The Motivation Hacker

by Nick Winter

this rationalization is also how most goals die—you convince yourself that it’s okay to not do what you told yourself you would do—and if you can develop the habit of noticing it and defeating it, then you’ll be more effective in achieving your goals.

Lifehacker Luke Muehlhauser has broken down social skills into a map of such skills[57], from handshakes to reading faces to hairstyle, which you can look through to find techniques to learn or to see how you might apply the technique to other areas.

you might break down front-crawl swimming into dozens of skills, from breathing into the water to having your hand enter the water without splash to rotating your body with each stroke. Then you could come up with a drill for each skill: stand in the pool and breathe in above water and out below water a bunch of times; stand there and push your arm smoothly into the water for five minutes; hold your breath for a few strokes while you focus only on making sure you rotate enough. So while learning the front crawl by trying to do the front crawl should seem too difficult, learning to do it by learning each subskill one-by-one should seem encouragingly easy if you break it down far enough.

Most of us spend our time coins doing jobs that other people have given us to do, saving the rest for entertainments that other people are trying to sell us.

If you have tiny children, don’t run off on your own to the Shaolin Temple to master kung fu. (Bring them.)

If you aren’t good at something yet, then hack your motivation to spend the time practicing, and you’ll become great

Many more such stories are never told, because their protagonists never protagonized.

Spending time coins without a plan is expensive, but at least you have feedback mechanisms like boredom, stress, and depression to tell you when you’re living your life wrong.

“Pain and pleasure indicators cannot take the place of being strategic about one’s goals.”

Imagine your ideal day. What do you do? Whom do you talk to? Where do you go? Then pick a few goals that will bring your days closer to this ideal.

Make a list of every crazy goal you can think of. Then rate each goal on three factors: how much the goal excites you, from one to ten; your probability of success if you tried as hard as you could; and how long it would take in hours[61]. Then sort the goals by excitement times probability of success divided by time required and pick some of the most efficient goals.

Imagine that you’re another person, more competent than yourself, who was just dropped into your current life at this moment, without any of your current obligations but with all of your current predicaments. Forget everything that has come before and where you used to be going. ...

“Would a protagonist keep striving desperately on his startup even after desperation gave way to prosperity?" No—he would strive to ignite all the freedom he had earned.

When you do pick your goals, forget the advice about SMART goals.[63] Use Piers Steel’s slightly improved CSI Approach. Your goals should be Challenging (if they’re not exciting, they won’t provide Value); Specific (abstract goals can leave you vulnerable to Impulsiveness, since it’s not clear what you need to do); Immediate (avoid long-Delayed goals in favor of ones you can start now and finish soon), and Approach-oriented. (As opposed to avoidance goals, where you try not to do something, you should instead reframe it positively as an attempt to do something—it just feels better.)

A terrible way to pick your goals is to do what society wants you to do: to chase prestige. Don’t do things to win the respect of people you don’t know.

Paul Graham puts it best: “Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you’ll make it prestigious.”

Paul also tells a cautionary tale about his friend who knew when she was in high school that she wanted to be a doctor. She was so motivated that she persevered through every obstacle, including not actually liking her work. She’s a successful doctor, and she hates it. Now she has a life chosen for her by a high-school kid.

Bad goals often take the form of intermediate steps. You might want to be rich. If so, then go do something that will make a lot of money—don’t go to college, fight your way out of debt, work your way up, and then be rich.

And if you want to play in a band or sail around the world or write novels, then don’t make money first. You’ll have lost your passion by the time you look for it.

Gatekeepers will tell you that you need to crawl before you can walk before you can be certified to begin. Run past them.

Watch out for things that you have always been good at. It always seems to make sense to keep doing them, to build on your previous accomplishments, and to play to your strengths. This can lead to greatness, but it can also be a trap.

There is not enough Value in “lose five pounds” to make you care. It’s too safe. It’s probably easier for the overweight motivation hacker to lose fifty pounds than fifteen, because he’ll know he needs to try harder, and he’ll want it more.

the key is to set your success spirals around the process (“I Expect that I can use Beeminder to make sure I lift weights twice a week”) while deriving your Value from the results

You can’t quite guarantee that effort will lead to success, but you can guarantee effort, and that almost always leads to success eventually if you just don’t quit.

My solution to calibrating my remembering self’s planning to my experiencing self’s well-being is to randomly ping myself to record my happiness right now, along with what I’m doing. A timestamped alert comes in on my phone or laptop about every three hours, and I type in a 1-10 happiness number[69] and a couple tags for whatever is making me feel good or bad.

Average experiential happiness for those nine hours: 4.47. My average happiness was 6.18 for the month before that, mostly from sitting at home listening to music and writing code. Bad planning, remembering self! And if I hadn’t measured it, my remembering self would probably have told me, just days later, that yeah it was a long car ride but what a blast those rapids were! Watch out for low fun density.

