Today I’m going to offer you a little technique to help you accomplish any goal that simply requires action or inaction on your part. It’s an underhanded and almost cruel way to get yourself to do something, but it works. You can use it to get yourself to do a one-time thing. Or you can use it to create a permanent change in some aspect of your life. I… inflicted this technique on an old friend from college and he instantaneously quit smoking and hasn’t for 6 weeks. He says he can’t see himself ever smoking again.
What is this technique? Some kind of hypnotism? No. It’s more evil than that. It’s blackmail. And we’re going to use what you love most as leverage.
Here’s a thought experiment.
Imagine you have a four-year-old daughter who is the light of your life. Imagine too that you have a problem with cheating on your diet. For years you have sabotaged yourself and you just can’t get out of your own way. After another rough day you find yourself pulling a tub of ice-cream out of the freezer and digging your spoon in, filled with regret. As you bring the spoon to your lips you hear a knock on your door. You go to open it and see a man you’ve never met before in a suit smiling at you. He pulls open his jacket and shows you a handgun stuck in the waistband of his pants. “Hello,” he says, still smiling. “I hope you’re doing well. I want you to know that the next time you cheat on your diet I am going to find your daughter and shoot her in the back of the head. There is no negotiating this. You must be 100% committed to your diet until you reach your goal weight, at which time you are freed from this deal. But until that time you will stick to your diet. And if not… well, then I hope you’ve enjoyed your time with your daughter. And I’m sure she’ll forgive you.” He nods, turns, and walks away.
Could you go back to the couch and dig back into that ice cream? I bet you couldn’t.
So that’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to make that deal. But you don’t need some shady individual or organization to come kill your daughter, because you’re going to make that deal with God. You don’t believe in God? Good, me neither. Then think of yourself as making the deal with the universe or fate or karma. It doesn’t matter how much or how little you believe in any of that.
Here’s how it works. Let’s say you need to make a dentist appointment. You’ve needed to make one for four months but you can never get yourself to actually do it. You know you should but you keep putting it off. So tonight you sit down at a table and write this on a piece of paper.
Tomorrow I will make my dentist appointment. If I fail to do so then something awful is going to happen to my child*. There is no getting out of this contract.
And then you sign it.
Will you make that appointment the next day? I would.
I’m too rational a person to believe that not making the appointment would actually cause something terrible to happen to my child. But at the same time, no one knows the absolute mechanics of the universe, so it’s definitely possible that writing up this contract and having these thoughts could manifest something terrible to happen if the contract is broken. But more importantly, even if we live in a godless, karma-less, fate-less universe, you will never know that for certain. These things are unknowable. So let’s say you don’t make that dentist appointment. You say, “fuck it, I’ll do it some other day,” and you rip up the little contract. Let’s say you do that and something terrible does end up happening to your daughter at some point. Maybe three weeks later she breaks her arm while climbing a tree, or three years later she gets hit by a drunk-driver, or thirty years later she gets a rare form of cancer. Any of these may be just accidents, and they probably are, but you can’t know that. And then you have to live with the possibility, however remote it might be, that you caused it to happen. In fact, you asked for it to happen because you couldn’t be bothered to take three minutes out of your day to make a dentist appointment.
As I said, this is essentially just a hyper-manipulative way of leveraging your willpower. It’s a tool for anyone who feels they can’t just tell themselves to do or not do something and then make that happen. It’s pretty ghoulish, and I don’t really recommend it, but I know it’s helped one friend of mine. If it helps anyone else here, I’d like to hear about it.
* If you don’t have kids, or hate them, then feel free to substitute in whatever you love:spouse, parents, siblings, friends, John Stamos.
