Rob Alvarez Bucholska
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Tom Vorselen On Why Effort Isn’t the Problem (Your Learning Systems Are) | Episode 429

 

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What if learning felt less like burnout and more like leveling up? We welcome Tom Vorselen, founder of The Study Coach, to explore how active learning, mindset shifts, and gamified structures help students and professionals overcome procrastination, manage time better, and achieve results without overwhelm.

Tom Vorselen is the founder of The Study Coach, a global coaching brand helping students and working professionals overcome procrastination, master time management, and study smarter with proven science-based methods. After struggling with poor grades and burnout during university, Tom transformed his own approach using evidence from cognitive psychology and neuroscience, eventually graduating with top marks and turning his system into a full-time mission. Today, The Study Coach supports learners in over 40 countries through personalized coaching, online programs, and workshops focused on efficiency, focus, and mindset. Tom’s methods have helped thousands of students from medicine to business to engineering achieve higher results in less time and regain confidence in their ability to learn, grow, and perform at their best.

Rob Alvarez is Head of Engagement Strategy, Europe at The Octalysis Group (TOG), a leading gamification and behavioral design consultancy. A globally recognized gamification strategist and TEDx speaker, he founded and hosts Professor Game, the #1 gamification podcast, and has interviewed hundreds of global experts. He designs evidence-based engagement systems that drive motivation, loyalty, and results, and teaches LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® and gamification at top institutions including IE Business School, EFMD, and EBS University across Europe, the Americas, and Asia.

 

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Lets’s do stuff together!

Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,

Rob

 

Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

Tom Vorselen (00:00)
my first year of my academics, failed 50 % of my courses. That was not due to me not putting in the effort, but because my methods were trash. Like they were just the average student rereading and highlighting approach and cramming one night before.

Rob (00:15)
And hey, Engagers, welcome back to another episode of the Professor Game Podcast. As you know, here we interview people who like to talk about the amazing world of gamification, game thinking, and other related ideas so that we can add value to your day by their experiences. And as you know, I am Professor Game. I am Rob.

And I am a consultant, I’m a coach, I do many things nowadays. I’m also the head of engagement strategy at the Octalysis Group, a leading gamification consultancy around the world. And today we have a very special guest. We have Tom with us and this connects very well to also a significant part of how I started in gamification. A lot of the experience I’ve had, which has to do with education and learning. But Tom, first we need to know.

Are you prepared to engage?

Tom Vorselen (01:11)
I am ready to engage, for sure. Let’s…

Rob (01:14)
Let’s do this, let’s do this, Tom. Let’s go because we have Tom with us today who is the founder of the Study Coach, a global coaching and brand helping students and working professionals overcome things like procrastination, master time management, and study smarter with proven science-based methods. And after struggling with poor grades and burnout during university, transformed his own approach using evidence from cognitive psychology and neuroscience, eventually graduating with top marks and turning his system into a full-time mission.

And he, as a study coach, supports learners in over 40 countries who personalize coaching, online programs, workshops, focus on efficiency, focus and mindset. His methods have helped thousands of students from medicine to business, to engineering, achieve higher results in less time, and especially regain that confidence in their ability to learn, grow and perform at their best. I see many shared topics we could be diving into today, especially on the whole science-backed neurocognition.

cognitive psychology and all that but but Tom is there anything we should be saying in that intro that we haven’t mentioned yet? ⁓

Tom Vorselen (02:20)
Yeah, before we kick this off, Rob, I just want to say thank you for having me on. I’ve listened to a couple episodes and what you’re building is super special. And I just wanted to acknowledge that because I know what effort it takes to create so many episodes every single week. It’s not easy. It requires a lot of hard work. So just you’re creating real impact and I’m very happy that I can be part of that. And the last thing before we jump in for everyone listening.

Do me and Rob a huge favor and go leave a five-star review if you haven’t done that yet for Rob on the platform that you’re listening to because it can impact even more people. I already did mine on Apple podcast, so you’ll see that coming in soon. So yeah, join me and I’m ready to dive in.

Rob (03:06)
Let’s do this. So Tom, when it comes to your day, right? We had a little bit of a chat in the pre-interview about your team and stuff you’re doing, but when it comes to your day or maybe your weeks, I don’t know, if we were to sort of follow you around, what would it look like? What would the engagers feel if they were in your sphere or following you as a shadow or something like that?

