Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

by Roy F. Baumeister

When psychologists isolate the personal qualities that predict “positive outcomes” in life, they consistently find two traits: intelligence and self-control.

Self-control is a vital strength and key to success in life.

He saw why marriages were going bad just when stress at work was at its worst: People were using up all their willpower on the job.

Ego depletion thus creates a double whammy: Your willpower is diminished and your cravings feel stronger than ever.

What stress really does, though, is deplete willpower, which diminishes your ability to control those emotions.

You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.

You use the same stock of willpower for all manner of tasks.

We can divide the uses of willpower into four broad categories,

starting with the control of thoughts.

Another broad category is the control of emotions,

Emotional control is uniquely difficult because you generally can’t alter your mood by an act of will.

A third category is often called impulse control,

Finally, there’s the category that researchers call performance control: focusing your energy on the task at hand, finding the right combination of speed and accuracy, managing time, persevering when you feel like quitting.

Focus on one project at a time. If you set more than one self-improvement goal, you may succeed for a while by drawing on reserves to power through, but that just leaves you more depleted and more prone to serious mistakes later.

No glucose, no willpower: The pattern showed up time and again as researchers tested more people in more situations.

Sleep deprivation has been shown to impair the processing of glucose, which produces immediate consequences for self-control—and, over the long term, a higher risk of diabetes.

The first step in self-control is to set a clear goal.

four Ds of his system, everything that has not been done, delegated, or dropped has been deferred to a half dozen two-drawer file cabinets,

Zeigarnik effect: Uncompleted tasks and unmet goals tend to pop into one’s mind. Once the task is completed and the goal reached, however, this stream of reminders comes to a stop.

the unconscious is asking the conscious mind to make a plan. The unconscious mind apparently can’t do this on its own, so it nags the conscious mind to make a plan with specifics like time, place, and opportunity. Once the plan is formed, the unconscious can stop nagging the conscious mind with reminders.

When asked whether making decisions would deplete their willpower and make them vulnerable to temptation, most people say no. They don’t realize that decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at their colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket, and can’t resist the car dealer’s offer to rustproof their new sedan.

What kinds of decisions deplete the most willpower? Which choices are the hardest?

The link between willpower and decision making works both ways: Decision making depletes your willpower, and once your willpower is depleted, you’re less able to make decisions.

“Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss,” Ariely says. Sometimes that makes sense, but too often we’re so eager to keep options open that we don’t see the long-term price that we’re paying—or

Should you focus on how far you’ve come or how much remains to be done? There’s no simple, universal answer, but it does make a difference, as demonstrated in experiments by Ayelet Fishbach of the University of Chicago. She and a Korean colleague, Minjung Koo, asked employees at a Korean advertising agency to describe their current role at the agency and their current projects. Then, by random assignment, half were told to reflect on what they had achieved thus far in their current role, dating back to when they had joined the agency. The rest were instructed to reflect on what they planned to achieve but had not yet accomplished. The ones who wrote about what they had already achieved had higher satisfaction with their current tasks and projects, as compared with the ones who reflected on what they had not yet achieved. But the latter were more motivated to reach their goals and then move on to more challenging new projects. Those who focused on what they had already done did not seem eager to move on to more difficult and challenging tasks. They were reasonably content with where they were and what they were currently doing. For contentment, apparently, it pays to look at how far you’ve come. To stoke motivation and ambition, focus instead on the road ahead.

Exercising self-control in one area seemed to improve all areas of life.

greatest benefits of their self-control showed up in school and in the workplace, confirming other evidence that successful students and workers tend to rely on good habits.

The clear implication was that the best advice for young writers and aspiring professors is: Write every day. Use your self-control to form a daily habit, and you’ll produce more with less effort in the long run.

principle of self-control: Focus on lofty thoughts.

“Why” questions push the mind up to higher levels of thinking and a focus on the future. “How” questions bring the mind down to low levels of thinking and a focus on the present.

self-control improved among people who were encouraged to think in high-level terms, and got worse among those who thought in low-level terms.

After engaging in high-level thinking, people were more likely to pass up a quick reward for something better in the future.

The results showed that a narrow, concrete, here-and-now focus works against self-control, whereas a broad, abstr...

Ainslie found that as we approach a short-term temptation, our tendency to discount the future follows the steep curve of a hyperbola, which is why this tendency is called hyperbolic discounting.

across the country, students’ self-esteem went up while their performance declined.

high self-esteem generally does not make people more effective or easier to get along with.

People with high self-esteem think they’re more popular, charming, and socially skilled than other people, but objective studies find no difference.

two clearly demonstrated benefits of high self-esteem,

First, it increases initiative, probably because it lends confidence. People with high self-esteem are more willing to act on their beliefs, to stand up for what they believe in, to approach others, to risk new undertakings.

Second, it feels good.

benefits of high self-esteem accrue to the self while its costs are borne by others, who must deal with side effects like arrogance and conceit.

At worst, self-esteem becomes narcissism, the self-absorbed conviction of personal superiority.

narcissism has increased sharply in recent decades, especially among young Americans.

when the going gets tough, people with high self-esteem often decide they shouldn’t bother. If other people can’t appreciate how terrific they are, then it’s the other people’s problem.

I loved that feeling of accomplishment. That’s where your self-esteem comes from, not from being told you’re the greatest.”

Psychological Science’s review panel: Forget about self-esteem. Work on self-control.

Researchers have found that severity seems to matter remarkably little and can even be counterproductive: Instead of encouraging virtue, harsh punishments teach the child that life is cruel and that aggression is appropriate.

Consistent discipline tends to produce well-behaved children.

It’s easy for a parent to say, ‘Go and clean up your room,” but that doesn’t tell the child anything. You may as well tell them to stare at the wall. You need the discipline to go in there with them and model exactly what to do—show them how to fold a piece of clothing and put it in the closet or the right drawer.”

rules are helpful only if children know them and understand them,