Dope Hacking

How I gamified my Substack goals with ChatGPT

Photo by ELLA DON on Unsplash

Let’s Start with Dope

I think about dopamine all the time.

So much so that I’m tempted to turn this post into a deep dive on dopaminergic cycles, and just generally geek out about neurochemistry. But I think that might be a betrayal of the generous offering of your time, so I’ll resist.

Instead, for the sake of context, I’ll do my best to briefly describe this cycle, which is a series of events involving the release, action, and reuptake of dopamine in the brain, strongly dictating the processes of motivation and mastery.

These are (roughly) the stages of the cycle:

1. Anticipation: Before you actually do pretty much anything, your brain starts releasing dopamine, which focuses you up and motivates you to take some specific action, like eating a cookie, firing up an episode of your favorite show, or (if you’re lucky) putting on your running shoes.

2. Action: In the middle of actually doing the thing, you get more dopamine, especially if the thing ends up paying off in the way you expected. Best example: video games. (Much more on this in a moment.)

3. Reward: The big hit of dopamine at the end. Your brain’s way of saying, “Great job! You did the thing, and it was great!” The purpose of this is to reinforce the behavior to make it more likely you go back and do it again soon.

None of that should be surprising or unfamiliar to you, but it’s helpful to refresh, especially to get a good grasp of a couple other important principles:

1. Synaptic Plasticity: A fancy term that describes the way the brain associates specific actions or stimuli with the release of dopamine. This is how neural pathways get strengthened, to the point that they become almost automatic.

2. Adaptation & Novelty: The sad fact is you can’t get the same amount of dopamine from the exact same thing forever. Over time, your brain dials down the amount of dope you get for the same thing. This is why we seek novelty — new shit triggers bigger hits.

Congratulations! You are now an expert on the dopaminergic cycle. Please leave a comment at the end so that I can award you your certificate.

On Gaming

Don’t worry, I’m not under the delusion that I’m breaking any new ground here. Anyone who has experienced the sustained thrill of a role playing game, or the addictive pull of something like Clash of Clans, or even chess, will have some experiential knowledge of how games hijack the dopaminergic cycle.

But, again, for the sake of context, let’s break down some of the specifics:

• Engagement: Inside of the game, you will be presented with an unending sequence of tasks and challenges that demand attention and skill. And taking action always produces immediate feedback, all of which triggers dopamine release.

• Micro-rewards: Think collecting coins in Mario, or XP in…pretty much every game I’ve ever played. It doesn’t take much to keep the dopaminergic system continually activated, which is why you can easily play for hours without getting bored or tired.

• Bigger rewards: This is stuff like loot, upgrades, badges, achievements, and even the construct of “leveling up,” which is often just a number that represents a basket of other in-game rewards. The prospect of these rewards keeps the dope engine running when you’re in the middle of working through some longer problem or task.

• Skill Progression: Not only can the feeling of progress trigger a lot of dopamine release, but as you get better at a game, certain aspects will get easier, while also unlocking more difficult challenges. This, of course, reinforces the pleasure you get from mastering a skill, on the way to greater mastery, establishing a positive feedback loop.

I could go on, but you very much get the idea.

The Dirty Dopamine of Mastery

When people talk about mastery, they love to lionize images of grit and determination. It’s Rocky Balboa punching slabs of meat and jogging up stairs. It’s orange sweat dripping off of people in Gatorade commercials. It’s coach Boone shouting “Water makes you weak!” at a bunch of high school football players under a hot Virginia sun.

We tend to admire people who “put in the reps.” We mythologize the olympian gold-medalist who kept training while her competition slept. We have an almost religious respect for the people who sacrifice everything on the alter of excellence.

But what about the guy who spends fourteen hours a day playing World of Warcraft?

Once you fully grasp the power of dopaminergic cycles, you’ll get the creeping sense that he’s not all that different from the gold-medalist.

It’s just that they picked different games.

Mastery, in and of itself, isn’t virtuous. It’s just gaming. If you dig into the story of Michael Phelps, for instance, you’ll find a young man who was pressured into swimming by other people until it became the only thing he knew, at the expense of everything else in his life. One of the most successful Olympic athletes of all time had to radically change his relationship to the game, or it would have taken his life, just like any other addiction.

This isn’t to say that mastery isn’t admirable, but I think we should be more careful about ascribing certain virtues to it. Sure, there’s such a thing as grit, as determination, as ferocity and ambition and indomitability — all admirable qualities, certainly, given the proper context.

But let’s not kid ourselves. Nobody gains mastery in any domain without, in a sense, gamifying it. In other words, the most spectacular achievements are, almost without exception, the product of playing the right games.

Game Selection

If we can understand and isolate the qualities of gaming that make it so addictive, then we should be able to apply those same qualities to other goals.

For many successful people, the gamification of their goals is an emergent phenomenon. Thanks to good parenting, or mentorship, or coaching, or whatever, they have managed to find themselves in a situation where their work often feels like play, which just means that their dopaminergic cycles align with their vocations.

Good for them!

But for anyone who hasn’t achieved some sort of domain mastery (me and statistically speaking probably you too), this didn’t quite happen. Instead, we’re stuck with whatever G&D (grit and determination) we can muster, which, compared to our heroes, never seems to be enough.