Tom Vorselen (03:28)
First of all, think they would think that I’m crazy because when you look at my time schedule, it looks like a huge Tetris playing board where there’s a bunch of color coded time blocked events, which almost looked like indeed the biggest Tetris game, but then in real life. yeah, next to that, I’m just obsessed with what I’m building at the moment, which means I’m putting in a ton of hours and…

taking only a couple of days off each month because I love what I’m doing so much, which yeah, sometimes people can’t resonate with. Maybe the engagers are high achievers, like-minded people, so they can. But yeah, the normal person would think like, they see my calendar and think, wow, what is this? Yeah.

Rob (04:20)
Amazing. It reminds me of a past guest near Eyal of Hooked and also Indistractable. I don’t know if you’ve read that book. And he talks a lot about timeboxing. Like many techniques I’ve heard in other places, his whole sort of system and his mind goes around like timeboxing is an essential component of his method. So it reminded me of our chat. I think it was episode like 100 or 101 or something like that, a long while ago. So Tom.

Tom Vorselen (04:47)
Yo.

Rob (04:51)
Let’s dive right in because we like to hit our guests very quick with a fail moment or a first attempt at learning. And of course, if it has to do with anything playful, gameful, or using these cognitive patterns and psychology and all these things, neuroscience that you’ve been studying, that would be especially interesting because it allows us to not only sort of, yeah, this is all the amazing things we’ve done, but it’s also like, what have we learned from? What are the mistakes that we’ve also made?

And it allows the people to say, you know, maybe not the exact same mistake, but in that area, we can take those lessons and probably apply it better to our, to our own spaces.

Tom Vorselen (05:31)
Yeah, for sure. What the listener should know is that becoming confident and effective in learning or in business, because once you start business, it’s like the biggest learning journey you will go on in life. It’s tough. So many students, working professionals, entrepreneurs, they all struggle with procrastination, weak habits, whether that’s learning or study habits, constant overwhelm of all of the things that they can do.

And they end up feeling stuck, stressed and disappointed with the results, which I also had, right? In my first year of my academics, I failed 50 % of my courses. And that was not due to me not putting in the effort, but it was basically because my methods compared to high school were trash. So what the goal is right now is that we help, again, students, working professionals and entrepreneurs master proven learning, time management methods so they can perform better.

feel more in control and reach their goals without like the burning out or wasting hours on tactics that don’t work. And one of the failures that I experienced there was indeed the methods, the tactics that I used in my first year of uni, they were bad. They were bad. Like they were just the average student rereading and highlighting approach and cramming one night before. But once you start doing courses like anatomy or physiology,

Rob, I’m going to tell you, you can’t get away with one or two hours of studying before a big exam. So that was my biggest failures. And once I started figuring out that it was not my effort, it wasn’t an effort problem, but my parents also saw that it was a method problem. They always got me tutors on everything, but these tutors didn’t work or well, they worked for a specific course.

However, once you start going into university or life and business, there’s no one type of a tutor that can solve that. So you need to change the fundamentals of your learning to ensure that you can get good results. So we then hired a learning professor, learning coach, and he was going to break us down the science of learning. And then let’s try to make a link to the gamification there. He taught me all kinds of tricks and methods.

that made learning A, more easy and B, more efficient than effective. And if you want, I can go into detail around all of them, but it included, for example, a five minute rule or a Seinfeld strategy where you check boxes in a row and you create the cross and you don’t break the chain. Things like that, that ultimately helped me to make the daunting process of the learning, anatomy and physiology way more fun and eventually also passing the courses.

Fisher.

Rob (08:28)
That sounds amazing. Love it. Because that’s one of the things. Sometimes, know Yuhkai Chao and the Octalysis Framework in general likes to talk a lot about a function-focused design versus human-focused design. And you can be super efficient and focus on all the efficiency. Everything is super efficient. But if you don’t account for your motivation, what actually drives you, what are the things that can keep you consistent, build up those habits?

then no matter how easy it is, how much you reduce friction, which is important, don’t get me wrong, especially for studying. If you don’t account for that, then eventually it just, you know, that motivation, that drive, that push, that nudge, it’s not going to be enough. You really have to deliver it in a systematic way, accounting for that in the right moment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I love that approach that that learning coach gave to you. And you were saying that, and I remember when I met Barbara, you know, Barbara Oakley, ⁓

think it’s learning how to learn the MOOC course is one of the most popular courses in Coursera. We had the massive opportunity to meet her actually twice in my couple of.

