Motivating Passwords

Passwords are annoying. That’s why we have password managers. However, to access your password manager you still need a password. This password in turn should be strong. It should be at least 12 characters long, include uppercase, lowercase letters, numbers, and at least one special symbol¹.

On top of that, you must occasionally enter that password, so you have to retrieve it from your memory. Writing it on paper isn’t a good idea. You then don’t have to memorize it, but it’s insecure (could be stolen) as well as inconvenient (you have to get up and grab that paper every time).

Instead, we can create a well-memorizable password from a sentence. For example: I forgot 9 passwords this year, so I wrote 1 sentence about it! Taking the first letter of each word and keeping the numbers and punctuation gives us the password: If9pty,sIw1sai!

That’s 15 characters combining uppercase letters, lowercase letters, digits, and special characters. It’s easy to remember and relatively hard to crack. And the cool thing is, there’s one thing we can add to this password to not only make it more memorizable, but also motivating.

How to create a motivating password

Maybe you have a goal that you’re trying to achieve. Maybe it’s to lose some weight. So you could come up with a sentence like: I want to lose 3 kilograms until the end of 2026. That gives you the password: Iwtl3kuteote2026. Same as before, it contains lowercase, uppercase letters as well as digits and special characters.

Now every time you unlock your password manager, you not only retrieve your password from memory, you also retrieve your goal. You’re reminding yourself of it. I think that’s even stronger than writing it on a post-it (I assume a lot of us use these to remind us of something), because after some time you just ignore the post-it and it doesn’t activate the goal anymore. You don’t retrieve it from memory. With the password, you keep retrieving it, so the goal stays active.

And once you’ve reached your goal, you come up with a new sentence. New goal, new password. However, please don’t use the sentences from this article. They’re published now, so they’ll end up on password lists. Come up with your own. That’s the point anyway.