Transcription
At this point, I've seen tons of videos just completely trashing willpower, but I don't think that's fair. I think willpower serves an incredible place, and if you really understand it, you understand the truth about willpower. It's a great tool to help you reach your potential. So, in the next couple of minutes, you're going to learn the truth about willpower: when to use it, how to use it, and even how the Spartans used it in a really weird way. Finally, we'll finish up with the pitfalls of using willpower.
You see, everybody loves to refer to the study that was done by Baumeister. Two groups of people are put in a room; there are radishes and cookies in the room. One group is told to resist the cookies and only eat the radishes, while the other group is allowed to eat the cookies and the radishes if they want to. Then, those two groups are asked to solve an impossible puzzle, and a timer is started to see how long it takes for those people to give up on the impossible puzzle. The people that had to resist the cookies often give up around 50% quicker than the people that were able to give in to the cookies.
So, the conclusion is that by resisting the cookies, you decrease willpower, which means you don't have the willpower to apply to the puzzle. But this has one major flaw that even scientists aren't able to pick up on. This study ignores things that people care about. Imagine you've gone through the whole day; you've used all of your willpower on multiple different things. You've been to the gym, you've resisted the cookies at work, and you get home thinking, "All of my willpower is depleted throughout the day." But then you see a baby outside that's cold without anybody around them. Although it takes effort and willpower for you to leave the house and go and save the baby, you're going to do it because you care about saving the baby.
A perfect example is when you wake up in the morning, wake up early, go to the gym, and have a healthy breakfast. The scientists say that this is going to require willpower, so you're going to have less willpower throughout the rest of the day. But personal experience says the complete opposite. If you wake up early and go to the gym, although you've used willpower to do those things, the momentum you build up is far stronger than the willpower depleted. So, although your willpower is being depleted, you're actually able to do far more better things throughout the rest of the day. So, who cares if your willpower has been depleted if you've got the momentum to have a great day?
The perfect example of this was the Spartans. The Spartans' training was absolutely brutal. They would work so hard and grind so much that going away to war was seen as a holiday. Their training was absolutely brutal, but they cared about it, so they didn't always have to rely on that grinding willpower to get stuff done. There were people around them, there was peer pressure, it was their identity, and they cared deeply about it, so they just got it done, and momentum was built rapidly every single day.
Another interesting point about the Spartans was that because they cared so intensely about war, fighting, and training, they outsourced absolutely everything else. They had people do everything that wasn't training. They had people do their taxes, shine their armor, sharpen their swords, grow their food, and help them around the house—everything they could to get rid of distractions so they could focus on what was important to them. They knew that if they did all of those other things, their willpower would be depleted, and they wouldn't have as much of it for what they cared about. So, not only were they building momentum, but they were also outsourcing things so they could focus on what mattered to them.
Use willpower on things that allow you to build momentum, and once the momentum is built, you won't require the need for willpower. This reflects newer research that was done by Baumeister, which figured out that people who don't use their willpower actually have more of it. The people who have engineered their environment and life and momentum in a way that they don't need to use willpower actually have more of it than the people who are constantly required to use willpower. It's a little bit like moving a boulder in physics. You have inertia, and you should use willpower to get the boulder moving, and then you should push it down a hill where the boulder rolls by itself and builds momentum. Whenever the boulder slows down, you should go and give it another push as well, using willpower only when it's necessary.
You can also use it like a racing game where you've got a nitrous button that you press, and that boosts you into moving forward and taking action, but only when it's required. If you don't do this, then you become Sisyphus, always pushing a boulder up a hill, struggling, straining, pushing, and heaving to move the boulder up the hill but never making any real progress.
When it comes to the topic of how to use willpower, there's actually a lot more to this story than you'd think. When it comes to using your willpower properly in a way that allows you to live a rich and incredible life, there are five steps that you must follow. We're going to talk about them and then discuss the biggest pitfalls of using willpower, which, if you're not careful about, can actually ruin the five steps completely.
The first step, which is boring but I have to talk about because it's so important, is good sleep and good food. If you're not sleeping well and you're not eating well, willpower is not going to be something that you have in abundance. The second thing is to be careful about what you use your willpower on. Don't use your willpower for the sake of using it to try and strengthen it. I've done things like that, and while they're okay, it's not as beneficial as finding something that's synergistic—something that gives you a whole lot of benefit, improves your life, but also requires willpower. That's the best of both worlds. A perfect example is something like a cold shower. While it requires a lot of willpower to do, there are many health benefits and many mental benefits of doing those things as well.
The third point is to front-load your decision-making. Instead of using your willpower multiple times every single day when a certain circumstance comes up, predetermine how you're going to act in that circumstance, and then you're just going to be acting out of habit or identity instead of requiring willpower. For example, if somebody offers you heroin, for most people, your default response is no because you've made the decision that never in your life are you going to try heroin. Therefore, you don't need willpower to make that decision; it's just a hard no.
This leads us on to the fourth point, which is that zero is easier than one. It's easier to do nothing of something than one of something. It's easier to have no cookies than it is to have one cookie every now and again because you've got a hard rule. It removes the decision of "Should I have the cookie?" because you already know the answer. So, zero is easier than one.
Number five is environment. Engineer your environment in a way that you don't have to use your willpower at all. Make good things easier and make bad things more difficult. Make it easier for you to work by having the desk near you, and make bad things harder to do by not buying ice cream. If you follow these five steps, you're going to be well on your way to actually using willpower in a way that benefits you instead of just something that makes you drained.
But there are a couple of pitfalls that you have to be careful not to fall into if you don't want all of that to be completely useless. The first pitfall comes from a study done by Duke University, where they found that whenever you use willpower to do a task, your IQ actually drops by around 10 points. Whenever you force yourself to do something, force yourself to work, or force yourself to study, less information is retained, and you're less good at studying because by focusing on willpower and by focusing on doing that thing, focus is brought away from the task itself, and therefore you're less good at the task.
This is especially true with kids with ADHD. If they're fiddling around and jumping around, by telling them to stop fiddling and stop jumping around, all of their mental energy has to go to stop fiddling, and they can't focus on the task at hand. So, what you want to do is try your best—and I know this is difficult—but try your best to engineer your life in a way where the things you're doing on a day-to-day basis are things that you enjoy, things that don't require willpower, and things that you do whether you get paid or not. Those things require no willpower, so you're able to focus fully and really get the best out of that situation, as well as the benefit of just doing things that you enjoy.
The perfect example: whenever we think of exercise nowadays, we think about going to the gym and lifting weights. But if you don't enjoy that, instead of forcing yourself to do that, just join a sport. Start playing football, start playing lacrosse—do something you enjoy. That way, you're going to do it for longer, and you're also going to be able to do it far more consistently.
The second pitfall is that you can end up using willpower as an excuse. As I've read books about willpower, I've often had to catch myself using the excuse of, "Oh, I didn't sleep well last night. I've done a lot of decision-making today; therefore, my willpower is down, and I can't do the thing that I know I should be doing." Don't use willpower as an excuse. In reality, willpower starts in your mind, and there are quotes that say you have as much willpower as you think you have. So, by thinking that your willpower is run out, then it has. But by thinking that willpower is something you can be re-energized and that you can control, you can end up doing far more things that are beneficial for you and living a great life.
So, to summarize, it's about inertia. It's about using your willpower on things that help you build momentum. The perfect example of that is optimizing your environment. One screen right now is a full playlist that's going to allow you to optimize your environment so that you can make consistent progress day in and day out without necessarily having to rely on willpower. Go ahead and click that video now, and if you've enjoyed the video, make sure you click the like button. I'll see you in the next video.