win_loop

have a draft of an essay i’ve sort of lazily idling on titled “win loops” and i might as well just tweet it out.

funnily, me quoting this tweet (really just to springboard off the phrase “biggest wins”, it’s almost unrelated to rival’s tweet) is itself an example of a win_loop

first a story of strange, repetitive “failure”. when i was a kid there were some video games that i liked playing, even though i didn’t really understand the mechanics of the games. one is playing GTA not knowing anything about the missions. another was how I played simcity 3000.

i’d open the map creator, flatten out the entire map, then I’d spend all of my money building roads that outlined the outermost square of the map. i’d spend so much $ building these roads that i’d get fired as mayor bc the maintenance cost would bankrupt the non-existent city.

I repeated this cycle endlessly. I suppose you could say maybe it wasn’t a failure in the sense that I really liked building roads. that feels like cope, tho. i just didn’t know how to play the game. i would have enjoyed building roads more in the context of a functional city

(what you’re supposed to do is to lay out a bunch of zones: residential, commercial, industrial. you connect these with roads. also build a power plant, and power lines. then sims show up and build buildings and pay taxes. now you can afford to build n maintain more roads)

what i just described is an example of the core win_loop in simcity 3000: you need sims and to make them happy → they pay taxes → you get money → you can do more things → get more sims who pay more taxes → you can care about things like education and healthcare and tech

now lets talk about sth that i have some positive experiences in, like writing. before i get any further i guess i’ll drop my hypothesis, which is: anywhere you see success, there must surely be win_loops going on. obvious? maybe. but ppl seldom rigorously examine them imo

i think the best win_loops in my life have revolved around writing online. i have written what casual people might consider an insane amount. (tho serious 0.1% pro writers would consider them table stakes, I think.) almost 250k tweets here, prob 2m+ words elsewhere

how? it’s definitely not that i’m a focused or disciplined person in general, lol. i’m quite sloppy and disorganized and don’t really have good habits. in fact, i did the largest volume of my writing from 2013-2018 on my commutes, and i haven’t been able to replicate that since

so what’s going on there? to understand this i break out my win_loop analysis: prior to me becoming a full time writerperson via my twitter blowing up, writing for me was an act of desperation, to keep my creative spirit alive amidst realworld drudgery

bills, mortgages, deliverables, etc etc were driving me to the edge. i clung on to this somewhat self-tormented mindset of “I have to write >1k words/day on my commutes or i’m fucked as a creative”. this raised the stakes tremendously for me. i wrote 500,000+ words like that

those stakes aren’t really real to me anymore. like, i won, lmao. i sell ebooks in my sleep now. i can just hang out with my wife and son and chill. i could probably almost kinda retire if i wanted to. so imo i have to invent or recreate new win_loops if i want things to change

there’s many different ways to think about win_loops. like, i do still enjoy tweeting. each tweet feels like a micro-win. that’s satisfying. but it’s not BIG satisfying. lemme invent some fake play number/points to try and convey the feelings (i dont actually think in these # s)

if i just lounge on twitter all day, that usually averages to sth like a “50 points” kinda day. which is much better than a “0 points” day where i do fuckall. on a GOOD day, where I write a really meaningful thread, or help a friend make a breakthrough, etc, it could be 500pts

on the other hand, writing something REALLY substantial? writing an essay like We Were Voyagers feels like 10,000pts. Are You Serious felt like 50,000 pts. Books like Friendly Ambitious Nerd and Introspect feel like 1,000,000pts++ and they residually keep earning more points

lemme check on those numbers… am i saying that Are You Serious felt like 100 Very Good days on Twitter? yes. it felt that good. but here’s wassup. the twitter win_loop is very easy for me to participate in. writing books, and good essays, is goddam fucken hard biiitch!!

a thing that i believe, but haven’t yet proven, but hope to prove, even if only to myself, is that the moment i figure out a working win_loop for me for my substack, I should be able to “effortlessly” publish like a hundred essays in a year. i already have the drafts

the imaginary point system thing is an interesting thing to play with. can i imagine writing another book for another 1 million points? theoretically, someday, yeah. could i work on such a book right now? absolutely not, i freeze and flinch at the thought. i got too much mess

that’s the interesting thing about imaginary points. it’s like children’s play, improv. theoretically speaking you can do anything, but in practice, you’re semi-constrained by a kind of magical plausibility. i find myself wondering, what could i get 1 million points from?

ok now lets switch entirely from everything else to talking about fitness, which is actually the thing that got me pondering all of this lately.

i’ve always been sort of moderately fit for a sedentary laptop worker. tall, skinny, i used to be a picky eater with anxiety and a poor appetite but i fixed that. i sorta cycle i’d say what feels like 40th percentile to 60th percentile fitness. i’d hit the gym every 2yrs or so

i’d go hard for maybe ~3 months, see some gains that i’m happy with, and then typically i’d either get bored, or i’d get some minor injury or strain, and then i’d fall off the wagon for the next 6-18 months before starting over. it’s quite funny to read my captions every 2 yrs

this year though i feel like something different is happening. i feel like i’m inhabiting a win_loop re: my workouts that’s much more robust than my previous ones. i feel a bit shy talking about it since its just been a month but i feel very very good about this one

anyway it feels premature to talk about the fitness stuff, i wouldn’t bother listening to me about it until at least 3-6 months of proven “this isn’t like the previous cycles”. but i saw rivals tweet, and i thought, eh, might be fun to just tweet the draft out

this is a sort of win in that i now.. can drop that draft from my plate, I guess? maybe i should spend an hour doing a thread abt one of my drafts each day. that sounds like a great idea actually. it uses my established win_loop of twitter poasting to chisel away at my drafts

this took an hour, which might seem wasteful to some, but it actually saved me like 3 more hours of working on a draft in isolation and thinking “nyeh, that’s not right”. it’s an investment in the context of the longer game i’m playing:

ok now lets switch entirely from everything else to talking about fitness, which is actually the thing that got me pondering all of this lately.

I think i’ll end on that, which is that even “losing” repeatedly at a particular game can be winning at the metagame, as long as you’re learning from yr experience, or sometimes even just eliminating the things that don’t work (…which is learning from your xp) gn. 200 points

actually if i start a new habit of tweeting out a thread about a draft each day, that’ll be like 1000 points/day minimum. cautiously excited. about these imaginary points i just made up. i am so serious

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win_loop