Learn to Trust the Authority of Experts
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.
Learn to Trust the Authority of Experts
Often times, there would be more experienced people trying to give you advice. However, it is so easy to dismiss it and say “No, that’s not the way. This person doesn’t understand our business.” However, after being on the side of the more “experienced” person, I realized how sometimes it is very straight forward for the expert, and clients or mentees just can’t see their work from a third person perspective while being too attached to what they already have. After that, I have fully learned to trust the people who have more experience and expertise in a field that I haven’t been a lot of time in.
Imagine talking to yourself ten years later. I’m sure the you ten years later will tell you that you are doing lots of things incorrectly. I’m also sure you will listen because you believe that person has more experience than you right now and will tell you what is correct. Now the expert is somewhat like the you ten years later in the narrow field that he is expert about. Why would you not listen to his experience over your speculation? This principle underlies much of behavioral design — including the Octalysis Framework, which was built on years of studying what truly motivates human behavior.
Trusting the authority of experts is actually a skill that requires some heart to learn too. Try to learn that today. Understanding what gamification is and why experts in behavioral design see patterns others miss can be a good starting point for developing that trust.