Motivation

Our super duper motivational system

Money is the best motivator?

When I remember my childhood I can say it was a super fun one. I had a bunch of wicked friends and we liked to play all kind of games - basketball, baseball, football, Risk, Poker, Counter-Strike and many many others I don’t even imagine their names. What I really hated about all those games, was the fact that when there’s nothing to loose no-one tries his best. Often the game is even ruined by some kid doing all kind of nonsenses.

The answer is to play for money! Now some of you might be thinking that it’s very bad.. but wait! Read on.

So somehow we figured out that the best thing is to set very small sums like $1 or $2 for any game. One basketball match - $2 from each player, Risk - everybody puts in the bank $2 and the winners takes it all, Counter-strike - $2 from each player and so on.. It works like magic! Everybody has a fire in his eyes. Emotions are exploding. You play like it’s the last game you ever play. The biggest motivation is not to win those $2 dollars, but not to loose your money. And in the end, after many years of playing for money in my childhood I can honestly say - that everyone of us made something around $0. That is because the teams are always more or less equal - one day you win, other day you loose. So this motivational system does wonders and makes no financial harm.

Our motivational system

This year me and my friend Gino J. started this blog with a goal to make 1 million dollars online. Yep, the first days of blogging are full of enthusiasm, so you write and write and you are so excited. The next day you have some assignments to do, and you feel tired, you don’t post for a day. Then the other day you are not in a mood, and you loose that posting consistency and I believe consistency is a crucial factor in blogging. We just had to do something about it.

Then I thought, if playing for money was so motivating in my childhood, wouldn’t it apply to us now. So I used Excel and created an automatic calculations for fines and bonuses of not writing posts. There are fines for not doing something (not writing a blog post $5 fine, not commenting other blog $1 fine..) To better understand how it works I will give you an example.

I (Tom) have to write 8 posts per month, and lets say I write only 2 (the fine for not writing the post is 5$), so at the end of the month I will pay Gino $5×6=30$. Well I really don’t want to pay $30 fine for my laziness!

We put these Excel calculation files in google documents, so we can follow each other by looking at each others tables. It’s only the first month we are using it, but so far it does wonders for me! I am efficient and consistent as never before .

There is my table for the first 11 days (you can see some empty spaces in the days 4,5,7 but it was due to my exams at college) :

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