Interesting way to motivate yourself

The New Year is typically a time of creating goals. We step back to review the process of the last year and then look for ways to do better. But it takes efforts, sometimes supreme effort, to change habits and get out of a rut. The result is very few resolutions made in January last till July.

How to Stick to New Year's Resolutions reports on a new way to provide additional motivation:

----------
Ian Ayres, a behavioral economist at Yale, developed a website called StickK.com, on which users set a specific goal and then pledge a sum of money to forfeit should they fail to achieve it. Unlike other sites that track weight loss and fitness goals and offer support via social networking, StickK leverages another discovery from behavioral economics: our extreme dislike of losing money.
----------

This year "more than 50,000 users who have put about $5 million at risk."

What a cool idea.