Tom Vorselen (09:34)
Yeah,

I watched their course like four years ago or something.

Rob (09:37)
So, know, it speaks kind of to the kind of speaks a little bit to the kind of things that you’re talking about, of course, with a, you know, MOOC sort of very, very zoomed out perspective with all, you know, a lot of science as well. And it’s precisely that it’s, know, how variety and all kinds of things are allowing your brain to be able to better focus and learn. another thing I love about what you’re saying is he was not teaching you how to learn biology better.

or how to understand, you know, math in a better way, or, you know, how to write better paragraphs. It’s, you know, it’s, it’s a more essential skill, which you, I’m sure you will agree with me is something that, that should start, start to be a part of school curriculum. Like everybody should be able to have these things on their minds as early as possible, because no matter where you go into, you will, you know, there, it’s quote unquote mandatory to go to school, at least to a certain level.

So the sooner you get at least the gist of this thing, ⁓ the more everybody will benefit from that, including your teachers.

Tom Vorselen (10:43)
Can I chime in on that for a bit? The most fascinating statistic that I’ve ever heard, it was from Gino, Dutch educator in the Netherlands. And he shared that on average, we spend around 13,000 hours at school between the age of five and 22. And when they did that research, and this was a couple of years ago, so maybe the numbers has changed a little bit, but on average, zero hours are dedicated.

towards learning how to learn. We only bombard our students and people with things that they have to learn, what they have to learn, but we rarely teach them how to learn, which then creates this big gap of everyone doing whatever they think is good, rereading and highlighting, even though that all of these methods have been debunked by science over and over and over, but still 84%.

of people use these methods as their main learning methods. And that still applies to people then in later stages of life. So if someone is listening to this and they are, I don’t know, in their forties, in their fifties, and they think, Hey, I’m picking up a course again, but I started to realize that I’ve never learned how to learn. And you’re going to reread your notes again, and you’re going to go to that exam. I’m going to tell you honestly, right now you’re setting yourself up for failure.

What you should be doing is a completely different approach for learning, which engages active learning, ⁓ based repetition, like principles from, indeed a learning science that will yield them way better results. But if they’ve never learned that you can’t expect from them that they can apply it right away.

Rob (12:31)
I teach at the university, I can tell you my, you know, 19, 21, 22, 23 year olds have no idea what you’re talking about mostly. So I couldn’t agree more. So Tom, speaking about all that success that is brought and how you understand all the science better. And I’m sure, you know, as, as research progresses and as you gain even more experience with all that you’ve done, all your, you’re the amazing students you’ve had, this is something that keeps on evolving. So I’d like to dive into one of those times when things didn’t work.

that did go super well. ⁓ And, and it sort of showed as a shining example, you know, again, as much as you can share, you know, I don’t know if you can share how much you can share about individual cases and whatnot, but we want to be there. You know, we want to sort of celebrate that, success. And as well, perhaps take some of the, some of the key lessons, some of the things that like, ⁓ I think this was very successful because we did all of these things, for example.

Tom Vorselen (13:23)
Yeah, for sure. There’s multiple, multiple situations of students that I worked with that were on the edge of academic probation. And just by slightly changing their learning approaches from indeed passive learning to active learning, and for the listeners, active learning means actively retrieving information from your memory, which forces your neural pathways to come up with the information. Even though that this is more difficult, it strengthens your neural pathways.

But what we’ve seen is literally in the students who were on their last retake. And if they were to fail that one retake, they will be kicked out of the program. And one of my students, I’m not going to share his name, but dental students ⁓ from the US. And he had two retakes. He had clinic rotations. He was a dental student and he had his most difficult course coming up. And in his university, they had to pass everything with 90%.

and above as a passing rate, which is insanely high. So he had those two retakes, he had his rotations and he had this current classes to take care of. When he called me, he was so stressed. He was on his holiday with his parents, but he couldn’t relax. I could see in his face that he was about to break down and cry. That’s how bad it was. And we started working together.

