Making failure painful is a way of pre-committing. There is some research that shows the effectiveness of pre-commitment, but I'm not aware of experimental studies on that particular kind of pre-commitment, so perhaps you're right. On the other hand, a great many people have found such "penalty" methods of precommitment very useful. And, if I have to bet on advice between a leading researcher in the field and a guy whose website looks like this, I'll bet on the former.