Let’s Make it Interesting - Putting Stakes on your Learning

When you go to a bank, it's not uncommon that you'll see a guard. You know, someone who'll take immediate action if you come in and try to rob the bank or something. But this is never the only layer of protection the bank uses. If the guard was the only security, a group of attackers could easily incapacitate the guard and steal everything.

But there are other layers. There's a vault that is very difficult to unlock. Only employees have access to it and they have to get background checks to work at the bank. There will be physical barriers between the employees and the rest of the bank. And the employees can easily activate a silent alarm to call the police to the scene. So there are many different levels of security an attacker would have to deal with.

Well, when it comes to study or learning, your motivation is very similar. You need to protect it with many different layers of security. When you're doing the hard work of learning for a long time, for weeks on end, it can be difficult to avoid burnout and to keep your motivation up. It's really easy to give up, especially if you're just studying something "for fun" on the side. When it stops being fun you're inclined to ask, "Well what am I doing this for?" So there are a lot of different ways to give yourself that extra motivation, and today I'm going to talk about a less conventional one called "stakes".

There are all kinds of ways to motivate yourself to gain something. But there's plenty of research out there on risk aversion that a more effective psychological trick to get someone to do something is to have a sort of punishment associated with not doing a particular task. Our brains are more effectively wired to avoid loss and harm than to seek the benefit.

So today I am recommending one possible extra tool for motivating yourself, and this is to put public stakes on your learning process. That is, you can promise, via a public blog post or video, that you will give up some money if you do not achieve your goal.

Now if this sounds like gambling...it's not. Gambling is when you're playing a game of chance or something you have no control over. Your learning ability is something you absolutely do have control over, so it's quite different.

Now the first step of this process is to select a measurable goal. So thinking back to my metrics article last week, you want to pick a meaningful metric related to your performance. Or if your learning process doesn't have a great metric, you can also just use the amount of time that you practice and really devote to your topic (although this requires you to hold yourself accountable).

The second step is to pick some cause or non-profit that you would rather not give money to. A great one is to select a politician or political party you reallllly don't like. What you'll promise is in whatever blog post or video you make is that you will donate some modest amount of money to this person or cause.

It doesn't have to be a lot, maybe even as little as $10, because the simple fact of donating to whatever "anti-charity" you don't support is often punishment enough. But of course the more you wager, the more painful it will be to lose, and the harder you will try.

There's actually a couple different websites that are designed to enable you to make these kinds of wagers. One of them I recommend is stickk.com. You can sign up for this and put some money on the line for your goal. In the video version below, you can see me walk through the process of making a goal on this site!

My Goal

Now today I'm going to set a specific goal for my chess play over the course of this year. My goal is to reach a 2000 rapid rating on chess.com. That is, at one point this year I must win a game that puts me at or above 2000 on this rating on my profile; I have to do this before 11:59 on December 31st 2022. I was around 1750 at the end of my baseline games, so I've got a little ways to go, but I don't think this is insurmountable. My tournament rating when I was young never went above about 1840 or so, and I think chess.com's ratings are supposed to track reasonably well with USCF ratings, so if I get to 2000, this suggests I would be at my strongest level ever, which would be really cool.

If I do not achieve this goal, then I will donate $100 to Hikaru Nakamura on his chess stream. For those unfamiliar, who is Hikaru Nakamura? Do I hate this guy? Well no, I've got nothing personal against him; he's done a great job making chess more popular in America, especially with online streaming. But he's kind of the "big fish" in American chess and chess streaming overall, so if I were to make a big donation, I'd rather give that to someone who's not as well established. I don't feel like Hikaru really needs my help.

It would be cool if Hikaru made a counter-wager against me, that would motivate me even more, but I'm not going to get my hopes up. I have some doubts he'll ever hear about me. But that doesn't matter because, remember, we're more motivated by the possibility of loss than by gain.

So I'm going to keep careful track of my progress towards this goal throughout the year, and you can be sure that there will be a celebration article if I get there. In the meantime, I hope you'll consider using this approach to motivate yourself. This is just one of a few different mindset-related tips I have for learning, and there are lots of other categories besides mindset. If you want to learn more about my overall strategy for learning, download my free Learning Checklist in that first link down below. I promise you'll learn something new from this, and hopefully it will help you make even more progress on your learning goals.

Here's this article in video form!