The Motivation Hacker

by Nick Winter

The motivation hacker will not let this happen. Instead, she will focus her Expectancy on the process: “spend an average of fifteen minutes per day on Anki.” She’ll structure her goal to be strict enough to keep herself on track and flexible enough to achieve while still having a life. (Beemind it.) She’ll build up her success spiral slowly so she doesn’t fall off, make sure she’s setting aside time to study, and keep an eye on what she’s learning to make sure that it actually matters to her instead of realizing too late that she’s added too many useless facts. And when she does spend six days meditating in a monastery with no chance to study, she’ll over-review beforehand and consistently review afterward, not paying much attention to the due reviews. And before you know it, without hardly trying, she’ll know Russian, American Sign Language, human neuroanatomy, a thousand jokes, all useful account and telephone numbers, a poem for every occasion, a big-picture history of the world, and enough machine learning techniques to teach a robot kung fu.