Nick Winter - The Motivation Hacker

The Motivation Hacker

by Nick Winter

Copyright 2013 Nick Winter

Kindle Edition

Contents

Foreword

I wrote this book in three months while simultaneously attempting seventeen other missions, including running a startup, launching a hit iPhone app, learning to write 3,000 new Chinese words, training to attempt a four-hour marathon from scratch, learning to skateboard, helping build a successful cognitive testing website, being best man at two weddings, increasing my bench press by sixty pounds, reading twenty books, going skydiving, helping to start the Human Hacker House, learning to throw knives, dropping my 5K time by five minutes, and learning to lucid dream. I planned to do all this while sleeping eight hours a night, sending 1,000 emails, hanging out with a hundred people, going on ten dates, buying groceries, cooking, cleaning, and trying to raise my average happiness from 6.3 to 7.3 out of 10.

How? By hacking my motivation.

The Motivation Hacker shows you how to summon extreme amounts of motivation to accomplish anything you can think of. From precommitment to rejection therapy, this is your field guide to getting yourself to want to do everything you always wanted to want to do.

Chapter One: Protagonist

Spark

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

The idea for this book came blurting into my brain on a flight from Pittsburgh to Silicon Valley. My ninety-nine belongings were in the mail, my backpack was bloated with few clothes and many dreams, and I had just finished rereading You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers, a frenzied novel in which the broken-but-satisfied hero drowns on the cover (the book starts right on the cover), flashes back three months, and drags his best friend to Senegal, Morocco, and Estonia in one week to give away all of his money and chase adventure. I gave the cherished book to the woman sitting next to me, who had heard of it and heard me laughing at the part where Will tries to leap from a car to a donkey cart in Marrakech. I thought, heres a guy who lived so much in one week that it overflowed a books 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 wasnt good for my brain. My adventure count was zero.

I felt a moment of panic, as if I had let my protagonist license expire and now I would have to retake the test. I had planned this ruthlessness of work so I could finish my startups iPhone app before my California move. The idea was to then move in with like-minded lifehacker . What could I do to change all of my habits at once, to go from single-minded startup man to lifestyle design hero?

I generated one amusingly implausible idea: to do all these things I had always wanted to do at the same time, limited only by the seconds in a day, while writing a book about it. I would max out my motivation with every trick I knew, with the two most important tricks being firstly to tell everyone I was writing a book about all these amazing things I would do, and secondly to set a time limit. How long does it take to write a book or train for a marathon? I had no ideaId never written anything longer than an agonizing sixteen-page school paper or run further than five desperate milesbut three months sounded perfect. I could probably fit in work and a dozen other deeds, too, because they wouldnt take that much timejust motivation. And I knew motivation.

Missions

Goal : Write a book. Requirements : Write a complete first draft of this book about motivation hacking.

Goal : Run a startup. Requirements : Stay on top of Skritter work as cofounder and Chief Technical Officer (CTO).

Goal : Launch a hit iPhone app. Requirements : Manage launch publicity campaign and finish fixing all bugs.

Goal : Learn to write 3,000 new Chinese words. Requirements : Go from 4,268 word writings learned in Skritter to 7,268.

Goal : Train to run a four-hour marathon from scratch. Requirements : Build endurance from 5 miles to 26.2 while increasing speed by 10%.

Goal : Learn to skateboard. Requirements : Be able to travel 10 miles on a longboard.

Goal : Help to build a successful cognitive testing website. Requirements : Hack on Quantified Mind , present to 100 people about it.

Goal : Be best man at two weddings. Requirements : Learn public speaking and pull off two great best man speeches.

Goal : Increase my bench press by 60 lbs. Requirements : Go from 1 rep max of 150 lbs to 210 lbs (I weigh 140 lbs).

Goal : Read 20 books. Requirements : Read 20 fiction and non-fiction books on my reading list.

Goal : Go skydiving. Requirements : Jump out of a plane while screaming in terror.

Goal : Help start the Human Hacker House. Requirements : Do my part of writing content, organizing events, and helping housemates.

Goal : Learn to throw knives. Requirements : Hit a target from 13 feet, 80% of the time.

Goal : Drop my 5K time by 5 minutes. Requirements : Run an official 5K in 23:15 from a pre-test of 28:15.

Goal : Learn to lucid dream. Requirements : Increase lucid dreaming and achieve three fantastic dream missions.

Goal : Go on 10 dates. Requirements : Go on 10 romantic dates with Chloe.

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

Goal : Increase happiness from 6.3 to 7.3 out of 10. Requirements : Hit average experiential happiness of 7.3 over the three months.

I came up with eighteen goals. Some I picked for terror, like the marathon and skydiving. Others I picked for excitement, like skateboarding and knife throwing, or because theyd be useful and fun, like learning 3,000 new Chinese words and reading twenty books. The rest I had to do, like giving the two best man speeches and running the startup. I wanted to make sure I did them well.

For each goal, I decided on success criteria and motivation hacks to fire me up. Ill introduce these motivation hacks throughout the book, and theyre also listed in Chapters 11 and 12. I estimated how long each mission would take, built a schedule that could just barely fit if I wasted no time, and grinned at myself in challenge. Lets see what youve got, Nick!

Techniques

A chef wields dozens of tools, from spatulas to potato scrubbing gloves. Every once in a while, hell need the pastry brush, but every day hell use a chefs knife, a frying pan, salt, and a stove. Like a chef, a motivation hacker has a core set of tools. Ill introduce these in Chapters 3 and 4: success spirals, precommitment, and burnt ships. Sometimes you can reach into your motivation pantry (Chapter 12) and pull out some timeboxing, but its often best not to get too fancy.

And just as the chef who dogmatically used his chefs knife for everything would cook a terrible pancake, so would a motivation hacker fail to quit an internet addiction using only precommitment. No single technique can solve every problem. This book will recommend several approaches to increasing motivation. Use more than one at a time.

Self-Help Books

Ive read some great self-help books that inspired me. In these books, the author writes about how he used to suck at something, how he epiphanied out and then worked towards a dream for years, and how now hes amazing at everything and its all because of this empirically validated, Pareto-distilled , beautifully Zen method which he has developed and wants to share with you in small bites mixed with inspirational anecdotes about how he applied the technique in his impossibly interesting life. 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.