Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could all get intensely motivated as soon as we knew we “should” do something? I know I should save 10% of my income, wake up early, focus on my most important objectives every day, write down my goals, meticulously track my time, exercise daily, and eat a healthy diet full of fresh fruits and vegetables. That doesn’t mean I do these things consistently, or at all.

I even know by careful reasoning what the actual effect is on my life to NOT do those things, in the sense that I know I could be missing out on all kinds of life improvements and happiness. That isn’t always enough for me either. I don’t think it’s enough for anyone to look at a calculation and see that eating out costs them hundreds of thousands of dollars 30 years from now to get them to stop doing it.

But why not? Theoretically I know I would rather have the hundreds of thousands of dollars vs any given meal out. Because of this, I don’t think the loss of perceived opportunity or future gain is enough to motivate you to take action consistently.

It’s like the lazy lurker that just wants you to coast along instead of really push yourself to achieve. Everyone does this because of several reasons, which I believe partly include the following:

1. you think you can always ‘make up for lost time’
2. the cost in your current quality of life is greater than the perceived benefit down the road
3. you want something NOW

Luckily, I have a guaranteed way to defeat your own worst enemy (yourself).

Make it impossible to fail by increasing the pain of failure. Tony Robbins talks about linking pain to certain activities you’d like to stop doing. How I actually applied that, was to create myself a 30 day challenge – I increased the cost of failure, and so I succeeded.

I made an agreement with my friend Lars that I would do several things, and for each failure to do one of those things, I would pay him $50. The things I decided to take on were going to bed by 10pm, waking up by 7AM, and working 8 hours every day, including weekends. I do not recommend the same things. At the time when I took this upon myself I decided I needed to convince myself that I was capable of working hard, given the right motivation to do so. Indeed, I was capable.

It was exhausting, but also tremendously empowering at the same time. I knew I could do anything and succeed at it, by simply increasing the cost of failure. I’m working on some new challenges for myself that are longer term, and more sustainable. The biggest mistake in that first challenge I did, was that the cost was great on both sides – hard to fail because I didn’t want to keep paying out, and hard to succeed because I was burning out.

A couple more things I learned:

• Taking massive action is not the same as creating the results you desire. I was realizing that I was doing so much every day, but I found myself filling up my day with non important work when I had to fill my quota. I was confusing motion with action.
• Working 8 hours every weekend day is not a good idea – especially because of the reduced time I had to spend with my wife and friends.
• Working hard is still tremendously valuable – I (l)earned more in those 30 days than I did in any other month. I earned quite a bit from consulting, but even more valuable was everything I learned doing the experiment. If you read a book one page at a time you will learn much slower than if you read it several pages in one sitting.

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