Introduction

The Super Mario Effect - Tricking Your Brain into Learning More | Mark Rober | TEDxPenn

URL- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vJRopau0g0

Speaker: Mark Rober

In this ted talk mark rober talks about our perception of failure and about how getting negative marked makes us
discouraged and quit earlier than we should have.
He says we shouldn’t focus on the failures but learn from them and make sure not to repeat them

Nxt pg

About th speaker

Mark B. Rober is an American YouTuber, engineer, inventor, and educator. He is known for his YouTube videos
on popular science and do-it-yourself gadgets. Before YouTube, Rober was an engineer with NASA for nine
years, where he spent seven years working on the Curiosity rover at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He later
worked for four years at Apple Inc. as a product designer in their Special Projects Group, where he authored
patents involving virtual reality in self-driving cars.

During his time at NASA, Rober began making viral videos.  He advocates for science, making videos testing the
ability for sharks to smell blood in water, fluidized sand[12] and water purification. In October 2011, Rober
recorded his first YouTube video. It shows a Halloween costume that used two iPads to create the illusion of
seeing through his body.

In December 2018, Rober posted a video showing how he tricked parcel thieves with an engineered contraption
that sprayed glitter on the thieves, emitted a foul odor, and captured video of the thieves. The video went viral,
receiving 25 million views in one day. Rober posted a follow-up in December 2019, teaming up with Macaulay
Culkin and featuring an improved design.[23] Rober would post another follow up a year later, featuring a third
edition of the bomb.

Rober has contributed articles to Men's Health,[28] and gave a TEDx presentation in 2015 How to Come Up with
Good Ideas[5] and another one entitled The Super Mario Effect – Tricking Your Brain into Learning More.[29] He
has also made numerous appearances on Jimmy Kimmel Live!

Synopsis 300 ish words

The Super Mario Effect: A Psychological Trick to Help Achieve Success Painlessly
Mark Rober asked his YouTube followers to play a simple computer programming puzzle that he made with

a friend. The object of the puzzle was simple — to get the car across the maze by arranging the code blocks

. 50,000 of his followers took the test.

What his followers didn’t know was that Mark randomly served up two different types of tests.

In one version, if you’d hit run and weren’t successful, you didn’t lose any of the starting 200 points

However, if you hit run in the other version and weren’t successful, the program showed a different

message: “That didn’t work. You lost 5 points. You now have 195 points. Please try again.”

The minute difference between those two messages unveiled something very significant about the human

psyche through the results of the test.

68% of the people who didn’t lose any points ultimately solved the puzzle yet only 52% of the people who

lost 5 points were able to solve the puzzle. That’s a delta of 16%! Another piece of data Mark collected was

how many tries the players took before they gave up. The group that didn’t lose any points averaged at

about 12 tries, while people who lost 5 points, averaged at about 5 tries.

To put simply, the group that made more attempts saw higher success rates than the ones that made fewer

attempts. Which is also true about success in the real world. “Nana Korobi, Ya Oki” — says the Japanese

proverb — “Fall down seven times, stand up eight.”

However, the only difference between the two groups was the different messages they were shown on

failing.

Research done 100 words what research/??

Graph pics etc

The puzzle
Success rates

Attempts to solve before finding success

Personal observations 400 words
Impact o you

No need to push yourself. Mistakes are overcome with trial and error

With The Super Mario effect, Mark wants us to see failure as a necessity. He wants us to understand that

each failure means that we’re getting closer to our goal. And more importantly, he wants us to see it in a way

that leaves no necessity for optimism in the first place.

We think that failure is the opposite of success just like poor is the opposite of rich. But being poor for a long

time doesn’t make you rich. But failing a lot — granted that you learn from the failures — eventually makes

you successful.

Our Current Perception of Failure

I believe it’s safe to assume that we see failure in a negative light. Fear of failure causes us to never try in

the first place. Failure can cause us to quit, earlier than we should. Failure, if allowed to be more powerful

than it has to be, can even devour our self-esteem.

But maybe, it’s not failure that’s the culprit. Perhaps, it’s how we see failure. For instance, in the experiment

Mark conducted, both groups failed, but their failure was given a different meaning in both cases. For one, it

was simply to try again. For another, it was “You lost something. Please try again.”

Even if the group was losing points which Mark himself describes as “no value in the real world, no one will

ever see these, completely meaningless fake internet points,” they still quit earlier than the ones who didn’t

see failure in a negative light.

Our current model of failure is just like that as well. We see failure as bad and painful. We think of it as

something that shouldn’t have happened.

Mark says in his TED talk, “When it comes to games like this, no one ever picks up the controller for the first
time and after jumping into a pit, thinks — I’m so ashamed. That was such a failure — and they never want
to try again.” That doesn’t happen. What happens is they remember that there’s a pit there and their job
becomes to not fall into the pit again. While playing a game, we learn from the failures but don’t focus on
the failures.

Conclution 100 words

Final Thoughts

Our current perception of failure is that it’s painful and to be successful, you have to power through the pain.

However, Mark’s experiment says that it’s detrimental to see failure in a negative light. Instead, we must see

failure as a predecessor to success; a necessity to learn more.

And I understand that it’s much easier said than done. But it’s certainly possible. If we’re to trick our brains

into thinking that it’s a game not much different than Super Mario, we can begin to embrace failure, learn

more, and consequently find more success in life. And oh, all of that without the need for optimism. Isn’t that

wonderful?