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People often want to improve themselves. But whether it's quitting smoking or losing weight, self-improvement is difficult. The idea for this Article came from a very real practice of its authors to make selfimprovement a little bit easier.

Over the course of our friendship, each of us has had personal goals related to our growth as individuals. As a way of incentivizing this development and completing these goals, we would participate in what we called" personal growth bets" with each other. These bets can, and have, dealt with any number of goals, but the canonical example is weight loss. For example, a rough outline of such a bet would be: if Max does not lose 10 pounds over the next six months, he must pay Jack $1,000. Whereas, if he does lose the weight, Jack must buy Max a steak dinner. A vast amount of psychological research, as well as simple intuition, supports the conclusion that incentives matter. If someone …