The willpower outsourcing
The core principles of the Achiever Life app are simple: using willpower correctly, focusing on the most important tasks, and embracing a certain degree of fatalism about goal achievement. Below is the "first-person" story of Achiever's developer, which will give you a good sense of how to effectively apply these concepts.
As I got older, I started experiencing all the stereotypical accompanying issues—medical and psychological—with a cherry on top in the form of severe professional burnout. Meanwhile, I’m as lazy as a cat that screamed for half an hour after stepping on its tail because it was too lazy to move. So, the effectiveness of the "crutch" I needed to prop up my intention to get my act together and change my life for the better was critically important.
As an experienced programmer, I first searched for ready-made solutions from various self-help gurus and psychology experts. Despite spending a considerable amount of money and over half a year of time, there were no visible results. Spoiler: A comprehensive theoretical and practical solution, which Achiever perfectly complements, was found later, but that’s another story. As the Chinese say, if you've been messing up your life for 20 years, don't expect it to take only 20 days to fix it... But waiting 20 years for results wasn't something I was willing to do.
Being a successful business consultant as well, I decided to stop listening to coaches and apply the principles and tools from the Theory of Constraints (TOC), which I practice, to myself. The old maxim: "Physician, heal thyself."
TOC suggests analyzing a situation by listing the Undesirable Effects (UDEs) in the system and then finding the core cause that is actually responsible for most of them. If that core cause is within your control (you can clearly do something about it), you’re in luck, and you can design a path forward by treating the cause, not just the symptoms.
That’s exactly what I did, deciding that I, too, was a kind of enterprise. But while the main goal of a commercial company is profit, for a person, it's more likely the "pursuit of happiness." So, let's consider the effort on routine actions and habits as conditional operating expenses, the effort to achieve specific goals as conditional investment, and the happiness derived from life as "profit." After defining my terms, I made a list of UDEs in my own life, analyzed the cause-and-effect relationships, built my Current Reality and Future Reality Trees, and determined the key changes needed to pivot the situation from problems to success by impacting the core causes of everything.
The “Non-Psychological” Business Approach
The result of this “non-psychological,” utilitarian business approach was a typical, decent TOC outcome. The analysis helped uncover several root causes that underpinned the failure of all my previous attempts at change. These causes included:
- Not understanding that willpower is a limited resource that must be used correctly and with maximum effect.
- Trying to achieve too many goals at once—doing everything immediately—which violates the strategic principle of concentrating forces.
- The lack of a clearly visible link between my efforts and a result that was important to my subconscious, which led to a loss of motivation.
- The absence of a simple algorithm for choosing the goals whose achievement would noticeably improve my life.
- Underestimating the importance of the process of moving toward a goal, not just the final result (which may not even happen).
Oops. This looks an awful lot like the set of problems we constantly see in struggling commercial companies. But right now, we’re focused on psychology...
The first cause was fairly easy to address. The correctly posed question contained most of the answer, and I quickly found an "operating manual" for willpower in the form of a technique for working with my own brain, based on the principle of dopamine reinforcement. Unfortunately, despite its absolute effectiveness, this method was quite difficult to implement consistently in daily life. (You can read the details of the search ready-made solution elsewhere.) Ultimately, this led to the creation of Achiever, which is based on dopamine reinforcement principles and primarily solves the problem of a lack of willpower.
The second cause proved much more difficult because, like almost any TOC solution, it required a change in thinking. Forcing yourself to do less, not more, is a very uncomfortable process because it contradicts the principles that "success propaganda" has hammered into us for years. Achiever helps here too, as it’s fundamentally impossible to use it as yet another to-do list, turning your daily tasks into an endless laundry list.
The third cause happened to be surprisingly simple. The main tool for designing and implementing changes in a company, called the Strategy and Tactics Tree, perfectly suited the design of personal goals, completely solving that problem. We are currently working on a separate desktop/tablet app to complement the strictly "mobile" Achiever, and we’ll share the details soon.
The fourth cause is also effectively eliminated by applying the Strategy/Tactics Trees. However, as I discovered later, the simplest algorithm for everyday use was brilliantly articulated by Vladimir Yakovlev in his course, "To Be Continued…". To put it briefly, the algorithm for choosing where to focus your efforts to improve your life is simple: Choose your maximum discomfort, figure out how to turn it into comfort, and do it. Repeat with your new main discomfort.
Oops again. This is awfully similar to the Five Focusing Steps of TOC. Damn professional deformation…
The fifth problem wasn't a problem for me personally. Any Russian entrepreneur operates in an extremely hostile environment and understands that goal achievement is inherently a stochastic process. Getting a result often depends not on one's own efforts but on "how the chips fall." In personal life, goals where the process itself doesn't bring you joy shouldn't be considered well-formulated. Life will always introduce adjustments, and it's foolish not to account for that. This is why one of Achiever's key features is the absence of artificially assigned deadlines for goals. A goal's deadline in Achiever is calculated based on task dates and their dependencies, and changing it doesn't mean the whole goal is a failure. This large and important topic will be explored in a separate article.
As a result, Achiever and the resulting "mix-and-match" of practical methods for manipulating my own brain have yielded very noticeable results in a surprisingly short time. Since I effectively conducted a clean experiment with a control (with and without Achiever), I am extremely happy with the outcomes. Having my willpower partly contained in a mobile app is a little strange, but, well, that's just the current trend...
P.S.
If I had discovered Yakovlev's course at the beginning of all my exercises, I would have saved about a year of time. On the other hand, the experience and pleasure gained during my own research are priceless, so I definitely have no regrets :) Nevertheless, Yakovlev’s concepts, which put the right words in their proper places, significantly improved my understanding of certain points and (among many other things) gave me the definition of "discomfort." This perfectly replaced the UDE for the purpose of systematically analyzing my own life.
I also took Yakovlev’s definition of a measurable result as a specific moment of joy, rather than abstract, poorly formalizable happiness. I strongly recommend studying the subtle differences between these concepts in the original source—it’s worth it. This is not an advertisement for Yakovlev's courses, but my sincere gratitude for his deep analytical work and excellent presentation. The author has not yet found anything more useful in terms of self-development for older-aged junior entrepreneurs.