Let me get this straight.
You've hired a Zen master so that your team can encourage people to meditate in order not to lose the money they've gambled? You seriously think you can inspire true meditation in someone by making them worry about the money they'll lose if they don't "meditate?" What's wrong with you? More importantly, what's wrong with the obviously fraudulent Zen master that's helping you do this?<p>First of all, meditation shouldn't have anything to do with a financial worry/financial incentive. This is one of the most dishonest things I've seen on HN. It's a cheap way to make money off the unsuspecting, naive crowd that's never had the patience or discipline to try meditation and has money to waste. Your website isn't even technically innovative; it makes money by encouraging people to give you their money, and you get to keep it if they don't achieve deeply personal goals that involve <i>detachment, peace and personal discovery</i>. How are you helping? How is taking money hostage contributing to the spirit of true meditation?<p>If you want to make money, go beyond an HTML page that laughs in the face of meditation and make something actually useful, like a real product.<p>I'm saying this as someone who did specialized research in Zen buddhism in an academic environment for one year.
You have a typo in your subline: "Pledge money and vow to mediate for 30 days straight."<p>I am assuming mediate should be meditate, unless you really want my help in a peace process (not wise).
You're getting a pretty hostile response!<p>People are free to spend their money on whatever they want. I'd prefer them to spend money on meditation than on, for example, telephone psychics or homeopathy.<p>Motivation is a tricky, unsolved, problem. It's really important too - people need motivation to stop smoking, to eat better, to exercise more. These all have serious public health impacts. So I welcome anyone working on this problem. I hope you're keeping detailed stats.<p>Good Luck!
Awesome! Love the idea, and would love to partner up and make a deal to get people excited and started meditating. I released Buddha Mind (<a href="http://buddhamindapp.com" rel="nofollow">http://buddhamindapp.com</a>) yesterday, an app which incorporates a heart rate monitor to measure changes in your heart rate variance.<p>Shoot me an email at my username at gmail dot com, and let's see if we can't get more people excited about meditating and learning to control their mind.
First off, I think it's a cool idea. Now, I certainly don't expect this is the case here, but the cynic in me notes that in a set up like this, there is actually a financial incentive for the 'service provider' here to provide such a bad product that they actually turn customers away.<p>The better the service provided, the more likely customers are to stick with the program, and the less money they make.
I read about someone pledged to give money to the KKK if she ever smoked again. The negative association was motivational. The strength of the feeling was stronger than the urge to break the habit.
Uh, this is really stupid. You can do this exact same thing for any activity for free with joesgoals.com or any of the tens of other freely available "don't break the chain" web apps.<p>Here are some more:<p><a href="http://www.openforum.com/articles/17-best-tools-and-apps-for-building-new-habits-and-goals/" rel="nofollow">http://www.openforum.com/articles/17-best-tools-and-apps-for...</a>