A possibly genius accountability trick
Or at the very least, another tool to put in your self-help toolbox
I went for a coffee with a friend yesterday. We got chatting about human mindset and motivation, which is something I often end up talking about, it being a particular interest of mine (obviously!) and he told me about a funny post he’d come across online.
I’m paraphrasing, but it went something along the lines of:
When the poster is struggling with something, they go online, open up Reddit (Or Quora or similar), and post their question. Which is where most people would stop, and they’d sit back, waiting for the answers to come in.
And of course, often they don’t.
You might be waiting a good while for someone to come across your question and to be interested or knowledgeable or enthusiastic enough to bother to answer. But this person goes one step further than that.
Once their question is posted, they log off Reddit, log on using a second account they’ve set up, one with a different name/profile picture, and then post an answer. Ideally an egregiously wrong one. A real jaw dropper, something which can’t possibly be right is best.
And then people absolutely fall over themselves to post and to prove the first answerer wrong. And in doing so, of course, they then provide the original poster with loads of good ideas for how they might solve their problem.
I chuckled at the story, of course, but as I drove home, my nerves slightly jangly from the caffeine in a very large iced vanilla latte, my mind just wouldn’t let the idea go. It was still chewing it over this morning.
Why? Because I think there’s something psychologically very powerful at play there.
I think it’s partly because it feeds into our human tendency to focus on the negative.
I’ve said this before, but that’s hardwired into each one of us. Why? Because our ancestors were fearful, risk-averse people. If your great-great-great-(you know where I’m going with this)-grandfather Ug the caveman, saw a bush rustling, then he was the man who’d assume it was a ravenous beast, lurking there, just waiting to make a meal out of him. Whether he was right or not to flee in terror, is irrelevant. When he was right, he would’ve been the one who survived, while his more relaxed friend, let’s call him Og, got his throat ripped out by a sabre-tooth tiger.
So Ug lived long enough to pass his genes on to the next generation, while Og didn’t.
And so on and so forth, throughout the generations. That tendency to focus on the negative has been bred into us, which is why you can get ten compliments, but if you also get one harsh comment, then that’s the one which will stick in your brain and which you may still find yourself chewing over in the middle of the night, the positives all now completely forgotten.
The media plays into this tendency as well. That’s why all of the news is bad, because if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t watch, and they wouldn’t make as much money out of their advertising revenue.
We also love to be right. It’s an ego thing, I guess. That’s why people spend so much of their damned lives arguing with complete strangers on the internet. It’s pretty much risk free, at the end of the day. If we were an argumentative, ego-driven kind of person, fifty or a hundred years ago then a) the number of people we came into contact with every day was way, way, waaaay smaller than the number of people whose opinions you can read and hear online even while you’re doing your morning wee, b) they were also people you’d have to associate with again in the future, so you tended to keep it polite and c) they were standing right in front of you, and in past times, people were way more likely to punch you in the face if you were rude to them.
So, I think this story feeds into both of those (very human and totally normal) tendencies.
Remember, my manifesto includes the words:
You are not weird
This all got me thinking, can we harness this in some way, make use of it in order to help us to do something - or indeed not to do something?
Here’s my idea. Let’s hook into our desire to prove people wrong, shall we?
Think of your biggest, hairiest, most audacious goal. Something which scares you half to death.
Ordinarily, I’d tell you to keep your cards close to your chest, not to talk to anyone about it.
Why? Because sometimes, if you talk about certain types of things too much, you stop wanting to do them.
Those things tend to be the more creative kind of pursuits.
For example, as someone who’s written quite a few fiction books, I know that in the past, when I’ve discussed my plot at length with people, I run the risk of losing the desire to write it at all.
Why? Because our brains are marvellous problem-solving machines, and we’ve talked it all through now, so our silly old brains can then lose interest altogether in solving the problem which is reconciling and making sense of the seeds of your original plot.
Or, if it’s something you’re trying to so which no one in your friendship group or family has ever done, you may talk at length and with great excitement about your next project, only to receive at best, polite but slightly befuddled smiles, and at worst, outright concern for the fact that you’re taking such a risk, a creative leap into the unknown.
All of that can be really, really demotivational. Trust me, I know, I’ve been there. But I also know, as Jamie Kern Lima says in her amazing book Worthy:
I’m not crazy, I’m just first!
So, after giving it some thought, I believe there’s a way we can tap into these ideas and use them to help us to get things done.
Think of someone you absolutely know who will pooh-pooh your idea. Tell them in great detail what you plan to do. And as they start to tell you all the reasons why you can’t do it, or it won’t succeed (perhaps because they’re trying to protect you maybe or wanting to prove you wrong or trying to put you off because they feel bad about their own choices), take a deep breath, gird your loins (whatever that means), stop them dead in their tracks and challenge them instead to put their money where their mouth is.
Make a bet with them. Make it on the small side if money is tight for one or both of you. But put real money on the table.
Tell them that you’re absolutely determined to prove them wrong, which will fire them up too and will encourage them to put their hand in their pocket.
If you want an extra little burst of motivation, then promise that you’ll donate the money if you win to a charity you love. And that if you lose (and to hook into our tendency to find negatives compelling), you’ll get them to send the money to a cause you loathe.
Will this work for everyone? Hell, no. Will it work for every situation? Also, no.
But as I’ve said many times now (and as I also tell everyone who’ll listen to me on the subject of personal development and self help) I believe that we all need to learn (and try) as many little tricks and tips as we can, to build up a toolbox (a Rolodex, if you like, Google it if you’re under the age of 30) which we can rifle through and try out when we face a new challenge. The more of them you know, the more chance you have in each situation of having one you can use which will work.
What do you think? Have I totally lost the plot, or could this be useful?
Update: my friend messaged me today to say he'd discovered this is called Cunningham's Law - it even has its own Wikipedia entry! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#%22Cunningham's_Law%22
This is fascinating. There was a community Facebook account set up for my county during COVID - to disseminate useful info and coordinate community volunteering. They worked out early on that if they just posted the facts their posts didn't get seen by many. So they worked out that by adding strategic typos or errors they could make their posts go viral and get their info out there really efficiently. It was so clever and it worked every time.