lukeprog comments on April 2013 Media Thread - Less Wrong

7 Post author: ArisKatsaris 04 April 2013 10:55PM

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Comment author: ArisKatsaris 04 April 2013 10:55:39PM 0 points [-]

Nonfiction Books Thread

Comment author: lukeprog 09 April 2013 06:15:23PM *  4 points [-]

Nick Winter, The Motivation Hacker.

The book opens like this:

I wrote this book in three months while running a startup, launching a hit iPhone app, learning to write 3,000 new Chinese words, training to run 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 did 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 raising my average happiness from 6.3 to 7.3 out of 10. And I wrote this paragraph beforehand--I haven't edited it since. How did I do all of this? I hacked my motivation.

A few notes:

  • Nick writes that he was launched into this incredible self change by reading my post How to Beat Procrastination and then Piers Steel's The Procrastination Equation (my post is a summary of the book), and then applying the techniques that worked best for him, all at the same time. Luckily, his book explains what he did in great detail.
  • He remembers the procrastination equation (Motivation = [Expectancy × Value] / [Impulsiveness × Delay]) as MEVID. Handy.
  • Nick attended the same CFAR workshop I did: March 2013.
Comment author: Procrastinus 09 April 2013 11:04:56PM 2 points [-]

This is neat and actually might be better in some ways than the original book. People tend to respond better to stories than statistics and science, though the most useful stories are those based on the latter. Could be the best of both worlds?