The Motivation Hacker

The gist: the author read ‘The Procrastination Equation' and was inspired to use the techniques there to supercharge their motivation (going beyond merely defeating procrastination, to being enthusiastic about their goals).

Generally solid short book, and most of the advice given send reasonable. The one major exception is the implication that people should be purposefully over-optimistic in their projections, so that they get started. I would rather know what I'm getting myself into and make the conscious choice not to pursue a goal, rather than committing to things that I'm not prepared to do.

Review 2021: I reread this book, six years later, in an attempt to break out of a retirement/covid-related slump. It's really interesting to see the book with fresh eyes. My old review seems like it missed the point of the book — the point isn't in the things Nick did, it's in his strategies for doing them. Maybe at that time I was in a headspace where all of his techniques were familiar to me, but this time around, dang. There's so much good advice in this book. My primary takeaway is not just to precommit to goals, but to aggressively overly precommit to goals. Like, one precommitment mechanism isn't enough. Try seven. This really resonates with me and my recent lack of success with precommitment. Thanks for the great book, Nick!


Review 2015: Inspirational and well written, but I continually found myself wishing for more actionable advice about how to actually go about learning the cool things Nick did (knife throwing, anyone?). The book ends with his results, but I wish they had been fewer and more in-depth case studies about what he found worked and didn't work.

Nick Winter is a non-expert who wrote this book in 3 months. That said, there is a lot here that is valuable–his enthusiasm is contagious, he's done some good research and a lot of what he talks about led me off with good directions for additional research.

Don't be deterred by the 3 star rating, you'd be hard pressed to walk away from reading it without feeling excited to learn something new, make more of your life and have a little more fun. That's worth the 3 bucks and 3 hours this book will cost you.