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“To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.” - Walter Pater,
and I had just finished rereading You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers, a frenzied novel
here’s a guy who lived so much in one week that it overflowed a book’s pages and he had to summarize the rest of his three-month epic escapade in a sentence and die on the cover. What had I done in the last three months? Wrote code for 717 hours. Got better at handstands and pull-ups. Packed my moving box. Discovered that eating half a stick of butter a day wasn’t good for my brain. My adventure count was zero.
if I had let my protagonist license expire
A chef wields dozens of tools, from spatulas to potato scrubbing gloves. Every once in a while, he’ll need the pastry brush, but every day he’ll use a chef’s knife, a frying pan, salt, and a stove.
More motivation doesn’t just mean that we’re more likely to succeed at a task, but also that we’ll have more fun doing it. This is what we want; this is why we hack motivation.
Hack like this: first pick your goals, then figure out which motivation hacks to use on the subtasks that lead to those goals—and then use far more of them than you need, so that you not only succeed, but that you do so with excitement, with joy, with extra verve and a hunger for the next goal.
television shows about fascinating characters doing things only slightly more fantastic than what you’re doing.
I used to have no ambitions, and as I slowly fixed myself, they appeared.
Motivation hackers are in danger of achieving the wrong goals.
Low Expectancy • You want to lose weight, but nothing has worked before, so it’s hard to maintain healthy choices.
You have never been very athletic, so you avoid physical pursuits.
When you have low Expectancy, though, your confidence is so low that you aren’t willing to practice.
The biggest hack a motivation hacker can perform is to build her confidence to the size of a volcano.
It’s hard to keep exercising because it’s so painful or boring.
You don’t have a good answer to the question of “What are you looking forward to?”
When you see low Value in what you’re doing, either because the end reward is not important or because the process is not enjoyable, motivation is scarce.
You get the urge to snack when you’re not hungry instead of starting or persevering in some task.
Low Delay • You are always so close to achieving one goal or another that you never lack the urge to go finish something.
Regardless of what model of willpower the motivation hacker uses, she will structure her goals so that she doesn’t need to rely on willpower to achieve them.
Willpower seems to be needed in one scenario: when deciding to begin. In order to commit to a goal, you need to deny yourself room to weasel out. Instead, you must design a sufficiently powerful motivational structure in advance. For some reason, this part is hard.
The one tip that I have is that if you can’t bring yourself to commit to a goal now, then try picking a date far enough in the future that it’s not as scary and commit to starting then. Then in the meantime, talk yourself into it.
You can get to the point where even the craziest goals afford only achievement, and the question becomes not, “Can I do this?” but “Do I want this?” (The answer is then usually, “Sure, why not?”)
The important part is to never weasel out of doing what you said you’d do. If the day comes where you can’t do the goal, do it anyway. If it truly is impossible, then your Expectancy will take damage. If it’s just frustratingly inconvenient and hard that day, then when you persevere, your Expectancy will grow—and you’ll learn to plan better next time. Try to anticipate any obstacles that could come up, and then either make the goal easy enough that you’d still be able to deal with them, or include them as explicit excuses.
My organization for success spirals is simple. I keep recurring goals that I might forget in my To-Do software, like journaling daily or measuring my bodyfat percentage every two weeks.
My brain had done its protective trick where it explained these failures as things that I would be able to succeed at later, once I weren’t so desperately burdened with the destiny of my startup,
Eat vitamins - so easy once the habit is there!
Gaze into Chloe's eyes - I read that this is a good relationship hack, and she has pretty eyes anyway
Mentally contrast[30] goals - for each goal, spend a little time thinking about where I am vs. where I’d like to be
It was too easy, in a way. After a few months of building these habits, I realized that although I was learning a lot and living a richer life while raising my overall Expectancy, I wasn’t getting very much Skritter work done.
6:00 - 6:10: wake up with the sun, bathroom, weigh, dress, narrate dream journal 6:10 − 6:15: breakfast of two raw eggs, a little dark chocolate, a bunch of vitamins 6:15 − 6:20: longboard down to the park 6:20 − 6:27: practice Chinese with Skritter in the park 6:27 − 7:20: read a book in the park 7:20 − 7:27: practice Chinese with Skritter in the park 7:27 − 7:32: longboard back from the park 7:32 − 7:40: second breakfast of milk + protein + creatine + athletic greens, a little more chocolate 7:40 − 7:45: wake Chloe up gently before her 7:41 alarm 7:45 − 7:50: practice knife throwing 7:50 −
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At each point of decision to do or not do one of these things, my old brain would have generated a stream of rationalizations about how I don’t have to do it or can do it later or won’t be able to keep it up anyway or I’m too tired and had better take it easy. But with my current Expectancy levels, I already know I’m going to do it.
