Of the two of us, Reshan is the gamer. He enjoys video games, and has developed a discerning palate based on his understanding of his own learning style and the particular problems he enjoys solving.

The first time Reshan used Microsoft's Xbox original Kinect product (a camera and infrared motion sensor control for the gaming console), he was instantly engaged. He could swing his arm in a bowling motion and the character on the screen would bowl a ball. Interesting. Novel. Fun.

But soon he found that swinging his arm in the air and seeing a visual representation of the motion on a screen was not the way he most enjoyed playing a video game. The game did not become a narrative worth investing himself in continuously; he wasn't motivated to climb its particular levels or talk to his friends about how to approach problems within the game; he did not want to wear the logo of the game on a shirt to tell the world that he was not just a player, but a living, breathing extension of the game, someone who might run back through scenarios while waiting online or chatting with friends.

But why?

For one, as game scholars Katie Salen Tekinbas and Eric Zimmerman might say, the bowling game only offered him what game designers would call “discernibility,” wherein “the result of the game action is communicated to the player in a perceivable way” (Tekinbas & Zimmerman, 2003). Clearly, this game offered plenty of that.

It did not offer him an outcome that was “integrated,” though. Integrated action in a game means that “an action a player takes not only has immediate significance in the game, but also affects the play experience at a later point in the game” (p. 35). Though the game might do that for some players, it did not do it for Reshan; he could not see the through‐line from action to later significance. The game could not become “meaningful play” for him. Tekinbas and Zimmerman explain further:

Playing a game means making choices and taking actions. All of this activity occurs within a game‐system designed to support meaningful kinds of choice‐making. Every action taken results in a change affecting the overall system of the game. (Tekinbas & Zimmerman, 2003, p. 33)

Meaningful choice‐making is the key here, and it is quite obvious when an experience does not generate or offer it for a participant. In those cases, the game – or product or service call or training – exists as an end in itself, like a shovel or a robo‐call or a training that leads to a certificate, and that's it.

On the other hand, the game can be a beginning in itself: a multiplier, and amplifier, of the player and the player's experience. A shovel that makes you somehow forget that you are shoveling. A training that not only gives you a certificate but also leaves you connected to a network of learners with whom you can continue to interact and from where you can draw support as you return to your job. A robo‐call that leads you to a human voice when things get complicated or emotional. An experience – with a product, solution, training, and so on – that allows the user to answer a resounding yes to the questions, “Is this delightful? Will I be able to be a better version of myself – doing better things – now that I have had this experience?”

Delight is the game you want to keep playing, the game in which your commitment and your personal engagement are critical components. As the designer of such experiences, in the Jersey City parlance referenced earlier, you extend the thing by making it possible for your users to access something around the thing.

Search for Meaning and Help Others Find It

We don't want to give off the wrong impression. Delight may be a game you want to keep playing, but that doesn't mean that a delightful experience will always be easy or easeful. Novelty is easy, but fades. Delight can be easy or hard, but it stays. And it's the “or hard” that we need to focus on briefly so that it doesn't get lost in familiar connotations of our chosen category.

Learning important things is not easy; learning important things requires effort; learning important things is ultimately worth the effort since doing so leads the learner‐practitioner to not only acquire knowledge and skills, but also to tap a vein of meaning that can be self‐reinforcing over time.

Teachers know all this, of course, and send out search parties of students all the time. If a student can find deep meaning in an assignment or course, everybody wins. The teacher does her job and the student hits the learning target. More important, the student learns how to learn – learns what learning feels like. The student may forget the concept, but if she falls in love with the search for knowledge, then that's the person you want to hire, that's the person you want on your team, that's the future leader of your company.

Teachers don't call the path “delight.” They often refer to it, instead, as the “zone of proximal development,” a term coined by Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky to describe the space that offers the right kind of challenge, the right kinds of fulfillment, for learners (Vygotsky, 1978). A good teacher pushes students to do things that are just difficult enough. If a task is too difficult, a good teacher knows, students will lose interest and perhaps turn against the assignment or task. But if it's too easy, it deadens learning, too, as too‐easy tasks lead students to either develop unhealthy illusions about their capacities or to, again, lose interest. To stay in the ZPD or just‐right zone for learning, students often need what is called scaffolding: something or someone they can lean on when they feel like they cannot take the next necessary step.

