I’ll agree with you here. While I love my weigh graph, the reality is I use my weight, my strength to weight ratio since I record all my lifts in the gym, the notch on my belt, body fat calipers, how I look in the mirror to tell. I’m pretty sensitive to even small changes, and normally all these things line up. Weight is just so handy because it’s no effort to measure and after so many years I know how much I should weigh given how much I’m able to lift. I couple a better measure, with knowing exactly how to turn the knobs on my inputs. Finally I put it together with really long time horizon goals. I was such a huge fan of the fact that my gf lost the weight so gradually. It took a couple years, but who cares. Time is going to pass anyway, so you might as well make a little progress while it’s in motion.
As someone who gets great joy from seeing others succeed, I would be checking the sentiment in your post to make sure that you’re just noting the problem and then immediately moving to solutions. You don’t want the fact that you’re right to stop you from getting what you want. If this isn’t a useful construct for you, then what would be? 90% of the attention goes to the solution and 10% the problem, etc etc.
I’m also not surprised that many people have had success beeminding weight. We’re all different. I’ve tried to get my girlfriend on beeminder as well as some of my friends, but it’s very clear the way their beliefs are wired up it’s not going to be effective for them. That’s a bummer because it works so well for me, but no big deal because we just hunt for other solutions together.
zedmango, reading some of your posts in the past (I don’t remember which…) reminded me of myself. I’m also on board with the “beemind inputs” thing: I do that for all my goals that I’m beeminding. If you haven’t read it and you’re prepared to admit to the risk of being wrong about something (no!), I think you might like The Hacker’s Diet – his prescription does align with that The Hacker's Diet
But I also applaud willinvent’s advice (or my spin on it I guess): What are you going to try to improve at, or to get better at improving at, the things you mention: health, fitness, looks (I assume you want to since you’re discussing it)? I would say: even the best ideas we have can always be improved, and often not in the ways we expect: it’s fundamentally trial and error – so how are you going to question your ideas and experiment to give yourself room to find out where you’re wrong and where you can improve your ideas and behaviour?
It’s often hard to explain the kind of buy-in that us data-motivated types can develop by default. I’ve described Beeminder to people I care about before, and more often than not the first question is “so why on earth wouldn’t you just lie to it?”
Part of why Beeminder works for me is that I know that it’s not just an app/algorithm, but a tiny company with real people behind it whose financial success depends on whether or not we’re honest with our data. So the pertinent question for me is totally reversed: “why on earth would I lie to it?”
Well that’s a real question, and something many of us struggle with - I wouldn’t write people off as wired wrong just for asking that.
My answer would be something like “because I really care about having an accurate view of what I did and didn’t do, I want to improve, and I’m expecting that on average I’ll be paying Beeminder a lot for this service, so it’s already accounted for in my mind. Also my OCD makes it hard to enter incorrect data. And I want Beeminder to work for me and it won’t work if I lie to it. If I’m gonna lie to it I might as well just quit and then I won’t owe anything.”
I’m not sure I understand your point about Beeminder’s financial success, since they also wouldn’t make any money if you always did what you said you would (except for premium plan payments). But surely caring about Beeminder’s financial success doesn’t prevent you from succeeding.
One of my friends is extremely professionally successful and couldn’t care less about money. She is hyper motivated by social accountability, but the financial sting just wouldn’t do it for her.
My gf just says the thought of the entire thing would give her anxiety to the point that she’d perform worse on her goals. I’m not sure that’s true, because I think in general the anticipation of an event is different from the experience of one and a divergence between those two is SUPER common for people, but it’s not my place to push, nor do I think I would appreciate if someone were pushy with me.
Completely agree with the “because an awesome team is behind it” argument. Having to reply to a derail email with a dog ate my homework and knowing a real person is reading it is pretty powerful too.
I was reading Cialdini’s Influence and then Presuasion and he talks about “why not use this knowledge for evil?” The core of his argument is because anything you do starts reflexively feeding back into your own view of yourself. Seeing yourself as a dishonest weasely person is painful, and it’s also seriously bad for your ability to accomplish your goals.
I’ve seen a similar concept written by Malcolm Ocean in his self referential bets where he talks about how powerful making a self promise is but the moment you blow it, you lose that productivity tool. Nick Winter had the same blurb in his Motivation Hacker book where he talked about swinging the sword of last resolve (can’t remember his actual language). Basically you just tie up your ego in something and say “ok this is it” …but uuuugh…can you imagine doing that and then just not following through…you’d feel terrible.
I know how important identity is, and that’s a big part of why I feel like being honest is important. That’s resonated with others in the past, though “awesome team” seems to have had more traction.
I think you put your finger on it with anticipation vs experience. Our everyday models of how we think and behave are so often just wrong.
But at the same time, people have to make judgements about what to spend their time on. I reckon - within bounds of not being a pain in the ass (one can talk about it honestly in terms of relating ones own experiences without being too irritating, I think?) - repetition probably helps! Also heading off up front people’s preconceptions of how it would work out for them? “You might think that it wouldn’t make a difference to… but…”.
This whole area of motivation, habits etc. is quite zeitgeisty, so there’s a good dollop of “social proof” to be had from the existence and content of books like Atomic Habits: if it’s in a book (especially a popular one), people are wont to take it much more seriously.
