The Motivation Hacker

by Nick Winter

I measured that I got more done per hour, and had more fun doing it, the longer I worked each day. (I didn’t have to beat my best each day, only my average.)

I calculated that Scott and I would need to average thirteen hours a day between us to get it done in time. At the thought of coding all-out for four months, my eyes narrowed, my jaw jutted, and I smiled a maniac smile. Let’s see what I’m capable of.

During one week, I decided to see just how many hours I could do. 87.3

Skateboarding would be different. Not only did I not know how to skateboard, but I had no idea how to learn to skateboard, or whether it would be hard, or where I would get a skateboard. To begin, I did my usual precommitment trick of mentioning everywhere that I was going to learn to skateboard this summer.

Depending on routine, Impulsiveness might be high after waking when you should fill out your dream journal, or throughout the day when you should do reality checks, or as you’re falling asleep when you should mentally condition yourself to have a lucid dream, but for me those were not impulsive times. I think I didn’t have motivation to practice just because Expectancy was too low. Lucid dreaming was harder than I had first guessed, and so I had been discouraged.

Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self by Robert Waggoner,

I set dream missions for myself, so that instead of flying, I could ask inventor Elon Musk[93] for great insights on the future of science and direct extra muscle construction nutrients toward my pecs.

This is a good strategy for learning many things: 1. Get excited about a skill. 2. While you’re excited, make time and hack up motivation to practice it. 3. Learn how to practice it from reading or from a teacher. 4. Start doing it right away.

You can often manufacture this type of trigger: sign up to do something you don’t know how to do in the hyperbolically discounted, not-so-scary future. When the time comes, you’ll have to learn it. You’re sending your future self a motivation bomb.

I had thought of myself as fit and fast, but after I had to run five miles down a mountain to make a Skritter meeting for which I had mixed up my time zones, I realized not only that this was the furthest that I’d ever run, but also that I was not fit, fast, or able to move afterward.

The longest thing I had ever written was a sixteen-page college paper for my honors thesis, and that took weeks and didn’t have to be readable by anyone.

Then I bought four books on writing that would kick off my read-twenty-books goal and committed to spending no more time reading writing blogs until I was done with the first draft. The process seemed simple enough: make a great writing environment, plan what you’ll write first, write a target number of words of it every day, and don’t show anyone or edit until you’re done with the terrible first draft.

Sure, I can write a thousand crappy words in a couple hours each day. Then I’ll cut out 30% of them and it’ll be brilliant.

a thousand jokes,

all useful account and telephone numbers,

If you have a Valueless task you need to do, then make a game out of it so that it challenges you. Get into flow. In The Hobbit, Bilbo’s dinner dwarves did hundreds of dishes in no time by turning dishwashing drudgery into a dish-tossing song.

Face boring tasks by imagining yourself as a badass Viking samurai who is called to fight chores. Fill in tax forms with serif handwriting. Timebox laundry. Use your non-dominant hand to take out the garbage, with your other hand behind your back. Floss blindfolded. Send a pesky email on only one breath of air. Clean a room while wearing a gi and listening to Dethklok. Challenge yourself to finish every overdue task today so you can go out and set something on fire tonight. Do some dwarf dishes.

Another good strategy for defeating Valueless tasks is to not do them.

A fourth strategy is the Fool’s Defense: you signal your inability to perform a task in the hopes that someone else will then take care of it for you. An example defender is the professor Randy Pausch, who refused to learn to use the copy machine so his secretary would never expect him to make his own copies. This is okay, since his secretary gets paid to do things he can’t do.

If you’re comfortable feigning helplessness ironing shirts, then you might consider developing a reputation of never answering emails. You’d save time and focus for more important things, and people would learn to deal with your eccentricity.

There’s now a community called Quantified Self[101] which extends that idea to personal measurement for personal improvement. If you want to save money, you should track your spending. If you want to get stronger, it helps to track your workout performance. And if you want to improve your motivation, your focus, your happiness, or your productivity, then you should measure those things, because otherwise you won’t know what’s working.

Deathbed regrets are like Hollywood films: they stir passions for a couple hours, but are poorly connected to reality. They are not good criteria for a well-lived life.

Most of a fad’s contents are a sticky mixture of stories that sound good enough for us to believe them. There’s a little bit of truth in each fad, but without struggling to carve out that truth from its sticky story goo, we’ll be stuck switching fads altogether instead of preserving what worked from the last attempt. And the parts that work are different for different people—you can’t trust anyone else to seek this truth for you.

