Concepts
Learning AI

Learning Through Play

Origin : Johan Huizinga, 1938 — popularized in the AI context by Oussama Ammar, 2026

Mastering a technology through intrinsically motivating projects before applying it to business. The beginner's advantage: no old habits to unlearn.

Tomorrow’s best AI operators won’t learn from courses. They’ll start by building useless things for themselves — a joke bot, a cat name generator, a tracker of movies watched. That’s not procrastination. That’s the most effective learning method there is.

Origin

Johan Huizinga, Dutch historian, published Homo Ludens in 1938: humans are fundamentally playing animals. Play isn’t recreation after serious work — it precedes and structures serious competence. Rituals, arts, and sciences are born from play before becoming disciplines.

In the AI context of 2026, Oussama Ammar reformulates this principle: “If I were 17 now, I’d put all my energy into learning to talk to the machine… I’d learn skills that would then make me king of the world in business.”

The Theory

The beginner’s advantage

Shunryu Suzuki formulated it in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (1970): “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.” Facing a radically new technology like generative AI, the beginner has a real advantage: no mental patterns to unlearn, no “but we’ve always done it this way.”

Flow as the optimal learning condition

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Flow, 1990) describes the optimal learning state: when the challenge slightly exceeds current skills. “Fun” projects naturally create this state — the project is challenging enough to be interesting, personal enough to maintain motivation when things get stuck.

Anchoring through intrinsic motivation

Jean Piaget (1952): new skills anchor better when linked to intrinsically motivating activities. You retain things 10x better when you learned them to build something you genuinely wanted, compared to a school exercise.

In Practice

The principle applied to AI learning:

  1. Choose an absurd but personal project — something you genuinely want, even if objectively useless (bot that sends football scores to your dad, playlist generator by weather, mood tracker)
  2. Build without a safety net — no prior training, no complete course. Start and search as you go
  3. Iterate fast, break often — errors in a personal project cost nothing. That’s where the real learning happens
  4. Transfer afterward — skills acquired on the fun project apply directly to business

This isn’t the same as doing a side project “for the portfolio.” It’s doing something for yourself, because it amuses you, with no pressure on results.

Nuances and Limits

Learning through play fails when the “fun” project is actually chosen to impress others (LinkedIn, etc.) rather than for oneself. Extrinsic motivation kills flow. The project needs to be genuinely useless in others’ eyes for the mechanism to work.

The concept applies to experienced adults too — the condition isn’t being young, it’s being in a beginner’s mindset toward the specific technology. A senior dev can learn AI the same way a teenager does, if they accept not knowing.

Sources: Huizinga, J. (1938). Homo Ludens · Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience · Suzuki, S. (1970). Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind · Ammar, O. (2026). Podcast

Concepts