notes #16: on the power of stakes and incentives

Stakes. Having the right incentives can be the difference between success and failure. Unfortunately, while some are obvious, others are more subtle. And that’s bad.

This reminds me of the story in Freakonomics where are child care centre decided to implement a fine to discourage parents from picking up their kids late. What happened instead was that more parents came late — what was initially a strong moral incentive to come on time became a weaker financial incentive to do so.

To achieve the goals (or avoid the anti-goals) I set up last week, I’ve got to create some meaningful stakes (Tim Ferriss talks about this in The 4-Hour Chef).

First, a quick refresher on my anti-goals:

• I want to avoid being stagnant in my coding and software design skills and knowledge.

• I want to avoid the team breaking up and not see any exponential progress in our projects.

• I want to avoid focusing too much on conventional metrics, and also avoid creating videos that stay stagnant in quality.

• I want to avoid being out of shape and have no consistent habits for my health.

You would think that achieving the results from the above will be sufficient but that’s often not the case — since their effects are only felt in the future.

And so here’s what I’m gonna do:

• Continue to document my progress here and be accountable to readers 🙂

• Put in $100 every week into an audience fund if I fail to make progress on the above 💰

Now that there is skin in the game, we gotta talk numbers now - and agree on a fair metric.

• Software: learn 1 new concept every week

• JoblessClub: execute a growth action every 2 weeks

• Content: make 1 improvement in quality every week

• Health: lose 1 kg every week

Notice that some of the metrics are action-based while others are result-based.

Ideally, a goal should have both that works in a sort of feedback loops.

I’ll go into greater detail on this next week.

For now, I guess you’ve got to take my word for it on the progress. 🤝

And that’s it. Thanks for reading.

Cheers,
Joesurf