Ramping up Partnerships for Joint Success on our Earth Server

In the content in my upcoming second book: 10,000 Hours of Play (10K HP), I divide life’s journey into 6 Actionable Steps to level up and live a fulfilling life. (My first book Actionable Gamification sold over 100K copies)

Within 10K HP, Steps 5 is to Build Your Alliance, which is to establish allies and partnerships that further your journey towards the Game of Life. 

That’s what I’m working on these days.

For my education platform Octalysis Prime and my Web3 project Metablox, I’m looking to establish and scale up new partnerships.

Joint Utility, Access, and Promotions

For instance, I’m starting a monthly Yu-kai Chou Web3nar where I talk about the latest trends in Web3, Tokenomics, Metaverse, Gamification, and more.

The next Yu-kai Chou Web3nar will be on the Starbucks Web3 Loyalty Program (Odyssey) – evaluation of their experience and flaws in their designs.

It will cost $500 to attend. However, if you are an OP Member ($50/mo), or own one of our Metablox NFTs ($100-$750), you can attend the Yu-kai Chou Web3nar every month without paying.

If you own a project (Web3 or not) and would like to partner up with my endeavors, whether it’s giving your members access to my monthly Web3nar, discounts on OP or Metablox, or joint promotional opportunities, feel free to reach out to me (reply to this email). 

I’m also happy to explore being on your Podcast, Twitter Spaces, or doing a speech/workshop for your group if you are interested. 

Of course, I won’t be able to partner with everyone who reaches out for obvious reasons, but in life there’s no harm to try (and try again).

An amazing free Webinar and PDF Guide by an Octalysis Prime Member/Partner

Speaking of Partnerships, one knowledge/promotional Partnership I am proud to share about is with Xperiencify.

The Xperiencify Founders have been members in the Octalysis Prime Community for a long time, and due to their success, I interviewed them as part of our OP curriculum. I also became an Advisor for them.

What’s mind-blowing is that they were able to apply the Octalysis Framework into creating online courses (among other skills), and amazingly sold over $33 Million in revenue for 11,529 students and counting!

Since I admire their masterful skills and am happy to see Octalysis being applied to their success, I wanted to share their secrets on creating wildly profitable online courses to you.

The first is a free PDF guide called The Dopamine Button.

Continue reading Learn from an Octalysis Prime Member who made $33M

I debated for a long time whether I should write this blogpost – because as a reputable known person, it’s extremely embarrassing. I had a lapse in intelligence and suffered humiliation and financial loss because of it.

However, I decided to write this because that’s how the Twitter Scammers get their way – people are too embarrassed to call them out so they keep scamming.

I wanted people who follow my work to avoid making idiotic mistakes that I make and prevent this terrible experience that I went through. So here you go:

Here’s the story of how I got scammed for the first time in my life (after fending off dozens of scammers), and the heartbreaking fact that Twitter wouldn’t even allow me to report the scammer (and hence, the scammer is still out there scamming people before my eyes).

Specifically, I got scammed by a person pretending to be a reputable YouTuber on Twitter and lost $400 as I pulled the plug right before losing more.

This post about the Twitter Scammer is broken into three sections:

1. How I got scammed
2. Why I couldn’t report this on Twitter
3. Some lessons to avoid being scammed in the future

The pandemic of Twitter Scammers

Twitter scams are quite common. The fact that people can change their Twitter Handles and IDs very easily – while useful – also leads to scammers constantly changing their identities while having an account that seems to be long lasting and credible.

There’s also a ton of bots on Twitter, which allows fake profiles to look like they have a lot of followers. This is the reason why Elon Musk recently withdrew from his offer to buy Twitter.

But the craziest thing is, after an hour of trying, there is no valid way to report a scammer on Twitter (only other things), until I finally gave up.

Without anything else I could do while knowing that this Twitter Scammer is scamming other people constantly even right now, I decided to write this blogpost.

