I’ve always been a competitive person. When there’s something I need to do, but I can’t find the motivation to get it done, I will often “gamify” it. It’s a cheap trick to play on myself, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t work.
That was my idea behind launching a Google Reviews challenge in our mastermind group in September.
Reviews are one of those things that we all want more of, but rarely get prioritized. They’re important, but almost never urgent. So in the whirlwind of running an agency, there’s always a bigger fire raging.
We had 11 members participate, and I honestly didn’t know what to expect. Maybe they’d collect 50 reviews? But no, we cruised past 100 (129 as I write this with a few hours left on the clock). Several folks doubled their number of reviews. One member grew his by 1,600%. Most people collected more reviews during the month than they collected in the previous year.
But as I talked to everyone during our weekly meetings, I was surprised to find out that unlike me, even people at the top of the leaderboard said they’re not competitive and didn’t care about beating other members or winning the prize.
So what was it?
An experiment by Ellen Langer actually provides some pretty insightful human psychology. She ran an experiment where she had 3 groups of people ask to cut in line at the copy machine.
Just asking (“Excuse me, I have 5 pages. May I use the Xerox machine?”) worked 60% of the time.
Adding an excuse (“…because I’m in a rush?”) pushed it to 94%.
But even a bad excuse (“…because I have to make copies?”) still worked 93% of the time.
“Because I have to make copies” is by no means a good excuse. Everyone needed to make copies. But this study showed you don’t need a good excuse, you just need an excuse.
And I think that’s exactly what our review challenge demonstrated. In fact, some members even told their customers they were asking for a review “because they were participating in a challenge”. Clients who failed to give a review before suddenly decided to do it. They too only need an excuse.
“Ask for reviews” might sit on the to-do list for months. But “Ask for reviews because I’m participating in a no-stakes, made-up challenge that I don’t even care about winning” somehow provided enough spark to get everyone moving.
Whatever we’re putting off, maybe we don’t need more information or more time… Maybe we just need an excuse — any excuse — to get started.
