There’s an old quote to the effect that in Hell you meet the person you could have become - some counterfactual version of yourself that argmaxed your utility function, spending all their time saving the world instead of sitting on the couch watching TV. (Or spent as much time saving the world as possible, maintaining optimal world-saving/TV-watching levels. Or maybe just watched better TV on a comfier couch. Hey, utility functions are subjective, I’m not judging.)
The implication is that we all fall drastically short of what we’re capable of, we all know this, we all stay on the couch and continue watching TV anyway, and we’d rather burn in a fiery lake of burning sulphur than acknowledge it. Why?
To some people, the obvious reason is hypocrisy, plain and simple: people don’t always want what they claim to want. You may tell yourself you want to save the world, but your behaviour reveals that you really want to watch TV on the couch. These people are usually economists or economist sympathisers, who are weirdly prone to making the obviously false assumption that people always act according to their highest innate desires.
It’s fair enough for an economist to concern themselves only with revealed preferences, since innate desires are harder to measure and less useful for modelling. But when you find yourself on the couch, watching TV but not really wanting to, it doesn’t feel like you’re doing what you want - it feels like being stuck, wanting to move yet finding yourself unable. If someone offered you a magic button that makes you want to get up off the couch and save the world, you’d probably press it, because deep down that really is what you want to do. So it’s not hypocrisy, it’s akrasia, or a failure to do what you want to.
But that might sound strange: why would anyone do anything they didn’t actually want to? Here the word ‘want’ is overloaded, doing double duty as our word for our higher-level desires (like saving the world) and lower-level desires (like watching TV on the couch). If you taboo the word ‘want’, the economists’ claim that “people don’t always want what they claim to want” becomes something more like “people aren’t always motivated to pursue what they claim to value”. And if you’re not actually wrong about what you claim to value, the problem is that your motivation isn’t aligned with your values.
Nick Winter’s The Motivation Hacker is an exploration of how this misalignment arises, a highly practical review of techniques for correcting it, and a chronicle of his 3-month-long attempt to better approximate his utility-argmaxed self by running a startup, training for a marathon, increasing his subjective wellbeing from 6.3/10 to 7.3/10, and 15 other such ‘missions’ (including writing a book about it).
It’s a uniquely valuable book, but most of its value comes from the circumstances under which it was written and the fact that it exists at all, rather than from the quality of its writing (it’s a bit too long at 30000 words and many of its copious footnotes add nothing of value[94]).
It undeniably belongs in the self-help section, but it manages to sidestep most of that genre’s pervasive issues by its very nature: most self-help authors will give you 500 words’ worth of advice over 250 pages, and go on to demonstrate how their ideas can help you write another book and host a self-help podcast.
The ideal solution to this problem would be for Elon Musk to spend his annual 10 minutes of spare time writing a couple paragraphs detailing how to run however many super successful companies at the same time. But Elon Musk was born Elon Musk; he can’t tell you how to become more like him any more than Yao Ming can write about how to grow taller.
Nick Winter strikes a pretty good middle ground, closer to the Musk end of the spectrum. As I said, he wrote this book in between running a startup, training for a marathon, studying Chinese, learning to throw knives, dating his girlfriend, etc.
And while it’s easy to be skeptical that he was ever much of a stuck-on-the-couch type, he writes about how he used to struggle with at least some of the stuff he tried to get himself to do: he describes how, years prior to writing the book, he stopped the same amusement park ride twice just so he could get off and had such bad social anxiety that he would beg his mother to order Taco Bell for him (and then his brother when she refused), yet in his 3 months he went skydiving, gave two very well-received wedding speeches, and hung out with 100 different people.
So while all the usual advice disclaimers apply, you have to at least wonder whether what he has to say might help you get a lot more done than you normally would.
Winter steals his model of motivation from another book, Piers Steels’ The Procrastination Equation. Said equation goes as follows:
Motivation = (Expectancy * Value) / (Impulsiveness * Delay)
(or M = (EV) / (ID))
Winter refers to these variables by name often, so let’s examine them in detail.