How I dodged a Blue Check Twitter Scammer

Continue reading Problem: I got scammed on Twitter but Twitter won’t allow me to report it

This is a Memory from Metablox.co, my NFT Platform aiming to preserve humanity’s most important memories onto the Blockchain. Check out the Memory (and more photos) here: Metablox – NFTs powered by real life memories

This was the second time I hosted the Octalysis Gamification Full Day Workshop at The Vault Coworking space in San Francisco.

The reason why I used this space is because I was part of the Founders Network, created by a good friend Kevin Holmes. It’s a network of Founders helping Founders. I asked if anyone had a good venue suggestion that I could use.

Kevin D Smith was kind enough to share his space The Vault with me, and as a benefit The Vault Members could attend too (my workshops can run up to $1000 per person). For this workshop, it turns out that Verizon sent quite a few of their employees to this event.

Since I was hosting a gamification workshop, I brought in a lot of fun game props. The Plants vs Zombies Flower and the Final Fantasy VII Cloud Sword was a favorite. 

One of the innovative things I did for this workshop is that when people contribute or answer questions, I give them a magnetic dart. At the end of the workshop, everyone plays a dart throwing game.

Everyone has one score, but if you have more darts you get more tries. You could see for the whole day, people were eager to get more darts because they were afraid to only have one dart and it wouldn’t even make the board. 

As you can see people had a lot of fun playing the dart throwing game towards the end. Even the online audiences (who was in a different timezone and pulled an all-nighter for this workshop) asked if I could turn the webcam and they wanted to see who would win the event. 

Towards the end, the winner of the Dart throwing game received an Apple Watch.

However, awkwardly, a week later the winner had to return the Apple Watch because they said Verizon was the company that sponsored them to attend the workshop, but due to company policy, they cannot accept these rewards at the end. 

Still everyone had a great time, and I hope by now they have all applied the Octalysis knowledge to all corners of the world!

As you are well aware, the world’s economy is in turmoil due to a combination of inflation, COVID-19, war, and commodities/supply chain shortages.

As we are officially in a recession (and things are looking to become way worse before becoming better), no investment market has been safe from huge declines — crypto, stocks, even gold and bonds have been suffering greatly.

So what do we do in this chaos? Where do we invest our time and money to not only protect what we have, but thrive to ascend above our environment in this new world?

If you look at the Hero’s Journey (or any game), at the beginning there is usually some shock in the system that changes the whole world negatively.

This becomes the call to adventure for the main character (you) to begin a heroic journey.

If there was no negative shock, then the hero would just stay in their comfort zones and not become heroic.

But the journey is still uncomfortable and scary.

There’s usually a “refusal of the call” where the hero still doesn’t want to go outside their comfort zone and change the course of this new world of chaos.

That’s usually when some kind of aid or mentor (potentially me, but could be anyone you respect and want to learn from) gives them the extra encouragement and reassurance to take on the heroic path.

Okay, so what’s this heroic path, and what do I actually do in this recession?

I’ve said this before, and as cliché as it sounds, in a recession, you want to double down on investing into YOURSELF and your Growth.

Even in good markets, you could make 0.1% — 20% returns with a variety of risk profiles, but if you invest in yourself and become more skilled/knowledgable/effective, you are GUARANTEED to reap returns from the investment for your entire life.

For example, I bought Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking: Fast & Slow for $50 back in the day, and the knowledge I obtained from it at least helped me make $400,000 more — either because I used the knowledge to close a number of client projects (each worth $100K-$200K), or it was the key knowledge that formed my designs for these client projects.

The crazy thing is, I will keep reaping benefits for the next 50 years from this small investment in money (but larger investment in time).

This is just one example, but there are a lot of great pieces of work and knowledge where my return was actually much higher than buying my first bitcoin in 2013, as crazy as that sounds.

Ever heard about people going back to getting an MBA or Law School when they got laid off during a recession?

