The Motivation Hacker ← We Can Solve This

“To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.” - Walter Pater,

You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers,

I felt a moment of panic, as if I had let my protagonist license expire and now I would have to retake the test.

• Goal: Hang out with 100 people. Requirements: Have significant conversations with 100 different people.

I would consume one of these books, maybe create a To-Do to reorganize my To-Dos, and go back to exactly what I was doing while feeling great about how great I would be someday.

I wrote this book as a way of forcing myself to live excellently, and to give good ideas on how to do the same to those who hunger, who can’t subsist on wishful thinking alone.

More motivation doesn’t just mean that we’re more likely to succeed at a task, but also that we’ll have more fun doing it. This is what we want; this is why we hack motivation.

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 the next goal.

if you get good at it, you might find yourself gleefully penning your opus in the morning, bike-touring Nepal during the day, rocking on guitar at night, checking up on your steam-powered skateboard business on the weekends, and scaring the locals with your laughter at the thought of how you used to drown out thoughts of the dreadful five-page paper with television shows about fascinating characters doing things only slightly more fantastic than what you’re doing.

I used to have no ambitions, and as I slowly fixed myself, they appeared.

Maybe there are no people without big dreams, just people with their eyes shut.

She could use the techniques in this book to pursue either goal, and she would likely succeed even if she picked the wrong one , perhaps never realizing that she’d found the lesser fulfillment. Motivation hackers are in danger of achieving the wrong goals.

Low Impulsiveness • At any time, there’s only one clear thing that you want to do, so you have no problems focusing on it.

Junk food? Sure—it’s not going to kill you tomorrow or anything.

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.

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.

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

If the day comes where you can’t do the goal, do it anyway.

If it’s just frustratingly inconvenient and hard that day, then when you persevere, your Expectancy will grow—and you’ll learn to plan better next time. Try to anticipate any obstacles that could come up, and then either make the goal easy enough that you’d still be able to deal with them, or include them as explicit excuses.

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

When I first set out to use success spirals, the only thing I could reliably do was work.

No To-Dos older than 3 days - make sure no miscellaneous tasks have remained undone longer than three days

Anki [29] - do some spaced repetition learning system flashcard reviews

Gaze into Chloe's eyes - I read that this is a good relationship hack, and she has pretty eyes anyway

With a long history of realizing that I always feel better after I get up or work out or study or accomplish something, no matter how tired or sore I think I am beforehand, the generalized cue of “I don’t feel like it” has been largely rewired from the “Quit” response to the “Do it so I can feel better” response.

I took the Sword with me when I went to college, knowing that if I couldn’t pull my life together then, I would never be able to do it. My friend Cathy remembers me telling her, “In a week, I’ll either be happy or dead.”

If the thought of losing $100 can motivate you to go to the gym three times a week for a month, then bind yourself with $1000 and watch yourself run cheerfully to the gym through the cold rain that you hadn’t planned for.

Precommitting is simple when there’s a single moment of success or failure. You turn it into do-or-die moment, and then you don’t die.

If Cortés were around today, he’d probably be one of us who turn our internet off. Apart from getting rid of your TV, that’s usually what this technique comes down to, so maybe it should be called “Disconnecting the Internet.”

I didn’t think my focus was too great that week (so many emails checked and rechecked), but they were surprised by how good it was, and I was surprised by how low their standards were. Here I was, an internet addict, being praised because I was functioning. How bad are other people’s addictions?

“I need to finish <Transparent Excuse> before I can focus on reducing my drinking,” or “I could probably start dating any time, but I can wait until after this work project is done.” I find that journaling helps with this. It’s much easier for me to tell when I’m lying to myself when I write things down, or especially when I hesitate to write about something. If it’s not a problem, then why am I so reluctant to engage it and prove that?

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

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

“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.

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

This is another source of bad goals: childhood dreams. Some childhood dreams are originally ours, and some grow on us, but most were given to us at a time when we didn’t know any better about what we liked.

Go ahead and travel the world, but pay attention to whether you enjoy it. Then

When you hit a low by yourself, it’s hard to get out of it. When your bros just keep going, you’ll stumble after them even if you’ve lost the light, only to find that it was just ahead at the next bend. Don’t strive alone if you don’t have to.

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.

I use this technique all the time with Chloe, too: “I’ll do the laundry; what will you trade me? Dinner? Deal [78] !” Unlike with money, we all have different preferences for chores, so trade tasks with someone and you can both get great deals.

Apple cofounder Steve Jobs said that you should stay hungry [80] in order to do great things. If your life is full, you won’t have the same drive as a desperate man. This doesn’t matter for many goals, but 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.

