Of Course You're Awesome. Now Pay $10 a Month to Hear Someone Else Say It
newsfeed.time.com
newsfeed.time.com
So I gave it a try. Then I tried it some more. Over time it really takes a transformation. At first I really felt like Stuart; but that is because I didn't believe the things I was saying. If I kept lowering the bar eventually I could find compliments about myself that I actually thought were true. The good feelings and confidence those smaller compliments gave me helped boost me to higher levels, and up and up, until the point now where I feel an abundance of confidence in most of my day to day interactions that I never had before.
Affirmations are really just a mind hack to architect your internal reality intentionally. You DO have an inner reality, so why not try to take control of it? :)
EDIT: Oh, but back to this startup.. I like this idea, but I hope they understand the principles behind affirmation therapy as a part of CBT. Simply telling someone they are awesome will have no actual affect if they don't believe what you are saying, so there needs to be a little bit of a day-to-day feedback process to hone in on the target emotions you want to generate. I doubt this much effort is being put in, but I might be willing to drop $10 to find out. :)
Yeah, the same goes with child development - there's quite a lot of research that says that it is counterproductive to praise a kid for something that they don't believe is praiseworthy.
But there are surely cultural variations to this. For example, I occasionally have had waitstaff in (US) restaurants where when I order an item on the menu will say something like "Excellent choice" or "Awesome". That really feels wrong to me, but since they do it, I suspect it works well at least on some people. So maybe the same thing happens here.
It's cool that they also mentioned the other projects by the same person.
People were saying that he was throwing ideas at a wall until one stuck or got noticed, and sure enough, here's a popular publication with a link to his new app.
He must be having a chuckle right now. Not sure if he's actually making money, but this has to feel like and accomplishment.
FTA:counts just over 100 subscribers
So, no.
here's a popular publication with a link to his new app [...] this has to feel like and accomplishment
It's a blog. And by that standard, pretty soon 'I posted to HN' will be an 'accomplishment'. Just for fun, let's look at the next two headlines:
Guyana's Health Minister Cautions Against Singing Too Much About Rum
Bizarro, Cat-Hating Woman Found
If he pays people to make all the calls, it should take him almost no time to run the business. And even paying the callers a reasonableish sum, he probably keeps ~1/3 of the money.
So he wrote an extremely-simple website, got it some exposure, and hired a friend to make the calls, and now he's got $500/month in recurring income that has a good chance of growing and requires little recurring work. Sure, he's not going to get rich, but that doesn't mean it's a failed venture.
That's really pretty good. I think Zachary really nailed the 'make something people want' angle :)
I saw it on HN first :-) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1616154
They should pitch that service to property management, technical support, customer service, etc.
Only reason why I say this, is Tim Ferris wrote an article on the Visa Concierge service ( http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2010/05/01/credit-card-... ) and they would do just about anything, but they wouldn't call you and tell you that you were awesome, they were "not allowed to do anything of a medical or emotional nature."
I'm thinking maybe not if there are other companies who do this, but who knows.
Even the request for daily affirmation was answered with the contact of a possible company that might provide it; so perhaps if knowledge of this service spreads, it might be a recommended source of that service.
Also, I know it's simply a rhetorical flourish but:
or, for $7.50 a month, you could give just a quarter to a homeless person every day and feel real good about yourself.
I wouldn't feel good doing this at all.
a) I'm unconvinced that my money will make a positive difference.
b) I don't want to reward begging.
c) I don't find interacting with the homeless enjoyable.
d) If I give the quarter to the same homeless guy each day he'll come to expect it and become unhappy if I don't one day.
e) Doing the same thing every day quickly makes it routine and destroys any enjoyment.
I'm just surprised that people always use the "giving money to the homeless" thing as an example of doing good, when there's far better stuff around. (For example, you could save your $7.50 for twelve months[1] and mail off a $90 donation to the charity of your choice).
[1] If you give less frequently you'll minimize the cost of processing your donations.
If you scaled this, you'd want to have a VoIP autodialer system, at which point you'd get down to maybe 60 seconds per call average, which is 30 minutes per customer per month, which is $20/hour revenue, so $10/hour labor would give you $10/hour on top of that to cover everything else. You could do this with call centers, which imposes real estate cost, or you could have a web-based system for employees to connect into from home, which also gives you the benefit of being able to hire them as independent contractors instead of employees and hence not having to worry about their taxes or health care.
There's further optimizations you could make. $10/hour is a high rate for paying people to place unwanted phone calls to complete strangers. I know because that's more than what I made doing that job. If you were running a call center of stoned teenagers and college students, you could probably get away with paying them $8/hour to call up subscribers and tell them they're awesome. Yes, most call centers are staffed by stoned teenagers and college students, at least the ones in charge of making scripted, outgoing calls. Well, at least mine was.
People only call centers staffed by stoned teenagers because they have to - they have an immediate problem they want help solving. Or they receive unwanted and unsolicited calls from them. Nobody is going to pay $10/month to receive a daily call from a stoned teenager who mispronounces their name.
Luckily, she is a good sport, and I think she'll love it. The thing I'm interested in is if this just gets annoying or not. (If yes, I'll just cancel the service)
I love the constant stream of positive affirmations.