What I like about this model, oversimplified though it is, is that it’s pleasingly pseudo-Bayesian: you start with a prior distribution over all the actions you could be taking that’s defined by your utility function (Value), you update based on evidence for and against the hypothesis that putting in effort would actually gain you what you value (Expectancy), something something hyperbolic discounting to arrive at a final EV for each action (Delay), then compare relative posterior weights to evaluate hypotheses as to the best thing to do next (Impulsiveness). When this algorithm’s outputs fail to match the territory (as evaluated by your utility function), you act against your own best interests, and we call it akrasia (unless the error is produced by an incorrect Value estimation - more on that later). The automatic hyperbolic discounting step makes the whole process harder to update and means that it’s perfectly possible to be motivated to do something even when you know you shouldn’t, or vice versa.
Also, since motivation isn’t zero-sum like probability, the sum of your motivation can be arbitrarily high or low - you can be pumped up and ready to take on your day because you’ve got important things to get done that you know you can accomplish, or you can find it hard to get out of bed because nothing you do seems to have any effect.
The former state of being is one Winter explicitly attempts to induce in himself, and he manages to succeed - which is almost amazing, seeing as the techniques he uses are mostly just cheap lifehacks meant to get you to sit down and go through your inbox.
Winter isn’t just trying to get himself to overcome procrastination on some important project, he’s trying to be fully motivated to write an iOS app and improve his 5K time and increase his bench press and and and and, at which point his posterior motivation for getting out of bed absolutely trounces his desire for a few more minutes of rest because it’s a necessary prerequisite for every single thing he’s trying to get done.
The way most motivation techniques work is to put a small finger on the scales and submit enough evidence to convince your brain that you should be working instead of slacking off. But even when this works, it tends to make you do so somewhat grudgingly, shifting your posterior motivation estimate from “meh, maybe later” to “okay fine”.
Possibly Winter’s main idea is that this isn’t good enough, and that really aligning your motivation with what you value should instill genuine enthusiasm for everything you want to get done. (Would your Hellish do-all-the-things counterfactual self do anything grudgingly?) So he uses the same techniques to shift “okay, fine” to “hells yeah, let’s get it done ASAP, especially because we have to practice longboarding in 10 minutes and read 100 pages after that and (you get the idea)”.
As someone who’s not normally that motivated to do anything, I find it pretty easy to doubt that this is even possible, but Winter insists that it worked - and at any rate, he mostly got his missions complete.
He starts the main portion of his book by outlining the two main motivation techniques he used, then lists a bunch more in the penultimate chapter. (Did I mention this entire book was written in 3 months?)
Somewhat surprisingly, the first motivation technique Winter describes (and the one he seems to refer to most throughout the book) doesn’t target the motivation variable that would seem to be the cause of most akrasia, i.e. Delay.
Instead, he argues that the most persistent failures of motivation are caused by low Expectancy, or lack of self-belief. Those who struggle with lack of motivation probably don’t want to hear that they just need to believe in themselves, so I suggest thinking of it as a calibration problem - I mean, what else do you call it when your probability estimates don’t match reality?
(If you’re convinced that your Expectancy estimates are in fact accurate, come back to Hell with me for a second and imagine meeting the person you could have become, if only you were more motivated. What did they achieve? By your own reckoning, that level of achievement should be possible for you if you can manage to try hard enough, but I bet you still feel some doubt that you could!)
A lack of Expectancy is a member of that awful class of problems that has an extremely simple yet impractically difficult solution: just do more and cooler stuff until you update your self-belief to a realistic level.
It’s a terrible self-perpetuating hole-in-my-bucket-style deadlock problem: you have no motivation because you don't think you can accomplish much because you haven't accomplished much because you have no motivation because there's a hole in your mental motivation bucket, and no matter how much you try to fill it, its level never gets any higher.
But the thing about buckets with holes in them is that they can still hold some amount of water (especially if you hold them at an angle so the hole is facing up).
