I took a super fast shower at my friends Jeff and Anne Sharnhorst’s house in Wailuku, Maui. Why? I had a coach. A shower coach.
The Shower Coach is a waterproof five-minute hourglass stuck to the shower wall. Rotate it and the sand starts to flow. The implicit message is, “Get your business done before the sand runs out.”
It got me going. I turned the glass and bolted off the starting line. Lather, rinse, and repeat went faster than ever. I was gonna beat that sand.
The Shower Coach works. Why? It follows the basic ideas behind every good game:
A challenging goal.
The Shower Coach throws down a challenge with a five-minute timer. It wouldn’t be much fun if the hourglass was thirty minutes instead of five. Thirty minutes isn’t a challenge. But five minutes is. Contrary to popular belief, people want to tackle challenges. Within reason, of course. Too much and we wouldn’t do it. If the Shower Coach was a one-minute timer, we wouldn’t play the game. A good challenge hits the sweet spot where it’s not so easy we’re bored, but not so hard we can’t reach it.
Rules of action.
Every good game has clear rules of action. And we know the rules of showering. Must wash hair and whole body. Can’t just jump in, rinse off, and jump out. That would be violating the rules. When goals are compelling and rules are clear, we know how to act. We know how to play the game.
Fast feedback.
As the sand flows, we measure progress. We get direct feedback for how we’re doing because we know where we are in our shower routine, and we know how much sand is still in the glass. We can quick-measure our progress the whole way, and see how we did. We can see ourselves progressing. Quick feedback motivates us.
Human nature is goal-driven, whether we realize it or not. Deep in our DNA there’s a need to create targets, go after them, and see how we’re doing.