And in the three months that we worked together, his grades were 94, 98, 95%. He passed the retakes, he passed the initial course and he could finish the rotations. So that is just one of the many success stories, but where he went from so stressed, so overwhelmed to feeling super confident and eventually texting me six months later, Tom, I graduated. can now go into the next dental program, my master’s.

and pursue his dream of ⁓ becoming a dentist and having his own practice. So that is one of the coolest stories, but yeah, so many more like that.

Rob (15:29)
What, of course, again, with the details that you can share, what are, what were some of the things that he might’ve been struggling with and how did that change? Like, what was that? What were those things that’s like, oh, change these things. And of course, you you spent three months with, with this student in, in, know, 10 minutes in a podcast, we won’t get even 10 % of that. So what could be some of the, the ideas, some of the seeds that you started planting so that he changed his approach?

Tom Vorselen (15:58)
Very good question. What I think people underestimate is their mindset regarding challenges and the future. So whenever we start with students, we always focus on the mindset first. Is it growth or is it fixed? And the majority of people have a fixed mindset because they’ve experienced failure in the past. So they’re going to project that failure into the future, which is completely fine. However, we have to break that pattern because that negative thinking is preventing them from

actually taking action and moving forward because negative thoughts create negative feelings, stress, anxiety, overwhelm. And these feelings make people avoid or procrastinate because we want to feel good. We want to feel happy. And that was the first most important step because he had those retakes and he failed in the past. We first had to do some mindset work there where I said, Hey dude, you have to start trusting yourself and trusting this process that we are going to go through.

And if you don’t trust that and you don’t believe in yourself, it’s going to be a hard one. Once that was set, that foundation, we started to look indeed at, first of all, it’s time management because, Rob, ⁓ you will be surprised. If I ask people to share with me what their timetable looks like, nine out of 10 times, I just get a completely empty calendar. But they do say, I’m so busy. I’m like, you’re busy doing nothing because your calendar doesn’t tell me anything. Yeah, but I have this to do. I have that to do.

All right, so let’s like block it out and see where all of your time goes. And then they figure out that they have a spare three to four hours each day that they’re just wasting on their phone or any other unnecessary activities. And the last thing that we then focused on was his learning methods, because he was one of these students that would only reread and highlight and go over his notes. And we changed that, especially for a dental students into mind maps, which is basically, well.

Probably everyone has heard about a mind map, a web of all of the concepts. And most important is that we try to create those from memory. So not just copy pasting when you’re watching a video or a lecture, but trying to force yourself and create that web from memory. And next to that, it was a lot of terms. So flashcards, sound dotting, but worked really well. And retrieval practice questions, which basically means creating.

practice questions, mock exam questions for ourselves and testing those and that yielded the results that he needed.

Rob (18:33)
That’s amazing. I love that. I just had one thing because again, I mentioned near at the start with the whole time boxing and all of that. Yet I know there are people who say, and, know, I can kind of vouch a little bit for that. ⁓ so sort of two things, right? There’s two sides of this. There’s people who say, you know, the whole time block boxing and that stuff. I’m super productive. know, everything goes well, but for me, it doesn’t work having everything on the calendar. It just doesn’t work for me. I I’d like to have your perspective on that, that, that one.

And then on people who say, maybe that could be better. Problem is I have a very unpredictable schedule. There are many things sort of shifting and moving at the same time. And let me give you a small example at home. You look at least very, very young. I’m 40 and we have a three-year-old daughter just having that element there of, I planned for today. All these things I have to get done. But then, you know, the, easy example is she gets sick. She can’t go to school now. She has to be at home. So things have to change, right? Like.

For example, I try to avoid having interviews at certain times where she might be napping because it’s the room next door and you know, things would not go well. But beyond that, yeah, ⁓ like for example, her mom might need to stay at home for that. Like things have to change. So two challenges, right? One, yeah, that kind of doesn’t work for me. I’m still super productive. And two is like, well, you know, time boxing sounds great, but how do I actually implement

Tom Vorselen (19:57)
Yeah, for sure. Very good question. I think the majority of people benefit from time blocking. The majority. Because what a science has also shown is that people who followed simple time blocked schedules saw an increase in productivity as well as the quality of their work improves because there’s a reduction in multitasking, which is actually bad. So for the majority of people, it works. For some people indeed, it doesn’t work because they start to feel like super overwhelmed.