So I read Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self by Robert Waggoner, skipped the precognition and shared dream chapters,

I started narrating my dreams using my phone’s dictation feature every morning after I woke up, and my dream recall increased from less than one a night to 1.9 a night,

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.

The day before I started writing, I spent three hours reading a few writers’ blog posts and hitting all of the highest-rated topic threads at writers.stackexchange.com .

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.

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.

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.

We tend to pick a destination, arrive somewhere else, and then be thankful we ended up precisely where we did, unaware of all the other places we could have gone, and more importantly, the other paths we could have traveled.

Such optimism is human and must be fought.

Set up more motivation hacks than you can ever imagine needing.

Neither can I count all the times that I’ve heard other people object to committing to a goal, reasoning that they shouldn’t have to force themselves to do something that they want to do.

I don’t know about you, but if I’m going to face a zombie, especially one that ate me last time I played, I’m going to want more than one bullet, and I’m going to want to fire them from range instead of waiting until he’s within brain-smelling distance.

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.

“To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.” - Walter Pater,

and I had just finished rereading You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers, a frenzied novel

here’s a guy who lived so much in one week that it overflowed a book’s pages and he had to summarize the rest of his three-month epic escapade in a sentence and die on the cover. What had I done in the last three months? Wrote code for 717 hours. Got better at handstands and pull-ups. Packed my moving box. Discovered that eating half a stick of butter a day wasn’t good for my brain. My adventure count was zero.

moment of panic, as if I

if I had let my protagonist license expire

A chef wields dozens of tools, from spatulas to potato scrubbing gloves. Every once in a while, he’ll need the pastry brush, but every day he’ll use a chef’s knife, a frying pan, salt, and a stove.

More motivation doesn’t just mean that we’re more likely to succeed at a task, but also that we’ll have more fun doing it. This is what we want; this is why we hack motivation.

television shows about fascinating characters doing things only slightly more fantastic than what you’re doing.

But I used to have no ambitions, and as I slowly fixed myself, they appeared.

I used to have no ambitions, and as I slowly fixed myself, they appeared.

Motivation hackers are in danger of achieving the wrong goals.

Low Expectancy • You want to lose weight, but nothing has worked before, so it’s hard to maintain healthy choices.

You have never been very athletic, so you avoid physical pursuits.

When you have low Expectancy, though, your confidence is so low that you aren’t willing to practice

The biggest hack a motivation hacker can perform is to build her confidence to the size of a volcano.

It’s hard to keep exercising because it’s so painful or boring.

You don’t have a good answer to the question of “What are you looking forward to?”

When you see low Value in what you’re doing, either because the end reward is not important or because the process is not enjoyable, motivation is scarce.

You get the urge to snack when you’re not hungry instead of starting or persevering in some task.

Low Delay • You are always so close to achieving one goal or another that you never lack the urge to go finish something.

Regardless of what model of willpower the motivation hacker uses, she will structure her goals so that she doesn’t need to rely on willpower to achieve them.

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.

You can get to the point where even the craziest goals afford only achievement, and the question becomes not, “Can I do this?” but “Do I want this?” (The answer is then usually, “Sure, why not?”)

The important part is to never weasel out of doing what you said you’d do. If the day comes where you can’t do the goal, do it anyway. If it truly is impossible, then your Expectancy will take damage. If it’s just frustratingly inconvenient and hard that day, then when you persevere, your Expectancy will grow—and you’ll learn to plan better next time. Try to anticipate any obstacles that could come up, and then either make the goal easy enough that you’d still be able to deal with them, or include them as explicit excuses.

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.

My brain had done its protective trick where it explained these failures as things that I would be able to succeed at later, once I weren’t so desperately burdened with the destiny of my startup,

Eat vitamins - so easy once the habit is there!

Gaze into Chloe's eyes - I read that this is a good relationship hack, and she has pretty eyes anyway

Mentally contrast[30] goals - for each goal, spend a little time thinking about where I am vs. where I’d like to be

It was too easy, in a way. After a few months of building these habits, I realized that although I was learning a lot and living a richer life while raising my overall Expectancy, I wasn’t getting very much Skritter work done.

