I’ve tried giving enthusiastic two minute overviews of how wonderful and miraculous is beeminder to friends, family, focusmate partners, and it nearly always falls flat right about the time that I explain, “… and then, if you don’t make your goal in time, they charge you $5…”
[Sign of pained expression on their face, followed by Crickets]
"…and if you don’t do it at $5, then they charge you $10… but but… it’s REALLY not that bad… you can make you goal as easy as you want…]
[Crickets]
I think from now on, I’m just going to explain that
“beeminder has been fantastic at giving me motivation to accomplish things that I’ve never been able to before, for the first time in my life. [Maybe give one or two examples.] Yeah check it out if something like that interests you. It’s spelled Beeminder, like reminder but a buzzing bee instead.”
Then I’m just going to SHUT UP and not explain HOW it works. If such a glowing recommendation isn’t enough for them to look it up themselves, then I doubt that anything else said would be persuasive. Or maybe they aren’t ready for the info right now, but when they stumble across beeminder in the future, they’ll remember my testimonial. They’ll be more receptive to the idea if they are looking it up themselves. Also, I think that articles and videos explain it much better than I do.
The idea of being threatened on purpose as a good thing is counterintuitive at first glance.
When I started using beeminder I wasn’t sure how to explain it to people. I chose not to tell anyone because I thought they would tell me I was wasting my money. When I told my brother about it he told me it was something that only a character from saw would do. After a few attempts I only got similar reactions from everyone. Nevertheless, after a couple of months I created a do less goal to quit smoking. I smoked two cigarettes since then and the next one will cost me $30. Right now I haven’t smoked since February and everytime the topic comes up people ask how did I manage to quit. That’s when I take the chance to speak about beeminder. When I explain how it works I always start the speech from the positive impact that it has on my life. Then, before talking about the derailments I explain that the main principle is to bring the long term consequences of our actions to the near future, in order to be deliberate about our long term goals(the marshmallow experiment helps a lot to make the point). Even though anecdotal evidence doesn’t prove anything, my experience has led me to believe that the best way to be a beeminder advocate is to beemind what’s important to you, achieve your goals and be a living example of how powerful this tool is.
I found beeminder because i was searching for something that would charge me money if i failed.
Id done a similar thing with my sister before but she didnt really hold me as accountable as i needed.
However, $ on goals has always been the only thing that really worked.
I was on the search again one time for a way to make me exercise and was talking to a guy (online dating) at the time who was a pt.
He said he’d heard good things about beeminder and that night i went down a 3hr rabbit hole of bms blogs and setup etc.
It was the only good thing to come out of our conversation but for it i am immensely grateful.
Even the website says that it’s geared towards a certain target audience. We tend to be data geeks to begin with, and love the intricacies that we can control and monitor. It isnt for everyone.
I do like what you’ve said about simply saying how great and helpful it’s been and if they want more info, well they know how Google works.
amen, and that was an amazing testimonial! thank you so much!
it’s really surprising how rare it is to get commitment devices with friends and family to work long-term. i guess it’s good news for beeminder though!
but for it i am immensely grateful.