What we normally see with students where it doesn’t work, there’s some, ⁓ either a type of ADD or ADHD underlying that makes it harder for them to follow through and like have all of the distractions. However, this is an important note for some of the students with ADD, ADHD, works wonders because finally they have structure and overview in their head and in their calendar. So it, it is a really a custom approach for each student that we work with.

We do highly recommend that everyone starts to do it and try it such that they can analyze what works, what doesn’t work. And same as with playing games. All right. So let’s figure out, let’s see if we can make the connection here to playing games and how we can relate that to real life. If you play a video game and you fail, you’re going to ask yourself, okay, what should I stop doing? What should I start doing? And what should I continue doing? And these are the three questions that we ask every week.

to our students based on their time management experiences. Because if you fail a level in a game, apparently either, ⁓ you’re not good enough or you have to change your tactic, which is the same with life and time blocking. So that is the first principle. And then of course you can change your time schedule. You can reflect each day and say, okay, what worked, what didn’t work? So what am I going to do tomorrow? So that is my take on time blocking. Yes, for some people works for some.

there needs to be more custom tailored advice and revisions to say so. The second question that you have reminds me of one of my students, a 42 year old surgeon with a two year old toddler. We just finished working together with him and what worked really well for him was indeed not having everything written down and not everything locked in. But each morning.

We gave him the exercise to fill out an Eisenhower matrix, which is basically a matrix that has different components where you figure out what is urgent and not urgent and what is important and not important. Highly recommend everyone to check this out on the internet or Google it. And he was going to block his tasks in this Eisenhower matrix each morning. And based on that, he was going to fill his day. So what is the most important and urgent? He would start doing those.

And if something happened, for example, the child got sick and there’s one box in this matrix that is called delegate. And there his partner came in, like he could delegate the taking care of his toddler such that he could focus on his coursework and vice versa. Right? If his partner had something, then he would, he would do it instead. So with him, it was more of a daily.

Reflection. Okay. So filling out this, this matrix every single morning, he sent that to one of his accountability coaches from our team. And then he would start working on it and he accepted, Hey, if something doesn’t go well, or I don’t finish it. I look at my priority list. Can I like fit it in tomorrow and knock it out? And that is also what I think life is about. Too many people expect themselves to finish everything.

that they have scheduled, but if you finish about 75 % on a daily basis, you’re doing an amazing job. Like an amazing job. Yeah.

Rob (23:50)
Love that. Love that. Thanks for that one. It kind of, kind of looks like what I tend to do nowadays. Perfect. Things that need to get done and, you know, adapting and doing as much as possible. 75 % is a good target. I haven’t, I haven’t achieved that too often lately, but it sounds like a very, very good one for sure. So Tom, when somebody comes to you, I’m guessing that you have some sort of process. like, oh, I’m having these struggles for studying in your case.

How do you start? What are the kinds of things that you look into? What does that process look like essentially?

Tom Vorselen (24:26)
Yeah, the process is fairly simple. We always first start with a deep dive free consultation call where I’m going to figure out what the challenges are. And the three most common challenges in this specific order are procrastination, bad time management, feeling overwhelmed and bad learning methods. 95 % of the people that we work with experience these. Whether it’s students or working professionals, the working professionals are the adult learners. also procrastinate.

They don’t know how to manage their time and their energy after work and they apply bad learning methods. So they have to retake bar exams, law exams, CFA certificates, you name it. So basically we figured that out first. Then we look at what their goals are, because I think it’s really important that we have something very clear that we’re working towards. And then based on every conversation, we start with a personalized plan. We always apply and…

assign one-on-one coaches, whether that’s me or someone from my team, such that we make sure that it’s not a one size fits all. Because I don’t believe in that, especially when we work with the variety of people that we work with. We can have an 18 year old student, or we can have a 52 year old entrepreneur. Like the difference between their needs, their schedules and their challenges is insane. So we always have one-on-one coaching in line to make sure that it’s

personalized and custom, but we also do have general resources, right? In a video vault where people can grab their nuggets, get the content because the principles that we do teach can be applied to the majority. However, the implementation might vary from person to person.