6:00 - 6:10: wake up with the sun, bathroom, weigh, dress, narrate dream journal 6:10 − 6:15: breakfast of two raw eggs, a little dark chocolate, a bunch of vitamins 6:15 − 6:20: longboard down to the park 6:20 − 6:27: practice Chinese with Skritter in the park 6:27 − 7:20: read a book in the park 7:20 − 7:27: practice Chinese with Skritter in the park 7:27 − 7:32: longboard back from the park 7:32 − 7:40: second breakfast of milk + protein + creatine + athletic greens, a little more chocolate 7:40 − 7:45: wake Chloe up gently before her 7:41 alarm 7:45 − 7:50: practice knife throwing 7:50 − 8:05: journaling 8:05 − 11:20: writing this book 11:20 - 12:00: intense home weightlifting and metabolic conditioning workout 12:00 − 12:01: handstand practice 12:01 − 12:15: eat pemmican stick[31], stretching routine 12:15 − 12:35: lunch in hammock 12:35 − 12:42: practice Chinese with Skritter in hammock 12:42 − 12:45: shower 12:45: internet on 12:45 − 16:15: Skritter work, sometimes replaced with errands like shopping, cleaning, and laundry, or hacking on Quantified Mind[32]. 16:15 - 17:15: only time allowed for email, forum, social media. 17:15 - 17:22: practice Chinese with Skritter in Papasan chair 17:22 - 17:30: Quantified Mind cognitive testing 17:30 - 18:00: intense running interval training 18:00 - 19:00: cooking and eating dinner with Chloe 19:00 - 21:00: catch up, social stuff, more reading 21:00 - 21:15: update experiments, then turn internet off 21:15 - 21:22: practice Chinese with Skritter while falling asleep 21:22 − 21:25: attempt to induce lucid dream 21:25 - 6:00: sleep (extra sleep to aid athletic recovery)

At each point of decision to do or not do one of these things, my old brain would have generated a stream of rationalizations about how I don’t have to do it or can do it later or won’t be able to keep it up anyway or I’m too tired and had better take it easy. But with my current Expectancy levels, I already know I’m going to do it.

When I notice myself skipping something more important, I take that as a cue to add more motivation hacks to make sure I do it, since in the long run, that’s much easier than trying to keep doing it with sufficient-but-not-excess motivation. When I find myself wasting time, I increase the difficulty by adding more pursuits.

“The four most expensive words in the English language are, ‘This time it’s different.’”

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. If the thought of losing $100 can motivate you to go to the gym three times a week for a month, then bind yourself with $1000 and watch yourself run cheerfully to the gym through the cold rain that you hadn’t planned for.

What precommitment devices shall I use? Everything I can think of! 1. I’ll give away $7,290 if I don’t do it on or before August 25, 2012. (I put another $7,290 on finishing the first draft of this book by then.) 2. I’ve already told Chloe, her friends, all my Human Hacker Housemates, and a bunch of people at a party. I’ll tell my startup cofounders, and I’ll post it on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. (I don’t like using social networks, but I haven’t set up an appropriate public blog yet, and I need to do this right now.) 3. I’m writing this whole chapter about it in advance, and it would be terribly inconvenient to have to rewrite it with a weaker example, and to fail at something when I’m writing a book about how to do the opposite. (Every little bit helps.) 4. I already paid for it. 5. Chloe is counting on me. 6. I’ll nonchalantly email my twin brother, who went skydiving no problem, and tell him that I’m going to go skydiving as if it’s no problem, too. 7. I’ll fix the date of the skydive now, so that there’s no chance of scheduling problems. (Friends’ schedules dictate August 19.)

Paul Graham has an excellent essay about the acceleration of addictiveness[46] in which he argues that to live a good life, one must become ever more eccentric in terms of saying no to the explosion of things that are designed to addict us, many of which are now delivered via the internet.

it’s harder to focus when a quick hit is right there on your computer or your phone. Do something about it, whether it’s keeping your phone in airplane mode until 5pm, or turning off your laptop’s WiFi at all times except 11:00 − 11:30 am and 8:00 − 9:00 pm.

make a 30-second delay before your browser loads any page to stop that compulsive typing of reddit.com whenever you blank out for a second.

One week when I was gearing up to do 70 hours of real work (high for me, but not intense), I did a one-week timelapse of my screen[48], with my face in the corner, and showed it to some friends, figuring that it might be fun but that they would eventually skip through it. But every one of them watched the whole seven minutes and exclaimed to me afterwards how inspiring it was that I never checked Facebook!

I started doing internetless mornings on the first day of writing this book.

When you’re desperate, it’s time to fight with every weapon you can. Your weapons, in this case, are not the Nerf Bat of Trying Harder or the Secret Wand of Easy Weight Loss.

I find that journaling helps with this. It’s much easier for me to tell when I’m lying to myself when I write things down, or especially when I hesitate to write about something. If it’s not a problem, then why am I so reluctant to engage it and prove that?

When you have private writing assignments like Write to yourself about your life path: what do you know about where you are coming from and where you are going?, it gets tough to keep pretending that your life isn’t a disaster heading for a catastrophe.

