Tim Ferriss, the author of “The 4-Hour Workweek” shares a few effective ways to develop new habits that could contribute to your health and success. Following is a transcript of the video.
What we lack are incentives so I would suggest using say, a service like “Coach.me” or site like “Stickk.com” to create incentives or even “DietBet”, which is for weight loss specifically where you are actually putting money on the line and reputation on the line to force you to have some type of motivation to do what you say you are going to do. And you can form betting pools with friends, let’s say it’s weight loss, you could have five friends, each puts in a $ 100 or enough to hurt if you lose it, and then you have a body composition improvement competitions so you use like a DEXA scan for instance to track your body fat percentage. Whoever loses the highest percentage points gets the pot, they get $ 500. Very, very effective. Doesn’t have to be that much even, I know two guys at Google who used to pay each other a dollar each if they missed a workout. These are people who make like a $ 100K plus a year and for whatever quirk of human psychology, that worked.
You could, and I know people who have done this, take very unflattering photos, right after the holidays is perfect or after a binge weekend. You have someone take a photograph of you, let’s just say, in your tighty-whities or very unflattering underwear under terrible lighting, puffy after a bad weekend and then you have to lose, let’s just call it, 20 pounds in two months or your merciless friend puts that on Facebook. Guess what? You will perform miracles. It’s not that we lack information, it’s that we lack sufficient incentives. You need a carrot or even better, and this is not depressing, this is useful, a meaningful stick if you don’t do what you have said is important for you to do.
