The Motivation Hacker

by Nick Winter

The self-experimenter improves by determining what works with simple experiments. For example, I wanted to improve my skin, but I didn’t know what interventions would actually help. I started using facial cleanser on just one half of my face, body wash on just one half of my body, tracking when I showered and changed my sheets, and alternating weeks of wearing a clean T-shirt to bed. I then asked Chloe to help me count my zits each day, without telling her which half was which. I analyzed the data and saw that body wash (p = 0.04) and facial cleanser (p = 0.02) both helped a tiny amount, washing the sheets did nothing, wearing a T-shirt did nothing, missing a day of showering did nothing, and missing multiple days of showering might have hurt a little bit. These results overrule many of my intuitions, and now I can save time not messing around with interventions that don’t work and move on to testing some that might.