The Motivation Hacker

Nick Winter introduces a new way of not running dry of motivation and not giving anyone control over when and how you get motivated. He calls it motivation hacking. You can cut through the blockage and restore the energy to accomplish your mission. Good planning and high confidence bring out a good motivation hacker. Alienate boring situations and experiences, replace them with activities that drive your life, and navigate your mind to challenges and the adrenaline to win. Having an iron will is an important skill to gain greater autonomy. It creates the possibility of achieving a goal set and one ends up in this invisible cloud where you believe that 'You'd rather try now and not regret later in future for not trying.' You have a whole ladder to climb up to. Detect when what you do doesn't spark joy anymore, and find more challenges to jump-start motivation or reroute. Nick Winter validates, " the larger the challenge, the better". According to the author, one way to commit to your tasks is by sharing with people who will keep you accountable. The author outlines an effective approach to setting goals. Such an amazing book as we approach the new year. Happy reading.

The Motivation Hacker explains multiple strategies to boost your motivation illustrated by the 3-month experiment of Nick Winter to radically be productive (with multiple goals such as reading 20 books, writing 1 book, learning 3000 Chinese words, running a marathon, etc packed in those 3 months). The advise is useful and mostly based on other sources he reviewed, but two things might go against this book. First, it's written from someone heavily focused on tracking and optimizing his life, I agree with this but even for me it was too much. The other thing is that while he achieved to write the first draft of this book in 3 months, some ideas and sections could have benefited from taking more time to be better organized, add more reflection and more edition. It seems a bit rushed or unrefined, a second edition would be useful but as far as I know it doesn't exist

I picked this up based on the title and a reference in another book I was reading. This is one of the first "self-development blogger" type books I've read where I didn't feel like the information was all a rehash of other, better books. Granted, the ideas in here are not new, but as someone who wasn't familiar with The Procrastination Equation or the material on LessWrong on the subject, I felt this was a great introduction to some very applicable concepts. Winter is also an engaging, humorous writer, so even if you're not interested in "motivation hacking," his personal anecdotes can make it a fun read. Maybe not life-changing work, but it might just start you on a path of improvement. I know it has for me.

A really enjoyable help book. Nick is an amazing guy, I totally depended on Skritter when I was living in China and Code Combat is an awesome idea. So I know he is someone who can get things done, and seeing the goals he put together for 3 months and what he accomplished is inspiring. However the most important part of the motivation hacker is the clarity he helps provide on improving your motivation and reasons why to do it. Not all of the techniques he puts forth are applicable to everyone but a lot are worth a try and he refreshing style in presenting the tools and approaches makes this a more more genuine help book than much that is out there. Highly recommended.

This book is written for both the person who needs to get things back on track now, and the person who has good habits, but wants to improve or keep them for longer periods of time. The author breaks down how he believes reverse motivation (or negative motivation) is more helpful than positive motivation. For example, instead of saying "I'm going to allow myself to smoke after I get this thing done" he says "I'm only going to allow myself to smoke three times today". And then adds penalties if he doesn't adhere to his goals. There's a lot more to it than that, separating short term goals from long term and a lot of tips on tools and how to create your own. The one downside I found was at the end of the book, where the last chapter was literally a list of all the things he did and accomplished. Seeing as he addressed most of those during the course of the book as helpful examples, I didn't think they were very necessary and they didn't offer any additional tips. You can easily skip them, which makes the book significantly shorter, where I feel a better wrap up could have occurred. There is also 15% of the book taken up by sourced links alone (the index at the very end). Seeing as the book definitely taught me a number of things and has great insight, I still rated it pretty highly and would suggest buying it.

This little book changed my life. Not a huge change, but a change for the better for sure. It helped me right a lot of things that I was doing wrong in my life. The main thing it helped me with was weight loss and working out. I have lost 48 lbs since I got this book and have started doing weight training to increase my strength. I have read it a number of times, and any time I catch myself starting to slip or getting down about my progress, I read it again. Thank you Nick Winter!

I was surprised and impressed by this book. I am the type of person who spends way too much of his time trying to hack his own motivation and looking online and in other books for ways of accomplishing this. Of course, the Internet is overloaded with such advice, almost all of it bad or dangerously incomplete. This book is short, concise, and complete, in the sense that its content is clearly and transparently implementable in your life. This may be because the book's recommendations are all very simple and concrete. For example: start off with goals so easy that you can't possibly fail them, to build up an implicit expectation that you can achieve your goals. I have never seen this advice framed in quite this way before, but I can tell you that it has worked marvelously for me. I would go so far as to say that I have read most of the advice featured in this book elsewhere before, but only in this book is the advice written in a way that makes intuitive sense. The Motivation Hacker is also written in an engaging style apparently based on the author's genuine enthusiastic personality, never sliding into hyperbole or hammy sales pitches. It's also a short read, so I don't hesitate to recommend it to members of the life-hacker cluster in personspace.

I've recently become interested in quantified self and bio hacking when I came across Nick's book. I have read dozens of motivational books, but this one provides some quick and practical ideas that are easy to integrate into you life. I recommend reading this book along with Josh Kaufman's book the "the first 20 hours" if you truly want to make a real change in how you act, approach challenges and acquire skills. Also, I really liked his story. You really get a sense of who Nick is, and he simply provides you great insight as he tells you how he faced his challenges. Plus, it's a great price. Even, if you read half of it, you'll have gotten your money's worth. But you should read all of it.

