Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

by Roy F. Baumeister

Hanging out with sharks, holding his breath for seventeen minutes, freezing for sixty-three hours and ending up in purgatory—all that he could handle, but the mundane daily stuff could still frustrate him. His ordeal in the ice set a world endurance record, but the feat didn’t make it into the Guinness book because he never got around to filling out the paperwork. He had the papers, but he kept procrastinating. He had fasted for forty-four days in London, but nowadays he didn’t have the willpower to avoid the food in his refrigerator. One reason, of course, was the ready availability. “I don’t think I could have succeeded on a forty-four-day-straight fast if I was in this apartment,” he said. “At the box in London, there was no way for me to be tempted because I was in that space. Which was part of my reason to make it public, because I knew that I would have to do it.” But even if he couldn’t do a seven-week fast at home, why couldn’t he simply cut back a little on the daily meals? Why did keeping up a modicum of discipline—in eating and reading and working efficiently—seem so difficult at the moment? Because he didn’t have the motivation. He had nothing to prove to the public or to himself. He and everyone else knew that he could control himself when he wanted to, and nobody was going to fault him for giving himself a break between stunts. For all his amazing willpower, he faced the same problem as the rest of us when dealing with the biggest self-control challenge of al...