I kept journaling, writing about how once I got to college I was going to talk to people, how I was going to change, how I was going to face my fears as if my life depended on it (which it did). This journaling was a form of precommitment: nine months of telling myself that I would take action would force me to swallow those promises if I didn’t follow through, and knowing that helped make me believe that I could do it.

I didn’t eat anything except Reese’s cups for the first two days because I was too afraid to ask anyone where the cafeteria was and how I could get food.

With any skill, you can come up with an exercise that will push you to just beyond your limits, where learning comes the fastest. And you already know how to use precommitment to get yourself to do the exercise.

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.

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.

“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. Instead, do things that you and people whom you respect care about. Paul Graham puts it best: “Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you’ll make it prestigious

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 feeling accomplished (10%)

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’ negativity and reading Hacker News and other internet media.

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.

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, distractions diminished. After recharging with a five

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 my Beeminder target of five hours a day.

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.

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.

read a book on lucid dreaming by someone who is great at it and writes as if it’s easy, then follow the author’s advice to practice it. How-to books make things seem easier than they are, which can kill motivation once you follow the advice half-heartedly and then don’t see any results. But they’re great for getting you started, and if you actually do the things you’re supposed to, then you get the great results you were promised (even though it’s harder than the author made it out to be—after all, if he’s writing a book on it, then he probably had an easier time learning it than most people will

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.

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,

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.

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. Chapter Ten: Experiments Measure Your Results Entrepreneurs, management gurus, and scientists all like to quote 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].”

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,

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.

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. Neither can I count all the times that I’ve heard other people

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.

“Eat more paleo[110] for a month” is not specific enough. “Eat

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.

Create Rewards. When you succeed, celebrate it, either by congratulating yourself or giving yourself a treat. Treats can backfire if overused, though. I prefer victory dances, fist pumps, and grinning like an idiot.

Make external reminders of your goals visible, and actually look at them. Avoid failing at your goals just because you forgot about them.

Schedule Play Before Work. Plan times to have as much fun as you can—this leads to more efficient recreation, and it also lets you focus on your goals during the other times, rather than just having low-grade leisure constantly tempting you as an option. Play hard.

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.

I talked to my friend Ben Reitz the Dream Master, and he added even more ideas for my list of things to do in lucid dreams, which now consists of: • Becoming a bear[116] • Engaging in supernatural combat • Exploring other planets • Becoming a planet • Being a sorcerer • Riding a dragon • Talking to dead people (relatives, famous scientists, berserk dictators) • Working through problems with Einstein • Creating my own animals using primordial energy from my hands • Sending healing energy to afflicted parts of my body • Ritualistically shedding burdens • Hypnotizing my waking self in self-improving ways • Being an opposite gender • Practicing Chinese • Seeking transcendental enlightenment • Discovering my totemic dream animal • Doing the most amazing dance the universe has ever seen • Witnessing the Big Bang • Composing music • Burping so loudly that I destroy the sun[117] • Discovering mysteries at the bottom of the vasty deep • Experiencing life in four or two dimensions • Having a conversation with a copy of myself • Seeing what I’ll look like in twenty years • Seeing colors I’ve never seen before • Practicing parkour • Being in two places at once • Generating amazing startup ideas • Pulling my dream self out of a mirror • Diving into the sun • Swimming with dolphins • Mixing senses so as to taste colors • Being inside a cartoon • Transmogrifying into a cloud and raining down • Running faster than sound • Stepping through mirrors • Stopping time • Flying with wings • Traveling to another dimension • Building a dream workshop that has doors through which I can enter continuous dream environments, like my science lab or my continuing adventure.

If there is a mode of ground transportation more fun than this, I do not know it. I felt like the coolest human. It goes up to twenty miles per hour, which is sick fast for something with brakes like soggy gum.

Turns out that if you demand to spend a romantic evening with a girl on a night where you’re clearly too busy to do any such thing, and you call it a date, and you show the same affection you normally do, she opens triple the amount of romance receptors. She charges up with love until she glows! Then she dissipates it over the next several days with yearnful ring-finger waggling.

digging caves in strawberries to put blueberries in them and surprise your girl at her bus stop with a blind, no-biting taste test[130] to determine what double morsel you’re holding in front of her mouth.

The pain of having to finish a bad goal is often a fair price for the lesson on picking your goals.

Here is my happiness tracking scale: 1: Suicidally depressed. 2: Majorly depressed or in tons of pain. 3: Frustrated or annoyed or sad or hurting or generally unhappy. 4: A little down. 5: Okay, I guess. 6: Happy. 7: Happy to the point of smiling or rocking out. 8: Excitedly happy; awesome. 9: Everything is just perfect. 10: Contender for best moment of my life.