3 Life Lessons I Learned Playing Animal Crossing When I Was a Child

Reading time: ~2 minutes

Summary (3 life lessons)

• Working hard and fast is not enough if you’re working on the wrong thing.
• Checking what actually works can save enormous effort.
• Anything important needs backups.

When I was a child, I spent an embarrassing amount of time playing Animal Crossing: Wild World.

In the game, you earn money (called bells), repay your home loan, and slowly build out your house and town.
Tom Nook is the shopkeeper and landlord. He sells you furniture, upgrades your house, and holds your ever-growing mortgage.

I took this very seriously.

I would grind for bells by mass-planting trees, harvesting fruit every few days, filling my inventory, and making multiple trips to Tom Nook’s shop to sell everything.

I was working hard. I was efficient.

But I was farming the local fruit.

In my save, that was pears. Each pear sold for 100 bells.

Non-native fruit, like apples or oranges, sold for 500 bells each.

Any foreign fruit I received via gift letters, I ate immediately. I was a child, and I assumed eating fruit was healthy and polite. You consume gifts.

...I didn’t know any better.

So I was doing five times the work for the same outcome.

Lesson 1

Hard work and efficiency matter, but effectiveness matters even more.

You can work hard and even optimise your process, but if you’re focused on the wrong thing, you’re wasting effort and underachieving.

Around that time, internet access became more common. Game FAQs and guides started appearing online.

I read them.

That’s how I learned how to actually earn bells:
farm foreign fruit, not your local variety.

Lesson 2

Look for evidence to verify what actually works.

Don’t assume your current approach is optimal just because it feels productive. Someone else has probably tested this already. Do what the test, preferably multiple tests, suggest is better.

I built my Animal Crossing world over several years.

One day, the cartridge died.

The save was gone.

No backups.

I started a new town, but I never got back to where I was before. Life moved on.

Lesson 3

Always have backups.

One copy is none.
Two copies is one.
Have three copies of anything you’d be upset to lose.

Related:

• Teach a student how to learn, and they will learn for a lifetime
• Why Students Fail to Achieve Their Goals Despite High Productivity and Hustling (and the Simple Solution)

Thank you. Wish you a pleasant day.