But once you see through the popular mythos enshrined by brain-dead clichés like “no pain no gain,” and understand how dopamine actually works, you can do the gamification thing on purpose, and start winning a hell of a lot more, no matter how paltry your precious supply of G&D.

Speaking of that supply, where do you think it even comes from? It comes from dopamine. When you’re deeply embedded in a game, your G&D becomes almost inexhaustible.

So, the most important question anyone has to answer is, what game do you want to play?

My Big Goal

Of all my goals, the one that excites me the most is to grow an audience on Substack large enough to make a modest living as a writer.

Let’s do a quick meta-analysis of this goal:

• It’s long-term. I won’t be able to do this by pushing hard for a week, or a month, or even a year.

• It’s complicated. There are lots of different things to do, to test, to invent. Not only in terms of what I write, but in terms of how I try to get that writing in front of more people, and how I manage my relationship with my readership.

• It’s hard. No matter what, it’s going to take a whole lot of metaphorical sweat and perhaps actual tears.

If all I’ve got is my own G&D, I’m doomed.

Is not this the perfect opportunity for gamification??

Fortunately, writing on Substack is already a somewhat gamified experience. Likes and comments, for instance, do a lot of heavy-lifting when it comes to positive reinforcement. They’re like the writer’s equivalent of micro-rewards.

But, as good as it is, it’s not always enough. In the face of a goal as grandiose as the one I’ve described, it’s very easy to get discouraged, fall out of sync with the dopaminergic cycle, and become overwhelmed at the prospect of somehow climbing back into it.

If you’ve been a subscriber to this here newsletter for the past few months, you might have guessed that this happened to me.

[Side note: In my absence, I’ve been grinding away at some larger projects that I’m excited to share more about soon.]

Which is why, last week, I decided I needed to slather a lot more gamification cream onto this whole situation.

To get me started, I turned to our mutual friend, ChatGPT.

Thanks, Mr. Robot

I started with this prompt:

You are a life coach who is an expert at gamification. Your specialty is converting goals into addictive games.

ChatGPT’s immediate response was a two page, eight step guide to gamification.

Whoah OK slow down.

Me: For the following interactions, please keep your answers brief and conversational, unless I specifically ask for a detailed breakdown.

ChatGPT: Absolutely! What goal would you like to gamify?

What followed was a surprisingly smooth and helpful conversation about how to gamify my grand Substack goals. At the end, ChatGPT actually walked me through a step-by-step process to build a point-tracking system using Google Sheets and Forms.

The whole thing took an afternoon.

The Substack Game

By now, I can see you nodding your head irritably and saying OK get to the point and tell me what you built.

I kept it very simple.

The primary objective was to attach a few more incentives to the things I want to get into the habit of doing consistently.

Like any good character, my Master Substacker starts at Level 1. Leveling up earns rewards and, even more importantly, gives me that sweet hit of dopamine by concretizing my sense of progress.

How do I level up? By earning XP.

How do I earn XP? Like this!

• 10 points for publishing a newsletter.

• 3 points for posting a Note.

• 2 points for replying to comments or emails.

I’m debating whether or not I should be able to earn XP for new subscribers, but the jury’s still out on that one. On the one hand, it’s not something I can directly control. On the other hand, there are plenty of things I can do that increase the odds.

So anyway, now I’ve got this Google form that automatically populates a spreadsheet to track my XP and current level, and suddenly, hilariously, arbitrarily, I’m more motivated to do things like publish newsletters, post Notes, and reply to comments and emails.

Because points!

Mystery and Magic

Trust that it is just as obvious to me as it is to you that the point of this isn’t the points. Deep down, I don’t care at all about this dumb game I made up.

But, somehow, it still works.

It tends to shock us to discover how well things work that shouldn’t work, like placebos, affirmations, and hypnosis.

We are made of mystery and magic.

For instance, let’s say you hate jogging. Most people hate jogging. Probably because it objectively sucks. But if you go out for a jog, and say to yourself, right at the moment of peak discomfort, “I love this, this is awesome, I love this,” over and over, it will start to be true. After just a few days, you’ll start to look forward to the chest pains and the sore legs and the sweaty pits.

Here’s the thing, you don’t even have to believe it at all. If you say the words, just repeat those words, they start to be true.

So I made this silly game, where I give myself meaningless points for doing things that I want to have done, but sometimes don’t feel like doing.

And by golly it really does work.

This week, I’ve written more, published more, and engaged more with people on Substack than I have in months. And, as predicted, this stuff is self-reinforcing. It seems likely I’ll forget all about my point system pretty soon, because I’ll have effectively hooked Substacking back into my dopaminergic cycles.

But then, if I ever fall back off the wagon, The Substack Game will be here, just waiting for me to pick it up and start playing.

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Speak!

• Are you persuaded, or are you pretty sure I’m delusional?

• Have you ever gamified any of your goals? Did it work?

• What is one of your most important goals that seems perpetually out of reach? How do you think you could hijack your dopaminergic cycles to achieve it?

• Are you married, partnered or single? Oh, sorry, wrong form.

• How many quesadillas would it take to cover the entire Empire State Building?

• [some other question about space or rockets or something]