by far, and every fiction book I read has got monetary value, you know, two to one of a business book I read.

Gershom Aitchison, host · [33:09]So Richard Edu Inc, we're a small school, and our extracurricular activities are not big sports fields. We have a lot of sports kids, and we do cater to, you know, elite sports kids. But what we've done from the very beginning is we've created clubs in the afternoon, and those clubs come together based on teacher and student curiosities and where that juncture is. And some clubs last a term, some last a long time, some are structured by the school because of the teacher's passions, and some are generated by students. So as a departure point, you know, Dungeons and Dragons, the Dungeon Master is one of the students, and he drives the whole process. But the robotics is something that we use for the curriculum, but we've also created the space after school for kids to be able to join. And Mrs. Aitchison and I really believe that our jobs as the leadership of the school is to create spaces where children can explore curiosities and their passions. So if you're a robotics club member, for example, you have access to the robotics lab, that's the 3D printer, and it's expected that you have the responsibility to look after the things in that space. If you want to arrange in the holidays to come and work with the projects and things that you're doing, then you can do that. If you want to arrange in the weekends, you can do that. At break time, you can go into that space, and it's exclusively available to you because of your affiliation with the club, and we don't regulate what that looks like. And often the projects and the things that are happening in that space are not Specified, they're not dictated. It's more a case of, what are you building? That's interesting. What do you want to do with it type of thing. And just allowing them the space to tinker, as it were. The garage band does exactly the same thing. The equipment's there. You can go in and play whatever you want. I left school today and three of the students were busy playing, one on the drums, one on the guitar, one on the piano, and they were just tinkering around because we've created the space for them to do that.

Richard Mulholland, guest · [35:01]I mean, I think that's absolutely incredible. When I was at school and they found out about Dungeons and Dragons, they, they called my parents in and tried to have an exorcism. The world has changed. but, and I just, I mean, obviously, I jealously wish this was something that we had. But, you know, I have that now, and I think that it's such a pity that I can't imagine as a single parent listening to this that doesn't think that's amazing. My, I think we spend a lot of time worrying about the youth, and I think we spend not nearly enough time worrying about people my age, you know, I'm 46, right? And I think that don't just be excited about this stuff, like if you have that, start that in your business, like people should be doing this in their companies and places to, you know, to make play and recreational obsession a thing. Like, you know, Google says it has that, you know, that 20% time, but that's still doing work. I'm like, give people more time, like encourage people to have these recreational obsessions. You know, ruthless curiosity and recreational obsession.