No matter how little you think you can accomplish, there’s still probably some little thing you can get yourself to do (especially if you use as many other motivation techniques as you can). Even if the idea of working out fills you with dread, surely you can do one pushup? And if you can do one pushup today, you’ll probably feel like you can do two tomorrow. Then, by induction on the natural numbers, you should be able to build enough self-belief to be able to exercise as much as you want, if you’re patient enough with your brain to wait for it to update its estimation of your ability. The brain doesn’t always make predictable updates, so you can’t skip to the end of this ‘success spiral’ as Winter calls it, but if you start small, keep raising the stakes (however slowly) and stick to what you decided to try to do, the upper limit will be defined by your actual level of ability.
And, once you’ve built self-confidence in one area, it should cause positive updates in similar areas and in your general ability to accomplish what you set your mind to - in other words, you’ll gain more self-confidence and become more motivated.
I realise that I’m dangerously close to going full Self-Help here, but it's hard to talk about calibrating low self-belief without sounding at least kinda like a motivational speaker. This isn't my aim, any more than I’m trying to sound like a zombie when I say the word 'brains'; there's a lot of money to be made in fixing others' self-belief, and the usual technique that a lot of people get paid a lot to do is just to tell others that their self-belief should be higher, or get them to repeat a mantra to that effect. It makes sense that those should each cause some small positive update, but probably not as much as actually accomplishing more of what you want.
Of the motivation devices Winter describes, this is the easiest one to imagine instilling enthusiasm where apathy used to be - of course you’d feel good about trying to climb Mount Everest if you really thought you could! Even so, it might not necessarily be enough to get you to train, or even to walk to the computer to book tickets to Nepal - after all, few people doubt their ability to do the dishes. Lack of self-belief may be a tricky akrasia trap to escape, but Expectancy is bounded, so even the most inspirational success spiral isn’t arbitrarily powerful. To really build up your motivation to where it needs to be, you need Winter’s other main technique.
The magic button that makes you want to turn off the TV and go save the world doesn’t exist, but commitment devices are pretty close.
The basic idea is that you say what you plan to do, and put something (usually either money or reputation) at stake that you stand to lose if you don’t do what you said. This simultaneously increases the Value of doing whatever you said you’d do, as well as potentially reducing the Delay if you commit to doing some amount of it sooner than the deadline.
Compared to success spirals, this is a much more direct way of putting a finger on your motivational scales by manually submitting your own evidence. And it scales much better - if your new motivation level isn’t as high as you want, you can just put more money on the line, or really really promise your accountability partner (or whoever) that you’re definitely 100% going to Do the Thing this time, super-duper-pinky-promise. Reputation is cheaper (at least in a sense), but money scales much better.
Putting so much money at stake that you enthusiastically do something you want yourself to do is sort of reminiscent of the idea of a cheerful price, the amount of money for which you can pay someone else to enthusiastically do something you want them to do. It’d be lovely if we all had someone to pay us a million dollars to go running every day, but if you don’t, the next best thing you can do is put a million dollars at stake (provided you have that much to lose).
Of course, there’s a big difference between potentially gaining a million dollars and potentially losing a million dollars: no one’s ever cheerful about not losing a million dollars. I didn't lose a million dollars just this morning. It wasn't that great. In fact, I've never lost a million dollars, but I imagine that once you have it’s not something you want to try a second time.
That sense of dread is still going to be present in a cheerful price arrangement: can you imagine losing out on being a millionaire because you missed your running deadline by 30 seconds? But if you’re prepared enough, there’s no sense of impending loss, just excitement over a potential gain.
Yet Winter swears by precommitment as the secret to motivation. What gives?
I can imagine two ways that using commitment devices by the craptonne can get you to do anything with a smile on your dial and a pep in your step:
Winter specifically mentions Beeminder, a service offering about as good a commitment device as you can get: daily reporting with custom deadlines for eliminating delay, real-money stakes increasing every time you derail up to $7290 (the amount Winter stood to pay if he didn’t go skydiving or write enough words), which is close enough to a million dollars to motivate you to attempt almost anything.
