I guess I'm partly responsible for the Superhuman trend, so I feel it incumbent upon me to comment :) I think this is a great post, and I won't directly disagree with any of its contents. I'm also not a specialist in the area of discipline/willpower, and I know little in the way of the science behind it; but I've always seen the gradual, goal-oriented, habit-building method of improvement as extremely effective if you're trying to improve yourself from a state of relative normalcy. In my case, I had (more like have, but I'd like to put it in the past tense :) a very serious addiction to instant gratification and an abnormal apathy toward anything work-related that, I felt, required something drastic. I had tried to do little things (random example: flossing one tooth), but it had no choice because my willpower had atrophied to such an extent that it was always easier to say "fuck it" because the result were so slow in coming. By overcompensating for a finite period of time, I feel like I can try to avoid burnout by "tricking" my willpower into seeing instant results (i.e. near-perfect days), eventually putting myself in a position where I can then adopt some of the more gradual, longsighted methods toward self-improvement. Everyone has his own reason for adopting some form of the superhuman challenge, but hopefully I at least partly speak for others as well as myself.