The Motivation Hacker

by Nick Winter

For each goal, I decided on success criteria and motivation hacks to fire me up.

Like a chef, a motivation hacker has a core set of tools. I’ll introduce these in Chapters 3 and 4: success spirals, precommitment, and burnt ships.

I actually have no idea how many people read The 4-Hour Work Week[6] and then start a business that gives them the freedom to sell their junk and travel as in Life Nomadic[7], then return to crush[8] being rich[9] while winning[10] things[11] and getting people done.

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

By increasing Expectancy or Value, or decreasing Impulsiveness or Delay, you hack motivation.

everyone else can just do these things without trying and you can never be good at them. You’ve learned to be helpless. I learned to be helpless at 16 out of 23 of these classic low Expectancy skills above.

The biggest hack a motivation hacker can perform is to build her confidence to the size of a volcano. An oversized eruption of Expectancy can incinerate all obstacles in the path to any goal when you combine it with good planning.

The motivation hacker learns to steer his life towards higher Value and to have fun demolishing boring necessities in his way.

Note on the Research I first read about the motivation equation in a blog post[17] over a year ago, in March 2011. The article summarized Piers Steels’ book, The Procrastination Equation, which was itself a summary of the state of our empirical evidence about how motivation works and techniques for improving it. I started experimenting with the techniques listed[18] in the article, some of which I found tremendously useful.

While most of these techniques are backed up by science, my recommendation of applying several of them at once to achieve superhuman motivation levels is beyond what has been studied.

“the will is a recursive process that bets the expected value of your future self-control against each of your successive temptations.”

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 not as scary and commit to starting then. Then in the meantime, talk yourself into it.

Motivation increases with Expectancy—confidence that you will win. When you know you’re going to succeed, motivation abounds. When you think you might not be able to accomplish a goal, then motivation suffers. Fail once, lose some confidence and motivation, try less, fail again, and repeat until you’ve no hope left.

To start building your success spirals, first make a tiny, achievable goal that you can’t forget to do.

Your goal also needs a completion date. You can’t succeed at doing something forever, even if it’s easy; eventually, life changes.

The important part is to never weasel out of doing what you said you’d do.

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.”

A beginning success spiral might look very similar, except with something easier than running, like brushing one’s teeth or reading books.

You have to shoot for 100% adherence because the point of the avoiding these foods entirely is to flush them out to determine intolerance.

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. Others I add to existing routines, like doing handstands before bed or eating vitamins on waking. Others are habitual enough now that I don’t remind myself. At night before bed, I open my Google Drive spreadsheet[24] and quickly record whether I have achieved each daily goal (while also recording some useful self-experimental data).

Where I Started

I then read about the motivation equation and the technique of success spirals and decided to try the idea of always accomplishing my goals. Excited by the idea of developing unshakable confidence in success on a broad spectrum of goals, I decided to set a lot of tiny goals, each of which I could do in a few minutes, and which I decided I would do at least six days each week with an overall average of 95% adherence.

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.

Success spirals—backed up by simple tracking of success—were the key habit for me.

Expenditures of willpower serve only to signal poor planning and a need to tweak the spiral.

When I find myself wasting time, I increase the difficulty by adding more pursuits.

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.

Even weak forms can be useful (although weaseling too much can backfire, lessening your bond with yourself), but the stronger the commitment[38] you make, and the less weasel room you give yourself, the more motivation you’ll have.

If precommitment is traditionally an Impulsiveness hack, then the way I suggest doing it may be thought of pre-overcommitment, where you’re hacking Expectancy now since you know Impulsiveness won’t get you later. You feel confident the whole time, and it’s not about the stakes.

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.

Hyperbolic discounting makes it easier to commit the further in advance you do it, and you also want to avoid the habit of putting off commitment (as Chloe always tells me). If you can’t do something now, then set a specific time at which you will decide to either do it then or to never do it.

The solution is to precommit to staying on track toward your goal at all times, not just by the end.