With a long history of realizing that I always feel better after I get up or work out or study or accomplish something, no matter how tired or sore I think I am beforehand, the generalized cue of “I don’t feel like it” has been largely rewired from the “Quit” response to the “Do it so I can feel better” response.
When I notice myself skipping something more important, I take that as a cue to add more motivation hacks to make sure I do it, since in the long run, that’s much easier than trying to keep doing it with sufficient-but-not-excess motivation. When I find myself wasting time, I increase the difficulty by adding more pursuits.
“The four most expensive words in the English language are, ‘This time it’s different.’”
Binding yourself is not that complicated and doesn’t take long, but the actual moment of precommitting is scarier than it sounds[39]. (After you commit, it’s not scary at all.) Don’t be scared into weakening the resolution. You should bind yourself with something far beyond the scope of the goal you’re trying to accomplish, so that there’s no contest: your motivation should be much higher than needed to get the job done, both so that you don’t fall a little short, and so that you have more fun. If the thought of losing $100 can motivate you to go to the gym three times a week for a month, then
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What precommitment devices shall I use? Everything I can think of! 1. I’ll give away $7,290 if I don’t do it on or before August 25, 2012. (I put another $7,290 on finishing the first draft of this book by then.) 2. I’ve already told Chloe, her friends, all my Human Hacker Housemates, and a bunch of people at a party. I’ll tell my startup cofounders, and I’ll post it on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. (I don’t like using social networks, but I haven’t set up an appropriate public blog yet, and I need to do this right now.) 3. I’m writing this whole chapter about it in advance, and it would
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Paul Graham has an excellent essay about the acceleration of addictiveness[46] in which he argues that to live a good life, one must become ever more eccentric in terms of saying no to the explosion of things that are designed to addict us, many of which are now delivered via the internet.
it’s harder to focus when a quick hit is right there on your computer or your phone. Do something about it, whether it’s keeping your phone in airplane mode until 5pm, or turning off your laptop’s WiFi at all times except 11:00 − 11:30 am and 8:00 − 9:00 pm.
make a 30-second delay before your browser loads any page to stop that compulsive typing of reddit.com whenever you blank out for a second.
One week when I was gearing up to do 70 hours of real work (high for me, but not intense), I did a one-week timelapse of my screen[48], with my face in the corner, and showed it to some friends, figuring that it might be fun but that they would eventually skip through it. But every one of them watched the whole seven minutes and exclaimed to me afterwards how inspiring it was that I never checked Facebook!
I didn’t think my focus was too great that week (so many emails checked and rechecked), but they were surprised by how good it was, and I was surprised by how low their standards were. Here I was, an internet addict, being praised because I was functioning. How bad are other people’s addictions?
I started doing internetless mornings on the first day of writing this book.
When you’re desperate, it’s time to fight with every weapon you can. Your weapons, in this case, are not the Nerf Bat of Trying Harder or the Secret Wand of Easy Weight Loss.
I find that journaling helps with this. It’s much easier for me to tell when I’m lying to myself when I write things down, or especially when I hesitate to write about something. If it’s not a problem, then why am I so reluctant to engage it and prove that?
When you have private writing assignments like Write to yourself about your life path: what do you know about where you are coming from and where you are going?, it gets tough to keep pretending that your life isn’t a disaster heading for a catastrophe.
I kept journaling, writing about how once I got to college I was going to talk to people, how I was going to change, how I was going to face my fears as if my life depended on it (which it did). This journaling was a form of precommitment: nine months of telling myself that I would take action would force me to swallow those promises if I didn’t follow through, and knowing that helped make me believe that I could do it.
I didn’t eat anything except Reese’s cups for the first two days because I was too afraid to ask anyone where the cafeteria was and how I could get food.
With any skill, you can come up with an exercise that will push you to just beyond your limits, where learning comes the fastest. And you already know how to use precommitment to get yourself to do the exercise.
Rejection Therapy is an exercise designed to get you over this useless fear. It uses the psychological tactic of “flooding”: you expose yourself to the terrifying stimulus over and over until you get over it and instinctively realize there’s nothing to be afraid of.
