I came across a really interesting personal accountability tactic while reading the book Nudge, a book with strong behavioral finance implications. If you’ve not read it before, I think it’s pretty interesting. Anyways, the basic idea is that you set up a meaningful bet that you will do something. That way, you are in control of the outcome. This could be an awesome tactic that helps you improve your stream’s consistency or your business’s operations.
The book’s examples
The author is a professor and part of his work involves mentoring PhD students during their thesis. His students have a strong financial incentive to finish their thesis as soon as possible because it leads to a promotion, increased pay, and increased benefits.
However, one of the main ideas in the book is that humans are bad at day to day execution of long term plans. This is especially true when there is short term pain (writing a thesis/exercising) but long term benefits (career progression/fitness). The author proposed an idea to help overcome that very human weakness.
He had his grad student commit to writing several $100 checks. The author would cash one check each month that the grad student didn’t turn in a chapter for his thesis. The money was then to be used on buying wine and food for a party that the student wouldn’t be invited to.
Ultimately, the incentive worked! Even though most of the chapters were turned in hours before the deadline they were still turned in. The student finished their thesis, the majority of the checks were torn up, and he received his promotion and accompanying financial gain. Plus, he was done with his thesis!
In addition to this, my wife and her sister have used the same tactic to great effect. They’ll bet $100 that each will accomplish some goal they have. As of yet, they’ve completed everything they set out so that they didn’t have to pay.
Ideas for streamers
So how could streamers apply this to their stream? After all, this is a blog on finances for streamers. If you’re somehow streaming while writing your thesis what on earth are you doing? Let’s look for more meaningful examples.
First, you need to know what would be a meaningful, painful bet to lose. That will be different for each of us. It could be monetary (like the $100) or it could be something else (chat gets to pick your outfit or you sing on stream or something). It’s like a reverse tip incentive. The point is that you would HATE having to pay the price if you failed. It makes the pain current. If you don’t know what would make a good bet, ask your friend with whom you’re making the bet. I’m sure they can come up with something devious.
Here’s a list of sample ideas I had that you could work on, though it’s important that you figure out what is truly your biggest obstacle and therefore important to you.
- You’ll stream at your scheduled time for a month/six months/a year.
- Each month, you will do your bookkeeping.
- You’ll upload clips/highlights/edited videos to YouTube on a schedule.
- You’ll go to bed/wake up by a certain time each day.
- Incorporate your business by X date.
- Pay your taxes by X date.
Key considerations
You need a partner for this. It could be a significant other, a colleague, or even chat. However, there needs to be someone to keep you accountable and call you to task to follow through on your bet. They also need to have enough compassion to be reasonable in case there are extenuating circumstances that nullify the conditions of the bet. They have to WANT you to succeed but benefit materially if you don’t.
Additionally, you need the bet to be so painful to be motivating but not so negative that it’s debilitating. After all, you’re not doing yourself any good if you lose the bet but then can’t carry on. So, if you can’t afford to lose $10,000 don’t bet $10,000! Bet something that you can afford but would hate to lose.
Conclusion
It’s possible to set up structures to help you accomplish long term, beneficial projects for your stream. A key part of that is an accountability structure that keeps you on track day to day. For some people, they can set goals and meet them just because they set the goal. For most of us, it needs to be a bit more painful than that.
The book Nudge suggested a way to make the pain more present so that we’re more likely to hit long term goals. You can bet that you’ll succeed, with real world and painful consequences if you fail. That way, you’re in total control of the outcome of the bet but you have to work for it to avoid losing. I’d suggest starting with something small but specific and seeing how that works. You’ll need someone who is willing to be a helpful partner.
You don’t have to figure this out alone. This is what we do- help streamers and young professionals make great money decisions. If that’s something that sounds interesting to you reach out me or schedule some time for a free consult. You can check out what I do here.