I read this book six months ago and I still use the ideas I learned every day. There are not many books where I can say that I still see the impact on my daily routine, what I've achieved in the last six months, my health, body weight and even my running times... It was literally a life changing book for me. The book is a chatty, informal description of the author's attempts to apply techniques to improving his own motivation covering a three month period where he also wrote the book. Nick is unashamedly a software engineering, silicon valley, tech start-up founder geek - a type I'm pretty familiar with so my empathy for the central character in the book ran deep, something where other readers' mileage may vary. Central to the book is the idea of the motivation equation (ideas which appear in other less accessible books too) - a combination of (unit-less) terms on the numerator and denominator. The goal is then to 'hack' these contributors, applying techniques and ideas that increase the ones that appear on the numerator and reducing the one's on the denominator. Nick sets out to apply these techniques to his own life - particularly during a crazy three month period where in addition to writing the book he attempted many other goals including learning such varied things as knife throwing, lucid dreaming and thousands of new Chinese characters. The story is compelling, fun and in my case, practical and useful.

Conocía mucho de los conceptos expuestos en el libro, como la ecuación de la motivación de Piers Steel. Pero ver estos principios en práctica ha sido muy inspirador. La historia personal de Nick utilizando diferentes herramientas para potenciar su motivación engancha muy rápido al lector. Recomendable para todos aquellos que estén sintiendo un poco de desesperanza a causa de su inacción y apatía para terminar el trabajo.

Bücher mit "Hacking" sind derzeit stark en vogue (vgl. Growth Hacker Marketing oder Mindhacker: 60 Tips, Tricks, and Games to Take Your Mind to the Next Level - das Buch von Nick Winter ist jedoch definitiv keine Modelektüre, sondern exzellenter Lesestoff zum Thema Produktivität. Nick Winters Philosophie ist einfach. Er fragt, warum erstreben wir keine größeren bzw. wichtigeren Rollen für uns selbst? Und er bietet eine einfache Lösung an: Motivation "hacken", die Zeit für das Üben einer bestimmten Fertigkeit nutzen - und so in etwas ein Großer werden! Dafür muss man sich Ziele setzen, die der Formel "CSI approach" entsprechen sollten: herausfordernd (challenging), spezifisch, unmittelbar (immediate) sowie positiv (approach oriented; nicht auf Vermeidung angelegt). Essentiell ist, dass die Ziele messbar sind. Dahinter steht die Philosophie des "Quantified Self" - herumexperimentieren und tracken und dann schauen, was funktioniert. Nick Winter liefert einige Anregungen, um "Arbeit" messbar zu machen; spannend ist hier insbesondere das auf Seth Roberts zurückgehende Percentile Feedback ([...]). Für das Lernen stellt er einen einfachen Algorithmus bereit: Spannung erzeugen, Übungsmodus ausfinding machen, Motivation "hacken" und Loslegen. Für das Auswendiglernen bieten sich "Vokabelkarten" an (hier insbesondere das flexible Tool "Anki"); dies ist vollständig verfolgbar. Zentraler Grundpfeiler des Buches ist die "Procrastination Equation" (bzw. "Prokrastinations-Gleichung"; vgl. The Procrastination Equation: How to Stop Putting Things Off and Start Getting Stuff Done ). Diese Gleichung lautet wie folgt: Motivation = (Expectancy x Value) / (Impulsiveness x Delay). Auf deutsch könnte man dies wie folgt übersetzen: Motivation = (Ergebniserwartung x Wertschätzung für das Ergebnis) / Ablenkbarkeit x zeitliche Entfernung des Ergebnisses). Für die Bestandteile der Gleichung bietet Nick Winter jeweils "Hacks" an: - Ergebniserwartung: Erfolgsspiralen, mentales Kontrastieren (vgl. hierzu:[...]) - Wertschätzung: Flow, "Energiemanagement", produktive Prokrastination - Ablenkbarkeit: Precommitment, "Burnt ships", "Goal reminders", Timeboxing (à la Pomodoro-Technik) - Ergebnisentfernung: Ziele herunterbrechen Dazu einige Erläuterungen: - Erfolgsspiralen werden durch das Setzen kleiner erreichbarer (Mini-)Ziele in Kombination mit einer Erfolgsmessung ermöglicht - Precommitment funktioniert am besten mit einem "Commitment Contract"; das ideale Tool hierfür ist Beeminder ([...]), das durch Visualisierung in Kombination mit einem solchen Vertrag sicherstellt, das man auf dem Weg zum Ziel "on track" bleibt - "Burnt ships" meint, unnötige Ablenken abzuschalten (z. B. mit Hilfe von Browser-Erweiterungen, um fehlgeleitetes Internet-Surfen abzustellen) In Summe ein gelungenes Buch zu einem unschlagbaren Preis!

Written with a very casual and colorful style. Gives great tools with examples and context. Recommend

The author seems to be the most cool person i wish to meet. Also extremely intelligent and clever. He proposes simple actions to make ourselves "motivated", but I think it's more than that: it's a life hacker way to look at life, with an enormous amount of vitality. This book is for the people who want to be more clever, more consistent with goals and habits and seek to see life as a good game and not the simple "hustle" mentality.