A psychological experiment

What is it all about

For a long time I tought that fear was a good motivator. Recently, this thesis of mine failed me big time. Fear helped me to study to exams I didn't want to study for. Fear made me finish projects quickly, but this is the first time I failed an exam because I feared so much I couldn't study.

Miserymaxxing

I had a new idea which I am currently validating and testing. I call it miserymaxxing. Let me explain it:
Let X be a criteria which when met, will give you some positive outcome, but when failed can leave you in misery or sadness. (For example exams, negotiations) A lot of people will get punished either internally, by negative toughts ("If I fail this interview I will get nowhere.") or externally (For example parents will take away your phone if you don't get an A in an exam) which leads to excess misery when you fail this X criteria. This is the motivation by fear whereby you are scared of failing. There are scenarios where methods like this can work but using fear as a motivator is not feasible in the long run because at some point you will start experiencing failure and there goes your motivation. Failure gives you relief, somewhat. Once you fail big time, fear will not help you much anymore. Miserymaxxing, which is my experimental method follows like this:
You make promises which harm you but the promises only should be kept if you succeed in the X criteria. It is important to not make worst promises than the outcome of failure, take this more like a bet: You bet on your own success. If failure is more likely you make promises which will result in larger misery. Now, you may ask, why the heck would something like this help? The answer is simple: Overall you feel lesser misery because if you fail, you will think: "Well at least I don't need to keep my bad promises..." but on the other hand if you succeed, because the promises were still under the terms of outcome via failure in terms of misery, you will still be up overall. This method may suck but I am trying this as my main motivation source for now. It is important to keep the promises even when you know that they don't bring you any good because it will help to condition your brain to see the good things in your life.