And so there was Beeminder[42]. Beeminder is a web service which lets you set arbitrary process-based goals and then holds you to them with all the reasonableness and firmness of your best friend who wants to see you succeed but won’t take any more of your crap. It’s got great graphs which will please you when you’re ahead, motivate you when you’re behind, and share with you the fear of the death that your goal is about to die when it’s time for you to be the uncomfortable hero of your story. You can adjust any goal, but the changes only take effect a week later, which is far enough away to keep you honest: you want to give up now, but you can’t, and you don’t want your future self to give up, so you just keep going.

One specific technique for precommitment is where you disable, remove, or destroy a distraction or temptation. I call it “Burning the Ships” after the inaccurate story of Hernán Cortés who, after landing his invasion force, ordered his men to burn their ships[45] so that they wouldn’t be distracted by the possibility of retreat when conquering the Aztec empire. You list possible distractions, and then you make it so that it’s impossible to do those things when you want to be working toward your other goals. Then instead of having to use willpower to prevent yourself from going to go grab a snack, you realize that there are no snacks available, and you get on with your flow.

I want to give you an example of putting these motivation hacks (success spirals, precommitment, and burnt ships) into action all at once. Sometimes you’ll face a goal which is so important it seems your life depends on it (high Value), but which seems so impossible (low Expectancy) that you’d rather die the slow death of escapism (high Impulsiveness) and ignore it until later (high Delay).

The example I will now give is the most important, most rewarding goal I’ve ever achieved. I had to use success spirals, precommitment, burnt ships, and a new environment. I was missing something which I needed and thought I could never have. I made a desperate plan, followed it for years, and acquired that missing piece. Many take this particular thing for granted, and some struggle with it, but few were ever as bad off as I was. Life without it was a combination of shame, fear, despair, and years spent escaping into books and video games. I lacked social skills.

With any skill, you can come up with an exercise that will push you to just beyond your limits, where learning comes the fastest.

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. There are a few different flavors, like the thirty-day challenge where you must be rejected at least once per day, but the one that I did only took an hour.

I went from initially terrified to mostly chill by the end of the hour, and that desensitization has stuck with me ever since[55]

Note that 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.

Rejection Therapy is one example of an exercise that gives huge gains in a short time if you can bring yourself to do it. With the powers of precommitment, you can set yourself up to do many such exercises, building skills and getting over fears in no time.

My second-favorite quote comes from the poet 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.”

If you aren’t good at something yet, then hack your motivation to spend the time practicing, and you’ll become great[60]. If you need to work a job to survive, then motivate yourself to hack at your goal outside of work, save money, or find a better job. If you don’t know how to do something, then motivate yourself to spend the time figuring it out.

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. What would you do? This is an exercise in overcoming the Sunk Cost Fallacy[62].

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 more about this in Chapter 12: Mistakes.

The biggest source of goals, both good and bad, is stories of what other people have done. If you read enough about startups, you’ll want to do one, perhaps forgetting that you value financial security. If your friends all start running, you may find yourself running with them, even though you actually hate it. Growing up watching romantic comedies will give you horrible ideas about what you want from a lover. Go ahead and travel the world, but pay attention to whether you enjoy it. Then there are the other types of stories: not of action and adventure, but of common contentment. Most people you know work jobs, buy things, go out, entertain themselves, and eventually start families. These may not be necessary goals for you. “Moderation in all things,” they say. That may keep a society together, but it’s not the protagonist’s job.

We have two modes of thinking about well-being: the experiencing self, which can semi-accurately tell you how happy you are in the moment if you ask yourself, and the remembering self, which can make up reasonable-sounding lies about how happy you were in the past, or about how happy something will make you in the future.

Unfortunately for us, the remembering self makes all the planning decisions, charting all of our goals across its bizarre cognitive geography. We ignore process and focus on conclusion; we overestimate both negative and positive impacts of possible events; we hyperbolically discount like a fishmonger going out of business; and we make disconnected events fit into consistent life stories. We end up with bad goals that don’t make us happy while we’re achieving them and which give only fleeting satisfaction when we’re done. Almost all attempts to increase our happiness end in failure because we don’t understand what actually makes us happy. And when you set yourself up to accomplish a goal no matter how unpleasant the process is, that’s not a recipe for well-being.

Watch out for low fun density.