“Moderation in all things,” they say. That may keep a society together, but it’s not the protagonist’s job.
I wrote this book in three months while simultaneously attempting seventeen other missions, including running a startup, launching a hit iPhone app, learning to write 3,000 new Chinese words, training to attempt a four-hour marathon from scratch, learning to skateboard, helping build a successful cognitive testing website, being best man at two weddings, increasing my bench press by sixty pounds, reading twenty books, going skydiving, helping to start the Human Hacker House, learning to throw knives, dropping my 5K time by five minutes, and learning to lucid dream. I planned to do all this while sleeping eight hours a night, sending 1,000 emails, hanging out with a hundred people, going on ten dates, buying groceries, cooking, cleaning, and trying to raise my average happiness from 6.3 to 7.3 out of 10.
How?
By hacking my motivation.
The Motivation Hacker shows you how to summon extreme amounts of motivation to accomplish anything you can think of. From precommitment to rejection therapy, this is your field guide to getting yourself to want to do everything you always wanted to want to do.
First published April 6, 2013. You've got your choice of where to grab it:
The last chapter of the book is a list of how all the missions turned out. I've put mission results extras here. If you haven't read the book, this'll spoil it a little. You'll still be able to eat it, though.
Aftermath of The Motivation Hacker - everything that surprised me about writing the book, what I learned, and stats from the first six months.
First Year Book Sales - I always love it when people share revenue data for their projects, so here are mine.
Second Year Book Sales - More stats!
Fourth Year Book Sales - Going strong.
Tenth Year Book Sales - It endures.
"Personally, this book inspired me to get a little crazy. I always thought super achievement required giving up balance - that you can't be number #1 and still have a life. Nick showed me wrong." - Amit
"If you want to squeeze every last drop of learning and adventure out of your short time in this universe, read this book." - David Klionsky"
"Probably worth at least 1000x what I paid for it." - Lincoln
"I really enjoyed the book. The blurb made it come across as a stereotypical self-help book ... but I don't think that does the book justice. It was a blast to read ... and all the self-help stuff is rigorously empirical." - Miranda
"Highly recommended for anyone who wants to take their productivity to the next level." - Chloe Fan
"Holy freaking crap do we love you, Nick Winter!" - Daniel Reeves, Beeminder
"Nick Winter beeminds spontaneous romantic gestures for his girlfriend. SWOON!" - Bethany Soule, Beeminder
"It's an excellent book, very helpful, very well written." - James Wilson
"Rather than a string of loosely connected anecdotes we get a unique blend of Bildungsroman and present-tense memoir. It's mad science only in the precise sense that makes normal look bad." - Wilder
You can see all the Amazon reviews here, and the Goodreads reviews, too.