Rob (26:12)
makes absolute sense. Love that. And Tom, you mentioned that you’ve heard a couple of episodes as well. You you’ve been enjoying the podcast and after hearing some of these questions, is there, is there somebody that you would be curious to hear or to see on the Professor Game podcast in the future? A potential future guest.

Tom Vorselen (26:29)
Ooh, I would actually be one of my team members because his name is Dan. He’s a, I think he’s now 20 and he is very much into using AI for our students and gamifying stuff. So he’s working on the development of our personalized AI tool that we use for our students. And he’s doing all of the research calls and he…

is trying and he’s applying like way more gamification principles into the coaching than I do personally. Cause I’m usually a very straightforward person and say like, just submit your stuff and make sure that you take the action. But he also tries to make it more, more fun. So he will be a very interesting guy, I think for his age. And this is also what some of our students say about him. He’s so well.

He’s so knowledgeable for his age and he’s been going through a bunch of things that got him to the place where he is right now. And he’s getting incredible results for indeed people in our program, but yeah, he’s just, he’s amazing for what he’s doing. He’s like young, but good, good. Yeah.

Rob (27:45)
Sounds great. How about keeping those recommendations still top, but talking about a book. Which book would you recommend and why?

Tom Vorselen (27:54)
I don’t know if people can see the bookshelves, but there will be too many books that I would recommend. I think the, do you want one that is close to like gamification and stuff or what are you looking for?

Rob (28:08)
Well, it’s up to you. course, gamification is always close to our hearts, but whatever you think would be most useful.

Tom Vorselen (28:15)
to align with gamification, it’s called Level Up. Level Up from Rob Dial, how to get focused on procrastinating and upgrade your life. He was my first mentor in business. So I learned a lot from him in terms of mindset and working on oneself. And once, when he came out with the book, there’s a bunch of very valuable journaling prompts in there because I personally believe

If you do self-reflection and you learn how to look at your own behavior and see life indeed as a video game where you are a person who’s capable of leveling up as soon as you slay your dragons and you beat the next level, this book is very much recommended. It’s an easy read, very practical examples in it. And I’ve already read it twice and probably going to read it a third time.

highly recommend.

Rob (29:16)
It definitely sounds like a top book to recommend. And in this world of learning and perhaps even a slight part side of fun to that learning as well and using neuroscience and all of that, what would you say is your superpower? That thing that sets you apart from at least most other people.

Tom Vorselen (29:34)
that I know how to learn.

And the reason why is because I think I’ve, I’ve for everyone who’s listening, I’ve been in business for three years now and I started already with the ID 2021, but I started to execute on it more through roughly in 2023. It’s when I quit my full-time job and decided to go full in. And I think my ability to grasp content very fast and apply it, which is the most important plus.

create new things from what I learn is giving me an unfair advantage in business and the development of our brand. And with that, we’ve grown almost 250 % compared to last year. And the year before, we also grew close to 500 % because we’re still startup, but yeah, like the implementation and…

learning things fast in terms of sales, terms of marketing, in terms of leadership. I think that is the unfair advantage that I have over other entrepreneurs.

Rob (30:46)
Amazing, Tom. And now we get to the difficult question of the day. What would you say is your favorite game?

Tom Vorselen (30:54)
I’ve always been a huge fan of two classic games, FIFA and Call of Duty. And the reason why I think Call of Duty, think once I looked at my hours played and it was like 24 days play time, because you have that aspect of leveling up and upgrading your weapons, figuring out which kid is best and…

Being too addicted to those two games, FIFA and Call of Duty actually also made me fail that first year of university that I referred to earlier. I was just too busy playing those two games instead of playing my life game. But yeah, they are definitely my favorite games that I used to play.

Rob (31:38)
They are definitely amazing games for sure. For very different reasons and FIFA, by the way, I think now it has a different name for.

Tom Vorselen (31:45)
FC, sorry. Yeah, FC. Yeah.