That’s because they know at that point, they can only invest in their skill growth, to prepare for the time the economy is strong again.

But why wait for being desperate before doing the most effective thing? During a recession you want to build your super powers so you can start dominating when the timing is ripe.

So how do I invest in myself and my growth?

There are a lot of ways to invest in yourself and your growth.
As mentioned above, if you want you should go buy Thinking: Fast & Slow and read it 3–4 times.

Or you can absorb Robert Cialdini’s work on Applied Psychology as that has also been a six digit gainer for me.

You could also read a bio like Elon Musk’s and see how accomplished people get to where where they are in life via the choices they made on that journey.

Or you can look into what I’ve worked tremendously hard on for the past 6 years to offer people who follow my work: Octalysis Prime.

Octalysis Prime is like a Gamified Mentorship Journey where you essentially get to download my brain and access me directly.

I’ve made over 900 videos of my greatest learnings/insights/case studies on how to live a more effective life: from productivity, to behavioral design, to parenting, to career, to managing finances.

To be clear, I’m no Elon Musk (I learned a lot from his bio), and don’t have random Lambo’s lying there in my garage next to my garage bookshelves, but I’ve definitely mastered some techniques and systems in my life that made me effective at things I do.

My design work has empowered over 1 Billion Users. I’ve sold 100K books with at least a handful of billionaires being fans of my work. I’ve taught at Stanford/Yale/Oxford/Tesla/Google/Uber/IDEO, and was rated the #1 Gamification Guru in the world 3 out of 4 years.

For $50/mo, OP Members get to download my brain and have weekly Live Coaching Sessions (in a group) with me.

They also get my full Masterclass content which I ran in 2020 on the 5-Step Octalysis Design that we charge $100K-$200K to implement for clients (the workshop was $1000 per person and had 17 hours of content) as well as my latest research/learning/insights on everything Octalysis.

So how do I know this works?

The proof that OP works is that more than 80% of the Consultants/Designers I hired for my own consulting firm The Octalysis Group came out of Octalysis Prime.

It’s literally the best things I have to offer, and I would not be hiring them and putting them in front of my clients like Microsoft or Lego if they didn’t learn everything it takes to represent my work and my brand.

The proof that OP is engaging can be seen from OP Members that have been logging in EVERY SINGLE DAY for years (we know because we have streak rewards), who have consumed all my 900+ videos and pushing me to make more faster.

We have a DAU/MAU (Daily Active User/Monthly Active User) of 38%, which is pretty unheard of in the online education space.

So if you want to start investing in yourself and start to thrive in this new chaotic world, I strongly suggest that you check out Octalysis Prime (we fully guarantee full refunds if you don’t like it anyway).

It’s been a long two years since I’ve written my last update. Things have been pretty crazy.

At first I thought no one would have noticed as who cares about a random person’s yearly update, but I started getting repeated messages from distant friends on how they haven’t received my update emails for a long time and asked if they have been removed from the list somehow.

I guess people do notice when I slack off on stuff like this.

The past two years have been pretty wild (it’s long but hey – two years of updates!).

Here’s the tl;dr

1. I moved my entire family back to Taiwan March of 2020
2. Twin daughters Symphony & Harmony Chou are almost 4
3. Consulting Company (Octalysis Group) and Education Platform (Octalysis Prime) growing and doing well.
4. I was fortunate enough to also teach my Octalysis Framework to Yale & Oxford University. Google Scholar shows over 1500 academic journals and PhD thesis
5. My book has sold more than 100,000 copies
6. I spent some time as Head of Creative Labs and Head of Digital Labs at HTC, contributing to the future of AR/VR and the Metaverse
7. I started my own NFT project called Metablox with my 16 year work partner Jun Loayza who is from Google/Youtube. Was self-funding but recently a friend convinced us to take his $100K investment so thought might as well open a round of investments.

Continue reading Yu-kai Chou Personal Update 2021