My two years of happiness tracking has surprised me[71]. I thought sunny weather was crucial for me and wanted to move from Pittsburgh to California. Nope; weather was only 3% of happiness and 1% of unhappiness. (I moved to California anyway, but for the people, not the weather.) My happiness from music used to be 14%, and I hadn’t taken any time to manage what music I listened to. When I found that out, I spent two days organizing my music collection to cull the bad stuff, increasing the density of enjoyable songs and bringing that up to 22%, increasing my overall positive happiness by 10%. Not bad for two days of effort.

almost all my happiness comes from enjoyable work (25%), music (22%), and fee...

My unhappiness (which is about half as large as my happiness) is split between work (18%), lack of accomplishment (16%), tiredness (12%), and physical discomfort (12%). This is after improving previous problem areas like others’...

The goals you choose should do the same: they should drench you in Value and then ignite you.

the best thing about doing a startup wasn’t the financial freedom I achieved, but the lesson in how it feels to love what you’re doing. After finishing that first ¾ lifetime[74] of work, I’m aiming to work at least a few more lifetimes. It’s more fun than simply having fun.

They were so drunk that I won twenty consecutive rounds of a card game to which I didn’t know the rules.

In a three-person startup, you do only tasks that you decide need doing because you want them done or because you want to help out your best friends. Writing a twenty-page FAQ is easier than writing a bogus two-page paper on the feminine gaze in Hiroshima mon amour. Do your own thing, not someone else’s.

When I was building a huge new feature that no one was trying yet, that was when I struggled with motivation. (This is part of why they say you should launch early.) Find a way to get people counting on you and appreciating your struggle.

It’s much easier to make money building maximally unsexy products like inventory management software because there’s less competition for boring work, but we wanted to make something cool, even if it was less profitable. (And indeed, we made almost nothing for the first two years. That part sucked.) You might be more motivated by mountains of cash than we were, but don’t overlook the fun factor. Enjoying something is part of doing it well.

We worked from home, and our headquarters was our guest bedroom. We got to work closely together, listen to music, eat lunch on the porch, and play games and blow things up after dinner. This was so much fun that we wanted to keep the startup going just so that we could keep hanging out. Merge your goals into the lifestyle that you want to lead.

One advisor told us that we should get an office, because that’s where you’re supposed to work. “You won’t get distracted in an office, so you’ll be more productive.” Poor guy—avoiding distractions doesn’t mean driving twenty minutes away and renting space where there’s nothing fun to do. Find or create a new environment and use it only for work, even if it’s just for set times of day. Leave bad habits at your new door, and they’ll stay out.

watch out if you’re trying to compete with those hungry desperados—they want it more than you do, so you’ll have to be extra smart about structuring your motivation in order to work as hard as they will.

Collect fun-dense[83] activities, then do those instead of spending more time on wimpy leisure distractions.

Everyone thinks this way, and it’s called the planning fallacy[84]. I think it’s great: everything takes longer than we think, but if we planned accurately, we’d give up right away. When you’re always almost done, the delay before your reward seems short, and so your motivation is high. You don’t have to do anything to take advantage of this; even recognizing that it always takes longer won’t save you from underestimating.

For motivational highs, kill delay: look for ways to do something amazing right away.

I’d learned about the motivation equation and realized that I needed to consciously design a motivating environment if I hoped to reach my goal (and have any fun doing it). I was like an athlete relearning how to move after an injury. I had lucked into a great motivation environment before, but now I needed to put one together from scratch.

The Value of finishing the app was already high, but the Value of working on it was low—fixing bugs sucked, and no one was using it yet and encouraging me. I decided to ignore the bugs for now and scramble on building the features I’d need to start alpha testing, since I’d like fixing bugs more when I had users to fix them for.

still mostly doing website maintenance, but enough to show me that I could do more on the app. I cranked that Beeminder up to five hours a day of iPhone app development and held on for my life. For the first three months, I skated the edge of death, never more than a day’s work away from failing my Beeminder goal.

But progress came, and my Expectancy grew stronger along with it.

I became better and better at saying no to activities that had a low fun density,

my other housemates learned that I was a badass samurai of work on a quest of ferocious focus,

After recharging with a five-friend, two-week trip to Mexico and Guatemala in January, motivation was bursting out of me. I soared over m...

At this point, I was having so much fun with the app that my goal had changed from “work enough” to “work as much as possible.”

I switched to a method of graphing my work time devised by psychologist Seth Roberts, which he called percentile feedback[88]. The idea is that you graph your progress throughout the day as a percentage of the day spent working since you woke up, and at the same time you plot it against all the previous days so that you can see how you’re doing compared to the past.