Cyborg Motivation

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 03:18:00 +0000

Recently I’ve been making my way through the reams of posts from Inkhaven, the daily blogging residency/challenge/convention that took place last month. Participating blogger Lucie Phillipon has written some good posts on the tools you can use to align your commitments to your goals, which given my recent Beeminder obsession I have been thinking about quite a bit.

One big question is: is it better to align your short-term actions and long term goals using external commitments and incentive systems or try to align yourself internally by shifting your thoughts? Or to put it differently, should you be a Cyborg or a Mentat? As you can probably predict as someone with a strict (but effective!) blogging commitment, I’m on largely on team Cyborg.

Furret Blog - Now weekly! (or I lose my pie money)

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 05:45:00 +0000

I’ve been very intrigued by the concept of Beeminder, a goal tracking service that keeps you committed to your goals by charging you actual money if you don’t stick to them. Which sounds like something no rational person would agree to (why stake your hard-earned cash on something you might not do when you can just keep it in your bank account?), but as they explain in one of their extremely detailed blog posts on the matter, you can exploit our predictable inconsistency on how we think about our preferences over time. Or in other words, I can move my intention to write a blog post Soon™ to a specific point (e.g. 12am this Saturday night), and have more riding on it than just the vague guilt of abandoning your goal to become a Cool Blogging Guy.

Motivation on Tom Guernier's Blog

Cyborg Motivation

Furret Blog - Now weekly! (or I lose my pie money)