Moving forward in your learning, or in a meaningful experience, is not always going to be easy, and it is not always going to provide the dopamine boost that a novel experience provides (that's why it requires a scaffold). A month‐long hike is going to have its very low, very slow, very boring moments, but it can still be cumulatively transformative. Writing or reading a book could be the same kind of hard slog – and similarly transformative. The teacher – or leader, seller, service professional, or trainer – shouldn't shy away from dips or what is drab, either. Boredom does not have to be the enemy of delight or meaning.

And, in fact, seeing it clearly helps us to avoid unnecessary avoidance of it.

In an article for Harvard Ed. Magazine, Zachary Jason weaves together some leading educational thinkers to talk about the cost of boredom for learners. Boredom admittedly has had a nefarious effect on student learning across the nation. It, admittedly, can lead students to turn away from school, away from teachers, away from things designed to help them.

But Jason doesn't only present boredom in a superficial or typical way. He digs around it. He recognizes, in some ways, its uses. To do anything at a very high level, you have to deal with some of the boring parts; you have to deal with repetitive practice; you have to do things that don't spark interest and excitement. The problem with boredom, then, is often not boredom itself, but the way it is packaged by educators and experts. According to Associate Professor Jal Mehta, whom Jason cites in his article, “We haven't created trajectories where students can see the meaning and purpose that would make the necessary boredom endurable.” Additionally, according to lecturer and author Todd Rose, “We need to get away from thinking that the opposite of ‘bored’ is ‘entertainment.’ [The opposite of bored is] ‘engaged’” (Jason, 2017).

So there we have it. If we make moves only to avoid boredom – in those we teach, train, lead, serve, or to whom we sell – then we may very well be attacking the wrong enemy. Establishing the right trajectory is critical in that it takes the learning out of the mere moment and puts it into a more inspiring and engaging story. (Ideally, a story of deep meaning.) It also prevents the more entertaining or temporarily stimulating choice that allows a learner (or user) to quickly sidestep a slower or more tedious part of a necessary process – one that might actually be good for them or helpful to them.

Boredom is not the enemy – poor teaching is.

Quiet students in a classroom might be completely off the teacher's task. (They might be watching a video or engaging in a chat with a student in another class.) They are bored and disengaged because they cannot connect the task to a personally fulfilling trajectory.

Excited students might be responding to a mere trick or joke – or something that happened outside of class. They are giving off the illusion of being engaged, and not bored, but only because they are temporarily entertained.

Disconnected tasks or activities grind learning to a halt, eliminating the potential of classrooms and schools. Likewise, disconnected companies squander opportunities to delight – to add value and to focus on the particular needs of – a particular client or customer or employee base.

Remember This Formula: Novelty + Trajectory = Okay

Novelty may capture attention, but without the participant's ability to build deeper meaning around a product or experience, it will not stick. Here's an example of novelty that works – because it connects a student to a continuously meaningful and personally relevant experience, one that allows him to become a better version of himself, doing better things, now that he routinely has this experience.

Zach Sevrens – a sophomore in high school when we spoke to him – was doing what most high schoolers in America are doing when they are sophomores: trying to figure out how to be students, how to juggle responsibilities, how to become productive citizens. For Zach, the path toward those aspirations would come through organization. As a busy young man, he knew that he would only be able to juggle competing priorities effectively if he had a solid organizational structure on which to rely. He tried out a few different systems, but only one moved from novelty to meaning – and stuck. Here are Zach's own words:

I needed a way to organize my work and be able to see what I had finished and still needed to do, but I love using my computer. So I decided to find an electronic checklist system. When I found Wunderlist, I liked the look and the features so I decided to try it. After I finished my first assignment and I went to check it off, the little dink it makes when I clicked it made me want to work more, so I could check more off [my list]. The first time I heard [the sound], I un‐checked and rechecked an item a couple times. So I continued using the app. The sound it makes plus the smoothness with which it runs makes me stay with it. I have no reason to switch, and I feel like I am being rewarded every time I complete an assignment. This program helps me get things done because I want to hear that brief sound it makes whenever I complete things. It also makes me want to write out each little thing that I have to do, whether that's different parts of a homework assignment (study + packet) or something I have to do later. I feel like Wunderlist makes me get everything I need to do written down. (Sevrens, personal statement, 2018)

So we're okay with novelty if it is treated as an invitation . . . the beginning of a great story. If it's the crack, as Leonard Cohen might say, “that's how light gets in” (1992). In Zach's case, both the “getting things done” and the “breaking down of complex tasks into manageable pieces” have helped him to develop more agency as a student and human being. At a time in his life when academic and personal challenges are on the rise, he's rising, too, and primed to do his best work.