Rob (31:48)
Yeah, indeed, So Tom, I don’t know if there’s anything you want to share with the audience before we take off. Of course, let us know where we can find out more about you, your approach, your coaches, your coaching, whatever it is that you’re doing in this world so that we can, the way we can find you. And I don’t know any final words, any wisdom, anything you want to say, it’s your time.

Tom Vorselen (32:08)
Yeah, sweet. So again, one of the things that I like is that you’re continuously showing up and you’ve been making so many episodes. How many have you created by now? Do you know?

Rob (32:20)
I don’t know what number this will be, by the time we’re recording, we launched, I think episode 420.

Tom Vorselen (32:26)
420. So that 420 is probably longer than I’ve been doing my content game and value online. So very much inspired by that. So I want to do the same. ⁓ That’s why I was thinking about giving away something that I’ve never shared before. And I shared this with you before we started this podcast. I’ve created something specifically reserved for your listeners, the Engagers.

I think you, you call them and I’m going to give them a study breakthrough bundle, which consists of basically two things. And it can be applied for students. It can be applied for working professionals. And, before I tell what it is, let me explain exactly who it is for such that they can see if they resonate. It can be for a student, working professional entrepreneur who’s experiencing challenges with procrastination, feeling overwhelmed or time pressure.

And they want to learn more efficiently and effectively get the same unfair advantage as I just shared with you, staying more consistent and actually remember what they learn and apply it. And right now it might feel like you’re working super hard and they don’t see the results. That probably has them frustrated, doubting their abilities. They might think that they are slow learners, which you are not, because if you apply the right methods, you can do so. And what you really need is indeed science-backed systems.

to manage your time, to focus and to retain knowledge like way faster. So that’s what I’ll help you with. What I created is something that we first call a Pacer studied blueprint. And it’s a step-by-step framework that helps you learn more with active recall, which is the thing that I talked about earlier. It has a guaranteed way to remember things that you read a lot faster. So you can be more in control, confident and learn things from business, from

your work or maybe in your studies. And the second thing, as I shared earlier, the biggest challenge that people have is eventually procrastination. So we created the anti-procrastination masterclass series and it’s a video training and a workbook. So also some actionable steps that they can fill out on the worksheet, helps with… Exactly. The name gives it away. They stop procrastinating and they plan their week like top performers.

Rob (34:45)
the action on what they’re learning.

Tom Vorselen (34:54)
⁓ Ultimately, what they will help is eliminate procrastination, staying more consistent, leveling up their life. There’s principles from the book that I shared, such that they can start to be more proud and feel more confident in what they do. So if you want to access that study breakthrough bundle, I put together a bundle on my Instagram page. My Instagram page is very simple. You go to my Instagram, which is at the underscore study coach.

And if you send me a DM with the word professor based on this podcast, you can grab it. So once again, if you want the Pacer study blueprint and the entire procrastination masterclass series, just go to at the underscore study coach and DM me the word professor, which I set up exclusively for this podcast. And you’ll get immediate access with the link inside of your DMs. We automate and gamify our DMs and the whole shebang.

I’ll log there as well.

Rob (35:55)
Let’s do this. Amazing, Tom. Thanks very much for taking the time, for investing your time, your experience, your knowledge into the Engagers because basically they are getting a lot of this value that you’re offering right now. I loved connecting sort of back to some of my roots with education, know, sort of everything started for me with education, with learning. Talked about Barbara, Dr. Barbara Oakley at some point, like many of these things brought back some great memories for me.

However, Tom and the Engagers, as you know, at least for now and for today, it is time to say that it’s game over. Engagers, and thank you for listening to the Professor Game. Are interested in this world of creating motivation, engagement, loyalty, using game-inspired solutions? How about you join us on our free online community at Professor Game on school?

Tom Vorselen (36:37)
Come on, guess and since you’re

Rob (36:52)
You can find the link right below in description. But the main thing is to click there, join us. It’s a platform called School. It’s for free and you will find plenty of resources there. We’ll be up to date with everything that we’re doing, any opportunities that we might have for you. And of course, before you go into your next mission, before you click continue, please remember to subscribe using your favorite podcast app and listen to the next episode of Professor Game. See you there.

 

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