Force Strategies Versus Personal Growth

Earlier this morning I was waiting for my son to finish his shower so I could drive him to church. I knew I had about three minutes so I went to FreeRice.com and played their vocabulary game which is sort of like SAT preparation. You pick (or guess) which answer is correct our of four options. I could describe more, but you can click the link and simply go there and see it and play it within seconds. You score points with correct answers and rice is donated to feed the hungry. Each correct answer is worth 20 grains of rice. My top level was 47 and I ended up on level 41. (You automatically level down when you give a wrong answer.) I won/helped donate 840 grains of rice and over 100 MILLION grains were donated yesterday. One day. That's really good. People are having fun. Learning. Maybe humbling themselves. And hungry people are receiving food. A survival need is being met. Check it out!

When I got back just a bit ago, I read Ian Ayres's editorial, You Bet Your Life, in the Sunday L.A. Times Opinion section. He wrote about people making commitment contracts to keep themselves on track toward their goals. He had $500 on the line every week if he failed to reach his goals and he never had to write a check on his way to losing 25 pounds. Ayres teaches law at Yale University and if he had missed a goal, he would have written a check for $500 that week to a charity chosen by his colleague, Dean Karlan, who teaches economics at Yale. They co-founded stickK.com, which you can visit by clicking on the title of this post. Their method is simply one strategy for reaching a goal, meeting a need.

In my opinion, the reasons for you or I not reaching a goal are part of what personal growth or self-development are about. I believe that dealing with the underlying issues in your life and your unhelpful and unhealthful belief systems is the better way to go in the long run. Forcing yourself to pay money can definitely work in forcing yourself to reach your goals. I'm sure you can find ample evidence on their website or in their writings. I'm suggesting that it's not the only strategy that works. The threat of paying money may force you to take certain actions, but it doesn't necessarily tell you WHY that threat is necessary. Self-development can take away the need for using that strategy. We'll see if FreeRice.com's educate and entertain yourself strategy (what I might call elementary personal growth or self-development) works in the long run. But it's working now and I expect that if you visit FreeRice.com and tell others about it, soon they will be donating 1 BILLION grains of rice per day and maybe, soon after than 100 Billion or even 1 TRILLION.

Now I'm going to go for a walk.

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Visit FreeRice.com and then visit Lime.com and register (use a pseudonym if you like - I'm Dr. Network there AND Leftcoastman here) and keep tracking of your steps and your minutes and your miles.