The other kind of precommitment Winter uses, he calls “Burnt Ships”: basically, getting rid of immediate distractions to reduce Impulsiveness. Like a hypothesis brought to your attention despite a lack of evidence, a distraction put right in front of you is harder to ignore than one you have to seek out yourself. So put snacks out of reach, turn off the internet if you don’t have a specific use for it right this second, put your phone in another room where you can still hear it ringing, just generally make it harder to do something if you don’t specifically want to do it. Either make it impossible, make it more costly, or make it take longer (hey, if you’ve got all this hyperbolic discounting lying around anyway, you may as well put it to good use).
I’m not convinced that all the techniques listed at the end of the book are that useful, so here are the ones that seem trusty enough to me:
Actually, that last one gets at a recurring theme in the book, that all the motivational hacks and useful online services in the world can’t tell you what goals you should choose. Winter didn’t seem to put nearly as much effort into deciding what to do as making himself do it.
Speaking of, what did he actually get done?
A lot, but not everything he wanted. To be more precise:
(You can read more about the specific missions here.)
None of that kerfuffle over commitment devices and believing in yourself is worth taking seriously if it didn’t actually work, so it’s reassuring (though not as much as you might hope) that he succeeded at 13/18 of the things he set out to do. Where he failed (or technically succeeded but didn’t really do what he wanted), he usually either failed to set concrete success criteria or overestimated his physiology (and in those cases, still managed to make great strides).
His biggest and only unqualified failure was his failure to increase his level of happiness, which does make you (and him) wonder what the point of the whole endeavour was. Shouldn’t all that relentless enthusiasm have made him feel a little better?
Let’s be real, this book was not written with a tonne of forethought. It was conceived over the course of a few days and committed to (on pain of $7290) before a single word had been written. It can be hard to know in advance how many words an idea in your head is going to need, so if you commit to a book that can more or less be summed up as “I used Beeminder to do a lot more stuff than I usually do, and you can too”, you may have to fill pages with some chapters that don’t directly contribute to the core of your book. To meet his word count, Winter includes chapters about:
For all his (useful and highly effective) Motivation Hacking, for all his ways of calibrating Expectancy and Delay and Impulsiveness, Nick Winter keeps running into the problem of miscalibrated utility functions, eventually concluding:
“I am sorry. I wish I had, in this book, an answer for the question of how to live. It turns out I only have half an answer: how to do anything you want. The other half, figuring out what to want—that I don’t know.”
The economists were sort of right for the wrong reasons: we don’t know our own utility functions, but not because we lie to ourselves about what we value. Happiness (or positive experience, or subjective wellbeing), along with anything else you value, is just hard to predict. There are no hacks for learning how much you should value achieving a goal: you have to do it the hard way, measuring and eventually matching the measurements more and more closely.
I think it’s important to bear in mind that Winter's self-reported happiness doesn't capture the whole story; presumably he managed to make some other people’s lives better by hanging out with them, entertaining them at a wedding, making learning Chinese easier for them, or writing a book for them. And the benefits from writing a book/learning skills/etc. pay off over longer time horizons than 3 months. Maybe managing to get all that done without taking a hit to your happiness in the short term is a win?
It feels like it should be possible to value accomplishing all those missions for their own sake - can’t you value learning and creating for their own sakes? - but if they don’t ultimately result in someone feeling better, they feel a lot more empty, at least to me.
I don’t know if this failure is as bad as Winter or I make it out to be - a book with great, practical advice on how to shape your motivation to align with your values is pretty good! But it’s probably a good sign if you take his advice, you should be mindful about what you use it for. Maybe instead of imagining the person you could become, imagine the life you could live, emphasising the journey over the destination and living moment-to-moment over ticking achievements off a list.
And if figuring all that out seems like a challenging problem, hopefully you can at least get yourself motivated to take on the challenge.