Did you hear? Biz Stone, co-founder of TWITTER, has released Jelly, “a mobile app that enables users to ask short questions of their social network through pictures.” (TechCrunch) It makes sense, I guess. There are startups like this popping everywhere based on the Visual Revolution.

Turns out there’s more to Jelly that meets the eye. Stone explains:

“Using Jelly to help people is as much more important than using Jelly to search for help. If we’re successful, then we’re going to introduce into the daily muscle memory of smartphone users, everyone, that there’s this idea that there’s other people that need their help right now. “Let’s make the world a more empathetic place by teaching that there’s other people around them that need help.”

I didn’t see that coming! Did you?

Who knew a simple questions-and-answers app could have such an ambitious goal: to better humankind.

Jelly aims to benefit the person answering more than the one asking.

In his article, Ferenstein says that this counterintuitive proposition is Jelly’s selling point. After all, you’d expect to use such a technical tool to ask quick questions about your daily challenges, but not any more than that. It’s refreshing to see that there’s a grand scheme behind an app.

I’d have to argue, though, that habituating empathy is just a part of the big picture. Empathy aside, Jelly could be quite beneficial for another sore area: motivation. (I blame productivity training for this one.)

I actually got the aha-moment when I skimmed this:

Jelly is explicitly discouraging discussions or any long-form back-and-forth. Just quick answers, a shot of personal dopamine, and off to the rest of the day.

As soon as I read “dopamine shot”, the first thing I did was to tweet to @TechCrunch and @ferenstein that “daily shots of dopamine” should be Jelly’s new tagline (I admit, a rather informal pitch, which should have been directed at @biz himself, oh well). The second thing was to dig out my recent research on how to sustain motivation. I’ll explain briefly.

Why can’t we sustain motivation for long periods of time?

Simple. Because of physiology.

Your body has this very neat but tricky “reward system”, which only activates when you accomplish something. The mind releases a healthy dose of dopamine, the hormone that makes you happy and full of energy.

You can do anything: paint the sky, conquer the world, build an app.

Unfortunately, this effect can wear off quickly, so you need to bathe in dopamine as often as you can. What happens is: when a goal is taking too long, there are no immediate results, and thus no reward.

This is why New Year’s Resolutions fail, why a lot of projects launch and quickly flop. Why it’s hard to keep relationship, jobs, and realize dreams.

But there is hope! Sustaining motivation can be achieved by doing simple things.

Some achieve it by celebrating small feats, which usually get lost between to-do lists and conference meetings. There’s too much to be done (24 hours is not enough) and no time for retrospection or symbollic celebrations. But somehow, the most successful people have managed to habituate it.

Once a habit settles in, it’s there for the long run.

In Positive Psychology, there’s a great exercise called “3 good things”. At night, you look back and think of three good things that happened during the day. It’s been found to increase people’s well-being after habitual practice as it helps focus the brain on the good stuff and appreciate them. It’s kind of like celebrating your day, so let’s say it has the same effect.

Small feats, good things… but these are just the tip of the iceberg!

It’s a fact that some things are notoriously more satisfying than others, like say, helping others.

Now imagine you’ve helped THREE PEOPLE that day. And you help three more people every day until you’ve built the habit of helping. This not only cultivates empathy but will also keep you happy in a long-term way.

Now let’s ask the obvious : what about the other social tools designed for helping people? Quora is great with questions and answers but it’s long-form. It takes so much time to write and read an answer AND most of the credit goes to the answer-giver because they’re trying to be “thought leaders”.

There are all kinds of other apps that aim to better human life by giving advice and recommendations, but fail to get as far as helping. It seems to me that most of them accommodate more self-promotion and brand-building than actual helping. Perhaps the short nature of the answers (twitter anyone?) and the wide popularity of Jelly (already) can make a difference.

Helping selflessly not only makes you happy, but also lasts longer.

That’s because you’ve improved another person’s day and that’s a HUGE accomplishment. If you do this every day, you will probably cultivate kick-ass resistance to everything: disappointment, delay, even dry-spells.

Now, I’m not saying that motivation trumps empathy, quite the opposite. But you have to agree that if “one stone kills two birds” and one of those birds is a huge challenge facing almost every human being on the planet, that alone should make any product irresistibly appealing to its users.

So yes, quite the interesting project, that Jelly app. I have to say it’s nice to think that helping others and helping yourself can both be achieved through a simple, everyday tool on my phone. We’ll soon find out.