Generally speaking there are 3 necessary components you need to achieve your goals.
1. Motivation to set up an achievable goal.
2. A system that can be tracked and measured.
3. WillpowerWillpower is often cited as the number 1 reason people just can’t seem to move up their asses. 27% of Americans feel their lack of willpower has the hardest wall they need to break through.
In this article you’ll take a look at what willpower actually is, how to train it and how you use it to your advantage. Welcome to Alux. If you don’t feel like reading the article here’s the video version:
You might have a hard time defining willpower. For most, it’s a mysterious force that helps you face adversity or make people feel bad they messed with the dog. Will power simply is your resistant ability or you can say short term temptation.
And since distractions and temptations follow you around on every corner, willpower may very well be the super power you need to turn your life around.
There’s a famous marshmallow test made by Walter Mischel in the 60’s. He left kids alone in a room with a single marshmallow and told them they could eat it right away, or wait for him to get back, in which case they would get to eat 2 marshmallows.
The results were mixed, some kids ate the marshmallow right away, while others waited.
It was proved that the kids who exerted self control turned out into more disciplined and successful adults, who actually earned more money overall.
There was also a follow up study who followed kids from age 0 to 32 which proved the same theory. Self control sits at the foundation of how well you perform in life. Willpower also dictates your ability to override impulses.
Like your impulse to go for another cookie after you already had 5. Or your impulse to pour yourself another drink when you’re way beyond tipsy. Or your impulse to “call it a day” at like 2 pm because you had 1 meeting and sent two emails and that’s a lot of work already.
These studies, along with well, common sense, prove that willpower is a key ingredient in getting shit done. So this begs the questions:
Why do so many people lack willpower?
If will power is such an important factor for your success in life, why are you struggling to harness it?
There are mainly 2 reasons for this:
1. You haven’t trained your willpower muscles.
2. The little willpower that you have is depleted on trivial decisions.
Let’s take them one by one. Will power is different from motivation in some aspects of life.Motivation is more of a state of mind. You either find it or you don’t. You can’t really “train” for it.
Willpower on the other hand is a full body experience. It’s pretty similar to being stressed out, in that sense. When you’re stressed, it’s not just your mind that’s hurting, it’s your whole body as well.
You start sweating, your heart is beating faster, you’re pacing constantly left and right. You feel your body in stress.It’s the same with willpower. When you fight the urge to order pizza at 1 am, you actually feel a tension in your body, like you’re physically fighting the temptation.
That’s your willpower muscle flexing itself. And just like any other muscle, it can be trained to get stronger by exposure to resistance. You can actually become a willpower athlete. Full disclosure, we didn’t come up with this term, we read it in a medicine paper from Stanford.
In the same paper, it’s stated that your willpower muscle can be trained in 2 major ways:
1. Actual physical exercise.
2. Meditation.
Both of these activities change the structure of your brain to make it more resistant to stress and more powerful in its ability to self control. Whenever you feel temptations, think of it like resistance training for your willpower muscle.
It’s an opportunity to train it, or let the weight fall on your head.
When you find yourself wanting to procrastinate, imagine you are in the mental gym. You have a willpower rack in front of you and procrastination as weights.
Will you take the opportunity to train or not?
Meditation has so many benefits it’s astonishing how little people are doing it.
Just as muscle, will power can get depleted.
Willpower depletion:
The second reason that is mentioned is willpower depletion. There’s a study where a group of people were exposed to the smell of fresh baked cookies. Some were able to eat the cookies, while others had to eat radishes. A test was given to both groups and what do you know, the group that ate radishes quit 12 minutes in. That’s because so much of their willpower was depleted from eating radishes instead of cookies that finish the test was just too much.
It turns out, your willpower energy can get depleted pretty fast. You have to make decisions and resist temptation every single day of the week. From what breakfast you eat, to what to wear and what to do.
One of the reasons so many high performing individuals have such basic routines and habits is to avoid willpower depletion. If you have 10 copies of the same outfit every morning, your decision of what to wear is pretty simple.
Overlapping goals
Another way to avoid willpower depletion is to have overlapping goals. If you make a goal for yourself to have a short run every morning, and another goal not to wake up so late every day, then you hit two birds with one stone.
If you want to be healthier and learn how to cook, one decision takes care of the other. So many people waste willpower energy by expecting too much of themselves in a really short time.
They also make incompatible goals. If let’s say you want to hang out more with your close friends, and also cut down on alcohol you’ll be faced with unnecessary decisions every time you go out.
Now obviously it is not mandatory for you to pick one or the other, but there is a smarter way to go about it. In conclusion.
if you want to develop and harness your full willpower do the following:
1. Willpower is a whole body experience so it’s affected by nutrition, exercise and sleep. Don’t neglect them.
2. Train your willpower muscle through exercise and meditation.
3. Take opportunities to resist temptations to further strengthen your willpower muscle.
4. Don’t overdo it. Too many back to back decisions will deplete your willpower energy.
And speaking of decisions, a couple of weeks ago we published a video about some of the most important decisions you can make that have immense impact in your life.
These are one time decisions. You only have to make them once and you’re done.
You can check the video out in the top corner or in the link down below.
There is a bonus for the true Aluxers.
Bonus: Willpower and poverty.
For the true Aluxers who always read until the end, you get a bonus piece of knowledge.
There is a strong correlation between lack of will power and poor financial decisions. It’s proven that once your willpower energy is depleted, your decision making skills suffer.
When a rich person goes car shopping, their concern may be what car looks the coolest, or what engine sounds the meanest. They don’t spend that much willpower. But when a poor person goes car shopping, they undergo multiple difficult financial decisions.
What car is the cheapest, what car has the best mileage, what car is less likely to break and cheap to repair, and so on. The whole process drains away all their willpower reserves. Similarly, When poor people must face tough financial decisions on a daily basis, their financial decision making skills suffer exponentially.
This means that the more difficult decisions they have to make, the more they make the bad ones. There’s a study in the Philippines where bank customers were given the option to open a special savings account.
The catch was that they couldn’t withdraw any money until they reached a certain target. Those who opened the savings account saved 82% more money than those who didn’t. That’s because they didn’t have to make the decision of what to do with the money since they couldn’t withdraw it.
The lesson is this: Try to automate as many difficult and important decisions as you can, to preserve your willpower energies. Think about it like this: if you buy a one year gym membership, you make one decision instead of 12.
We’ll see you tomorrow Aluxers!
