A Quiz Notes Welcome!
Welcome! Thanks for being here.
Quiz Notes is a new project where I’ll be sharing free weekly quiz questions, interesting things I’ve learned, and deep dives into various aspects of quizzing.
My aim is for you and me to improve as quizzers through this project and to have fun as we go along.
I also hope to encourage more people to join the quizzing world (especially here in Australia) and to make everyone feel welcome, regardless of who they are and where they are on their quizzing journey.
If it helps you learn something, improve more effectively, or just enjoy quizzing more, then mission accomplished.
Who Am I?
I’m Rohan1, and I live in Sydney, Australia with my wife and two kids. By day I juggle work in organisational psychology with stay-at-home dad life, and the rest of the time I’m a very enthusiastic amateur quizzer and trivia nerd. You can often find me doing online quizzes on Zoom, writing quiz questions, lost down Wikipedia rabbit holes, and annoying friends and family with interesting facts I’ve discovered.
I’ve been a lifelong trivia nerd but I’m a relative latecomer to the quizzing world. My first ever “formal” quizzing event was the 2022 World Quizzing Championships. It was a fun, intimidating and humbling experience. But it lit a fire and was enough to prompt me to seek out more online and in-person quizzing events where I could participate. Since then I’ve improved a lot and I’ve been lucky enough to have quizzed with and against many of the best quizzers in the country and the world, and luckier still to call many of them friends.
Even more of an honour was putting on the green and gold to represent my country at the 2024 Asia-Pacific Quizzing Championships, and I’ll be doing the same in 2025. Still pinching myself, really. If you told 2021 me that I’d get to represent Australia in something, I wouldn’t have believed you.
The psychology side of me is very interested in high performance, learning, skill acquisition, self-improvement, expertise, mastery, memory, resilience, and more. I spend a lot of time thinking about how they apply to quizzing and how they might inform efforts to improve effectively. Hopefully I can provide some useful insights in this area every now and then.
While I’m a fairly handy quizzer, I’m not an expert and this is an experiment. This is me thinking and learning in public and inviting you to join me along the way. Like everything in life, I’ll try to do my best, approach with humility, openness and curiosity, and figure it out as I go along. Beginner’s mindset and all that.
Who Is Quiz Notes For?
Anyone who loves trivia, answering quiz questions, and learning interesting stuff!
Also: quizzers who want to improve, and the quizzing-curious who want to learn more about what’s out there and how they can participate.
In short, I hope there’s something for everyone. My aim is always to write questions that are interesting and that could conceivably come up in future quizzes, across a wide range of difficulties and topics. That includes a mix of new stuff, traditional quiz topic areas, the “I should know this but I don’t” type questions, and more. Personally I’m not very good at dry list-learning, and I find it much harder to learn about topics I don’t find interesting. So I try to find the interesting in everything!
What You’ll Get
Every week you’ll get at least two quizzes and a collection of interesting facts.
Weekly Quiz Series: a 20-question general knowledge quiz published on Mondays.
Thursday Themed Quiz: a 10-question quiz on a single theme.
Friday Footnotes: a collection of things I learned or found interesting2 from the previous week.
Quizzing Academy: An ad-hoc series of deep dive posts on various aspects of quizzing, improvement, and performance. My aim is for this to be evergreen information that will be as useful in 5-10 years’ time as it is now.
Dispatches: Also ad-hoc, reports from in-person quizzing events, information about available quiz competitions, resources, occasional interviews, and whatever else takes my fancy.
Most of the good stuff will always be free, and please don’t feel any obligation to become a paid subscriber. But if you are super keen or want to support Quiz Notes, you will get some extra stuff for being a paid subscriber that I hope provides value.
Bonuses for paid subscribers:
Each month, subscribers will also get the following bonus content:
Monthly subscriber general knowledge quiz: 40 questions. A mix of pop culture and World Quizzing Championship category area questions.
Monthly subscriber themed quiz: 40 questions. A deep dive on a particular subject area.
Monthly Anki pack: A collection of the month’s questions as .tsv/.apkg files for use in Anki or other flashcarding software (more about Anki in a future Quizzing Academy deep dive).
As I said above, this is an experiment, and I’m open to feedback and suggestions about what is and isn’t useful. Above all, I hope you enjoy and get some value out of Quiz Notes. If it helps you learn something, improve more effectively, or just enjoy quizzing more, then that will make me very happy.
Onwards and upwards!
PS, my name is spelled Rohan but pronounced Rowan (like Rowan Atkinson). Though I’ve been called RO-han, Ro-HAN, Roland, Ron, Ryan, Ruan, and more. I’ll answer to anything really.
I think a key superpower of the trivia enthusiast is curiosity and interest in the wider world. Interesting things are easier to remember. Or in neuroscience jargon, perceptually salient stimuli are more likely to capture our attentional resources and get encoded into memory.