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.

Many goals are intended to make you happier, so measure your happiness and see what is effective.

If you’re trying to get stronger, then measure how much stronger you’re getting with each protocol you try so you can determine what’s working.

The curiosity involved in running an experiment can help motivation, too. Now your reward is not just lowering stress for a month, but also discovering how to lower it again in the future. If you’re as geeky as me, there can be as much Value in finding this truth as in the short-term result itself.

When hacking motivation, failure is expensive in terms of time coins, since you have to rebuild a lot of damaged Expectancy.

When you set up your success spiral, the planning fallacy will mess you up, because you’ll think, “How often will I exercise? Oh, five times a week sounds doable. I’ll start there.” Then life happens. You catch a cold. A work project demands extra time. A birthday anniversary holiday vacation date thing comes up. The gym closes early on Sundays. You drink too much one night. Before you know it, you’re toast, and your success spiral cracks.

You can’t predict in advance what specific obstacles are going to batter you away from the gym, so you don’t plan for any of them. But you should plan that something will make it harder than you can expect.

When I was starting success spirals, I thought I could average twenty minutes of Anki practice a day. I thought of the planning fallacy and cut that in half for a conservative estimate, and then performed a Hofstadter adjustment[107] and set my success spiral goal for five minutes a day.

You can even set goals like, “Do at least ten seconds of journaling six out of seven days I’m near my computer.” You’ll hope to write 750 words[108] a day, but you’ll plan for chaos, and when it happens, you won’t get discouraged and quit writing. You’ll still build a great habit.

Another way that overconfidence manifests itself is in how much motivation you decide to muster for a particular goal. In particular, you’ll tend to not use enough motivation hacks. You’ll think, “I already run sometimes without even pushing myself. If I set a schedule to run three times a week, and I tell a friend that I’m doing it, it’ll be easy.” Such optimism is human and must be fought. Set up more motivation hacks than you can ever imagine needing.

I can’t count how many times I’ve told myself I could do something without needing to get too strict about it, only to rationalize quitting (or postponing) when the going gets tough.

I’m going to hack motivation way more than I expect I’ll need to, and I’m going to do it up front when I’m feeling most excited about my goal. I’ll precommit, I’ll burn ships, I’ll create a motivation-only environment, I’ll start self-tracking to keep myself honest, I’ll find ways to make it more fun, and I’ll precommit some more. I might only need one bullet to achieve my goal, but if I fire off fifty rounds in every possible zombie hiding spot while the sun is still up, I’m not only more likely to survive and win the goal, but I’m also going to have a lot more fun along the way knowing that nothing can stop me.

It’s not fun to force yourself to work towards your goals. Don’t rely on willpower, don’t fall prey to overconfidence, and don’t think that overbuilding your motivation structure somehow means that you’re incapable of doing what you want to and should be able to do naturally.

Avoid running after the wrong goals. The motivation hacker learns to run fast, and if he goes the wrong way, he’ll end up far from the life he wanted. And if he makes himself excel at something he doesn’t like, he’ll override the natural pain indicators and push until he hurts himself. Always accomplish what you set out to do, but stop after any milestone where you realized that you weren’t enjoying the journey.

Sometimes people are afraid to be specific about a goal because they’re not sure what they want or what they’ll be able to accomplish—what if they commit to the wrong goal? But without a plan, they’re not likely to succeed; they should plan as well as they can and then set a time limit on the goal so that if it turns out to not be worthwhile, at least they can stop afterward. Stopping after you reach a goal is better than stopping before you start, during your pursuit, or never.

I prefer to focus on achieving superhuman motivation instead of avoiding normal human procrastination.

The motivation hacker will realize that she needn’t stop at getting in shape and quitting an email addiction. She will catch old dreams, discover new ones, and do anything she pleases.

Vicarious Victory. Surround yourself with motivated people (and avoid unmotivated people) to have their motivation rub off on you. If you can’t change your friends, reading biographies of inspirational people is an easier example of this.

Visualize the success you want to achieve, then contrast it with the not-success you have now.

Optimize Energy. Everything is more fun if you’re alert, not tired. Sleep well, eat well, get fit, guard your circadian rhythms, and avoid burnout. Cure energy lows with quality breaks, movement, sunshine, and good music. Match intensive tasks with periods of high energy.

Productive Procrastination. If you can’t bring yourself to do your main task, at least get some other things out of the way. It’s not perfect, but perfect is the enemy of good.