by Nick Winter
The premise of this book is about how the author, Nick Winter, set out to write the book in three months while simultaneously taking on 17 other audacious goals in those 3 months. The goals included running a startup, creating an iPhone App, learning to write 3,000 Chinese characters, and many other goals people don’t achieve in many years of training and trying. This book documents his journey and the hacks he used to achieve those goals.
The Motivation equation
Motivation can be defined by the above equation where:
- Expectancy is how likely you think you are to accomplish the goal
- Value is the value of the goal to you
- Impulsiveness is how distractible you are
- Delay is how far off the results seem
So to increase motivation you can either increase your expectancy and value of your goal or decrease your impulsiveness and delay. For example, consider learning a language. The Value may be high since you’ll be able to converse fluently on your trip to Puerto Vallarta, but your Expectancy could be low from not already knowing a second language. Layer on high Impulsiveness from your social media obsession and high Delay from the trip being months off, and you’ll be unlikely to find the motivation to practice.
Motivation Hacks
Hacks for Expectancy
Success Spirals
With success spirals you start out with very small almost laughably easy goals. By accomplishing each goal you begin to create habits reinforced by the success of completing the goal.
One of mine is to learn to backflip so I have practice backflips for 15 minutes a day. This is a very easy input-based goal as opposed to an output based goal such as do 20 back rolls each day.
Hacks for Value
Goal Picking
Here are 3 goal picking exercises that can help in picking goals:
- Imagine your ideal day. What do you do? With whom do you talk? Then choose some goals that will bring you closer to that ideal.
- Make a list of every crazy goal you can think of. Rate your goals on 3 factors
- How much the goal excites you
- Your probability of success if you tried as hard as you could
- How long it would take in hours
- Then sort the goals by excitement times probability divided by time
- Imagine you’re another person more competent than yourself and you were just dropped into your current life without any current obligations but with your current predicaments. Forget where you have been and where you are going. What would you do?
Bad ways to dream “The biggest source of goals, both good and bad, is stories of what other people have done.” You might start goals because all of your friends start doing it, because that’s what you wanted to do in high school, because you’ve always been good at it, etc. These goals may not bring happiness because they are based on your desires but others desires for you. Much like a woman who in high school wanted to be a doctor. She persisted though many obstacles even disliking her work. She is a successful doctor and hates it. Now she has a life that was chosen for her by a high school kid.
CSI Approach Goals
After choosing your goals forget about SMART goals and instead use the CSI Approach method. CSI Approach goals should be:
- Challenging: If they aren’t exciting they won’t create value
- Specific: with abstract goals it will be easy to become distracted
- Immediate: decrease delay by choosing goals you can get started on now and see quick progress
- Approach-oriented: as opposed to avoiding something, frame it positively
Task Samurai
Task Samurai is about the gamification of seemingly menial tasks. He includes the example from the Hobbit where all of the dwarves come to Bilbo’s house and eat a bunch of food and dirty a bunch of dishes. They then clean all of the dishes at an impressive rate while singing and throwing the dishes around and not breaking a single dish. So if you need to shower but want to get it done quick time yourself and try to beat your PR. Use your non dominant hand to take out the trash. Send in email in one breath.
Measure your results: Self experimentation
When you are trying new things measure what you are actually trying to achieve. When you are doing something to be happy measure your happiness. Use science to figure out what works and what doesn’t work for you. This will also help you to take you to many of the places you want to go as opposed to just the places we end up and think it is good we ended up there, unaware of all of the places we could’ve gone.
Hacks for Impulsiveness
Precommitment
Precommitment is a hack that involves committing to something before you do it and if you don’t do it there are repercussions. Telling everyone you know about your goals is a very simple form of precommitment. If you don’t complete your goal, people might think you are a failure. Then there are tools such as beeminder where you pledge money and then track your goal and if you do not reach your goal you lose that money.
Burnt Ships
This hack comes from the fabled story of Hernan Cortes burning his ships so that his troops had no thought of retreat while conquering the Aztec empire. You can apply this by turning off wifi during certain times of the day as to not be distracted. Or maybe turn off your phone for a few hours to days to complete a very important task. Or rent a hotel room, order room service, turn off your phone and other electronics, and use pen and paper to finally write that book you have been thinking about for 10 years. Whatever the distraction find ways to eliminate it and burn those ships to focus on getting things done.
Time Boxing
Place limits on the time allowed to perform a given task, the shorter, the better. By doing this you can ignore your distractions because you know you have a short timeline to complete your task. Then after your finish your task you can be as distracted as you want.
Hacks for Delay
Rejection Therapy
Rejection therapy helps to increase expectancy and decrease delay. Pretty much you get used to being rejected or failing quickly. One way is to get rejected doing the one thing you are trying to do (for example ask for a girls number) each day. Another way is to make a lot of interesting requests to multiple people in one hour and recount the tales of rejection with a group. The requests can be as simple as “Can I try on your shoe?” To as big as “Can I have your coat?” And everything in between. Winter did this and was surprised how many people said yes but also became very relaxed talking to people at the end of the hour.
Break Down Goals
Granularize your goals into smaller and smaller goals. Make subgoals and then sub-subgoals until the action almost seems laughable. This is the beginning of a success spiral and will make it easy to start going on a goal or project.