3 ms·

Is there any way I can take these principles and use them to motivate myself to work harder / get more done?

• derefr 16y ago
  If you want to get more done at the expense of stress, you can easily find some way to attach your goals to a parent goal that will embody such stress into them. Make the affections of a member of the opposite sex dependent on completing your goal, for example (find someone who thinks chiseled abs are attractive, and set yourself to dating them => you will stress out about getting chiseled abs.) Hypothetically, if you knew this trick when you were a child, you could make your parents act disappointed if you didn't do X—that would impress into you a great desire to do X, though you would reject doing X for a period of about 10 years at some point or another, coming back to it afterward. Obviously, make eating dependent on X—this is one reason why startups can be "exhilarating." If you want to get more done without stress, the answer is simply game design. Make the "small matter" of your goals addictive. Guarantee yourself intermittent rewards for your work (entertaining TV episode every 1000SLOC committed, without any displayed statistic for how many SLOC you have to go, only a notification when you reach it), and so forth. Remove "lame duck" periods—times during which what you're doing won't change the outcome of the "game" (won't push you toward success or failure.) Work at the edge of your expertise, such that there is always a chance of failure, but a failure that is insulated from outer failure (your refactoring didn't work out, so you have to throw away your work and start again—but you don't have a deadline, so this is okay. It just stings a bit.)