Stickk to your promises

Already struggling with your New Year’s Resolutions? Stickk.com is a new website that helps you achieve your personal goals by making a contractual commitment with your family, friends or colleagues at work.

On Stickk.com, you draw up an official commitment contract that binds you to achieving a personal goal, be it big or small. By agreeing to this contract, you publicly state your goal and commit to achieving it – and so stake your reputation on success.

To make you accountable as you work towards your goal, you file weekly reports on your progress. You are also asked to appoint someone you know as a “referee” to verify the accuracy of your reporting, and you also enlist as many supporters as you like to encourage you. And if you want to up the ante, you can even gamble on your success. If you accomplish your goal, you get your money back. If you don’t, your money goes to charity or to someone you’ve designated in advance.

To make things really interesting, Stikk encourages you to make some fascinating wagers. Yes, you can choose to give your money to a charity selected by Stikk – but you can also choose an anti-charity gift, selecting a cause that you DONT believe in. For example if you believe in gun control, your losing bet would go to the National Rifle Association Foundation. The less you believe in the cause, the harder you will want to work to ensure that the organization does NOT get the money.

“We are trying to motivate people to accomplish personal goals by having users literally put something on the line,” writes Dean Karlan, co-founder of Stikk and Professor of Economics at Yale. “We’re not simply a motivational site. We’re actually giving them the necessary tools for success.”