The 4-Hour Body_ An Uncommon Guide to Ra - Timothy Ferriss [27]
The researchers concluded that photographs are more effective than written food diaries. This is saying something, as prior studies had confirmed that subjects who use food diaries lose three times as much weight as those who don’t. The upshot: use your camera phone to take a snapshot before opening your mouth. Even without a prescribed diet, this awareness alone will result in fat-loss.
The camera can also be used to accentuate your flaws … to your benefit.
If we analyze the post-contest submissions of the winners of the Body- for- Life Challenge, the largest physique transformation contest in the last 50 years of publishing, we can isolate one common understated element: “before” photographs. The training methods and diet varied, but those who experienced the most dramatic changes credited the “before” photographs with adherence to the program. The pictures were placed in an unavoidable spot, often on the refrigerator, and served as inoculation against self-sabotage.
Get an accurate picture of your baseline. It will look worse than you expect. This need not be bad news. Ignoring it won’t fix it, so capture it and use it.
2. MAKE IT A GAME:
JACK STACK AND THE STICKINESS OF FIVE SESSIONS
Jack Stack was nervous. It was 1983, and he had just joined his employees to purchase SRC, a near-bankrupt engine remanufacturer, from their parent company, International Harvester. It was done in remarkable fashion, with $100,000 applied to a loan of $9 million, for a debt ratio of 89-to-1. The bank officer who handled the loan was fired within hours of approving it.
The 13 managers who contributed their life savings to make it possible were also nervous, but they needn’t have been. That $100,000 would be worth $23 million in 1993, just 10 years later. By 2008, sales had increased from $16 million to more than $400 million, and stock value had risen from 10¢ per share to $234 per share.
What was to thank?
Games. Frequent games.
Jack Stack taught all of his employees how to read the financial statements, opened the books, and put numerical goals alongside individual performance numbers on grease boards around the plant. Daily goals and public accountability were combined with daily rewards and public recognition.
The Hawthorne plant of the Western Electric Company in Cicero, Illinois, also figured this out, albeit accidentally. The year was 1955, and their finding was significant: increasing lighting in the plant made workers more productive. Then someone pointed out (I have to imagine a sweaty- palmed intern) a confusing detail. Productivity also improved when they dimmed the lighting! In fact, making any change at all seemed to result in increased productivity.
It turned out that, with each change, the workers suspected they were being observed and therefore worked harder. This phenomenon—also called the “observer effect”—came to be known as “the Hawthorne Effect.”
Reinforced by research in game design, Jack Stack and Western Electric’s results can be condensed into a simple equation: measurement = motivation.
Seeing progress in changing numbers makes the repetitive fascinating and creates a positive feedback loop. Once again, the act of measuring is often more important than what you measure. To quote the industrial statistician George Box: “Every model is wrong, but some are useful.”
It’s critical that you measure something. But that begets the question: to replace self-discipline, how often do you need to record things?
That is, how many times do you need to log data to get hooked and never stop? In the experience of the brilliant Nike+ team, and in the experience of their users, more than 1.2 million runners who have tracked more than 130 million