Don't be afraid to stand out

Time and time and again I've been confronted with colleagues that prefer to stand in the background and not be differentiated from the rest. Nowadays this invariably makes me think: why the hell not? Sometimes I think it's a clear case of lack of confidence in themselves and their know-how, which is understandable. In those cases I like to remember a common quote by Richard Branson that says "If someone offers you an amazing opportunity...

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What good is being awesome if no one knows about it?

I was wondering the other day about one or two colleagues of mine that are really good at what they do. And I mean really good. I've had the pleasure of working with quite a few amazingly competent people in my short career, but surprisingly, not that many of our colleagues knew or know right now how good these people are. And that phenomenon has been relatively constant throughout the years. When you come to think of it, it's...

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On spreading yourself too thin

For the second time in a relatively short span, I've received the same advice from two different people: don't spread yourself too thin. It should be noticed that I've been receiving that same advice from friends for the past 4 or 5 years, but these last two people were not my friends, as in they didn't know of my propensity to throw myself into things. They were just faced with one of my bursts of creativity and reacted according to...

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GSummit 2014 @ San Francisco - Day 4

You thought GSummit ended with Neil Degrasse Tyson? Think again! There was still some pretty awesome things missing! First of all, I forgot to mention in my previous post a really cool session by Jake Orlowitz about how wikipedia counteracted their contributor turnover by introducing gamification. They created an onboarding experience that got new contributors up to speed in an hour, with lots of gamified elements and rapid feedback....

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GSummit 2014 @ San Francisco - Day 3

GSummit 2014's unnoficial last day (the day after was hands-on labs in the morning and card-playing in the afternoon!) started off as usual with networking over bagels with schmear and some brown water americans call coffee but in reality it's not. This day was somewhat unusual because after the first session, for the second and third morning slots, almost everyone in #TeamPregame was unsure of which session to attend. And not because...

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GSummit 2014 @ San Francisco - Day 2

How to explain what happened on GSummit's Day 2 in not that many words... wow that's hard! There were a lot of really good talks, even a couple of mind blowing ones and the chance to get our hands dirty. Also, you could say that Day 2 really focused on behavior: the science behind it and the small nuances that we, as gamification designers should be aware. And one thing I've learned from GSummit is to call myself a gamification designer. But...

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GSummit 2014 @ San Francisco - Day 1

So, Day 1 of GSummit promised to be an exciting one with Gabe Zichermann's Advanced Gamification Workshop on my schedule. After taking the online Udemy courses for levels 1 and 2, I was really curious to see what would the presence-is-required level 3 entail. I must admit that anticipation was probably the main enemy of this experience. It was unfair of me to expect Gabe to provide a clearly defined framework and a set of techniques...

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