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The motivation hacker learns to steer his life towards higher Value and to have fun demolishing boring necessities in his way.
The motivation hacker learns to structure goals so that the perceived Delay is not so great. Intermediate milestones, process-based goals, and willfully optimistic planning are his tools here. With the right mindset, success is ever right around the corner.
That is, will is simply the process of making personal rules for ourselves that will help us reach our goals, and how much willpower we can muster is precisely how good we are at setting up these personal rules so that the we always prefer to keep our rules than to break them. This is a learnable skill.
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. If you have ideas for how to make it easier, let me know.
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 n...
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An intermediate success spiral might start with a goal defined like this: “I will run 57 out of the next 60 days, even if it’s just for two minutes, although I’ll aim to run for twenty minutes. I will set a recurring reminder to run at 5:30pm. I will place a run-tracking notebook by my bed to mark whether I ran that day, and to remind me to do it before bed if I still haven’t. If I become sick enough to call off work, or if I am injured to the point where running would be unhealthy, then I don’t have to run.”
The tip which worked for me was to focus on input-based process goals (write for five minutes) rather than output-based results goals (write one page), and to keep the required inputs minuscule at first.
Self help usually doesn’t work. You flit from book to blog to friendly tip, idly trying to improve and sometimes making a decent effort on some strategy that sounds exciting. When these attempts fail, you lose a little Expectancy that the next attempt will work. Chew through enough self-help advice without swallowing and soon you’ll be sustaining yourself only on the fleeting taste of inspiration, fantasizing success in place of pursuing it.
To precommit is to choose now to limit your options later, preventing yourself from making the wrong choice in the face of temptation. Publicly announcing your goal is a common form of precommitment.
MEVID: M = EV / ID, or Motivation = Expectancy times Value over Impulsiveness times Delay.
Willpower will desert you when you need it most, so you need enough precommitment to succeed even without any.
The solution is to precommit to staying on track toward your goal at all times, not just by the end.
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.
Carl Sandburg: “Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful, lest you let other people spend it for you.”
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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. Wha...
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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.) I talk
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A terrible way to pick your goals is to do what society wants you to do: to chase prestige.
A sure way to kill motivation is to water down the challenge. This seems as if it contradicts Expectancy and the idea of success spirals, where you make sure you can’t lose, but 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 (“I’m getting stronger, and one day I’ll deadlift 500 pounds!”).
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.
You might be able to just develop a habit of mentally interrupting yourself to ask how you’re doing and why. But if you’re human, don’t neglect this. Humans don’t know what makes us happy, so measure[70].
a few years.”[73] Working on your own startup can provide more motivation than anything else I know.
We focused our expectancy on the process, not the result.
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.
There are no shortage of long books and short blog posts with equivalently good suggestions, so take your pick. Here are a few, if you need them: • Getting Things Done: http://zenhabits.net/the-getting-things-done-gtd-faq/ • Zen To Done: http://zenhabits.net/zen-to-done-ztd-the-ultimate-simple-productivity-system/ • Final Version: http://www.markforster.net/ • Autopilot Schedule: http://calnewport.com/blog/2008/04/07/ • Four Quadrant To-Do list: http://sidsavara.com/personal-development/nerdy-productivity-coveys-time-management-matrix-illustrated-with-xkcd-comics
other entrepreneurs, management gurus, and scientists saying things like “You make what you measure[98],” “What gets measured, gets managed[99],” and “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it[100].”
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.
Dr. Steel’s CSI Approach (setting Challenging, Specific, Immediate, Approach-oriented goals).
Chapter Twelve: List of Motivation Techniques Sources
Expectancy Recall that Expectancy is your confidence of success. These techniques increase motivation by making you certain that you’ll succeed. • Success Spirals. Set yourself a series of achievable goals and then achieve all of them until you expect only success and failure is no longer familiar. • 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. • Mental Contrasting. Visualize the success you want to
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Value Value is both how rewarding a task will be when you finish it and how fun it is while you’re doing it. These are general ways to adjust what you’re doing so that it’s more meaningful and fun. • Find Flow. Tasks which are too easy or too hard are not engaging, so find ways to make tasks challenging but possible. I think of this in terms of being a task samurai and doing dwarf dishes. Make a game of it. Compete against yourself, or against others. • Find Meaning. Look for ways to connect tasks with major life goals, so that you can remind yourself why you’re doing what you’re doing. Set
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Impulsiveness Impulsiveness is your susceptibility to delay for a given task: how likely you are to put it off and do something more pressing. Limiting Impulsiveness often means getting rid of the options to do other things. • Precommitment. Choose now to limit your later options, preventing yourself from making the wrong choice in the face of temptation. • Burnt Ships. A specific form of precommitment where you disable, remove, or destroy a distraction or temptation. • Goal Reminders. Make external reminders of your goals visible, and actually look at them. Avoid failing at your goals just
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Delay Delay is how far off the reward seems to be. This is often hard to manipulate directly, but sometimes you can set yourself up to perceive Delay differently, thus scoring a big motivation win. • Break Goals Down. Granularize big goals until the next achievement is right in front of you. Subgoals and sub-subgoals defeat Delay. This is what Beeminder does automatically: you get a target for each day. • Plan Fallaciously. This isn’t so much a technique as a phenomenon, and its effects on motivation aren’t backed up by any research, either—just my experience with my startup and marathon
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task samurai.
[88] http://blog.sethroberts.net/2011/05/01/percentile-feedback-and-productivity/
