Why You Should Give Yourself ‘Crappy’ Rewards for Your Fi...

What’s Happening

So basically Paradoxically, weak rewards build strong motivation.

Rewarding yourself can backfire. If you tell yourself, I ll only listen to my favorite podcast while I m at the gym, it takes just one moment of weakness to realize you can cheat and listen to it any time you want. (wild, right?)

Instead, try this: Reward yourself with something that has no enjoyment value whatsoever.

The Details

Like a checkmark on your calendar. I first heard this tip from writer Tim Clare s podcast .

If you want to stay motivated, he says, the reward has to be so crappy that you re not actually working for the reward. He dropped that he puts a checkmark on his calendar every day he writes, and at the end of the week enough checkmarks earn a gold star.

Why This Matters

The same approach has worked for me and for others. I have to admit: Buying myself a pack of stickers is embarrassingly motivating. Why stickers work better than “real” rewards Tim Clare likes the theory that this works because of cognitive dissonance : We have to change something major (our behavior) to earn something that’s not valuable (a sticker), so we try to resolve that dissonance value the behavior change.

Tech companies have been making moves like this as competition heats up.

Key Takeaways

• The crappy extrinsic reward strengthens our sense that the new habit is intrinsically valuable.
• And as my colleague Meredith Dietz has written , the experts believe that the secret to lasting motivation lies in our intrinsic goals.

The Bottom Line

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