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Author Credibility: Yu-kai Chou
Yu-kai Chou created the Octalysis Framework after studying gamification since 2003 — years before the term entered mainstream vocabulary. As a Human-Systems Architect & Behavioral Designer, his framework has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 Billion Users.
Chou has taught the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.
His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and Google Scholar — with 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.
My Gamification TEDx speech in Switzerland reached 100K!
A few years ago, I went to Lausanne, Switzerland to do a TEDx speech on my framework Octalysis Gamification.
It was my first time visiting Europe, and it was a huge blast.
It was a pretty difficult speech to do, since originally this talk was a 5-hour workshop, and I had to shrink it to a 17 minute talk.
Not only that, I had to include a bunch of videos and fun things to share to make it dynamic.
Of course, a TEDx talk is more like a brochure instead of a manual. The goal of a brochure is to get people to want to learn more.
Therefore, a lot of the deeper knowledge, including Level II and Level III Octalysis couldn’t be covered, but I had to make it fun.
The First-Sentence Fumble
Little known fact — I said the first sentence incorrectly, and for the first minute I was simply trying to recover from that.
Usually I just intuitively do my talks with my slides, but TEDx asked me to memorize my lines and rehearse with them a few times. I was all ready to go.
But then when I was onstage, the lighting was MUCH stronger than I expected. It threw me off and I uttered the sentence wrong.
It was supposed to be, “Imagine a world where WORK is obsolete — where LABOR is a thing of a past.” I said, “Imagine a world where LABOR is…” and then I felt sad.
It took me 1–2 minutes to pick myself back up again and be on my flow again.
I always wonder if the talk would have been more successful if I maintained strong energy from the beginning. Of course, we would never know.
What Happened After
Since then, I published my book Actionable Gamification, and have won two Gamification Guru of the Year awards by the Gamification World Congress.
Many fans, book readers, and clients have contacted me after watching that talk. I am grateful how much this talk has contributed to my accomplishments today.
Thank you TEDx, thank you Lausanne, and thank you Switzerland.
Related Reading
- The Octalysis Framework for Gamification & Behavioral Design
- Gamification to improve our world: Yu-kai Chou at TEDxLausanne
- What is Gamification?
- Consulting / Speaking / Workshops
- 90+ Gamification Stats, Examples & Cases with ROI
- Books by Yu-kai Chou