Willpower Quotes

“What stress really does, though, is deplete willpower, which diminishes your ability to control those emotions.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“For most of us, though, the problem is not a lack of goals but rather too many of them.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“The best way to reduce stress in your life is to stop screwing up.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“Among university professors, for example, getting tenure is a major hurdle and milestone, and at most universities tenure depends heavily on having published some high-quality, original work. One researcher, Bob Boice, looked into the writing habits of young professors just starting out and tracked them to see how they fared. Not surprisingly, in a job where there is no real boss and no one sets schedules or tells you what to do, these young professors took a variety of approaches. Some would collect information until they were ready and then write a manuscript in a burst of intense energy, over perhaps a week or two, possibly including some long days and very late nights. Others plodded along at a steadier pace, trying to write a page or two every day. Others were in between. When Boice followed up on the group some years later, he found that their paths had diverged sharply. The page-a-day folks had done well and generally gotten tenure. The so-called “binge writers” fared far less well, and many had had their careers cut short. 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.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength

“the unconscious is asking the conscious mind to make a plan.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“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.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength

“However you define success—a happy family, good friends, a satisfying career, robust health, financial security, the freedom to pursue your passions—it tends to be accompanied by a couple of qualities.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“Restraining sexual impulses takes energy, and so does creative work. If you pour energy into your art, you have less available to restrain your libido.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“lock yourself into a virtuous path.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength

“When you pick your battles, look beyond the immediate challenges and put your life in perspective. Are you where you want to be? What could be better?”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“We’ve said that willpower is humans’ greatest strength, but the best strategy is not to rely on it in all situations. Save it for emergencies. As”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“The many Asian-American success stories have forced developmental psychologists to revise their theories about proper parenting. They used to warn against the “authoritarian” style, in which parents set rigid goals and enforced strict rules without much overt concern for the child’s feelings. Parents were advised to adopt a different style, called “authoritative,” in which they still set limits but gave more autonomy and paid more attention to the child’s desires. This warmer, more nurturing style was supposed to produce well-adjusted, selfconfident children who would do better academically and socially than those from authoritarian homes. But then, as Ruth Chao and other psychologists studied Asian-American families, they noticed that many of the parents set quite strict rules and goals. These immigrants, and often their children, too, considered their style of parenting to be a form of devotion, not oppression. Chinese-American parents were determined to instill self-control by following the Confucian concepts of chiao shun, which means “to train,” and guan, which means both “to govern” and “to love.” These parents might have seemed cold and rigid by American standards, but their children were flourishing both in and out of school. The”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“That’s the result of hyperbolic discounting: We can ignore temptations when they’re not immediately available, but once they’re right in front of us we lose perspective and forget our distant goals.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“But the eventual results were too intriguing to ignore. When people were placed in front of a mirror, or told that their actions were being filmed, they consistently changed their behavior. These self-conscious people worked harder at laboratory tasks. They gave more valid answers to questionnaires (meaning that their answers jibed more closely with their actual behavior). They were more consistent in their actions, and their actions were also more consistent with their values.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“First I make a list of priorities: one, two, three, and so on. Then I cross out everything from three on down.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“Charles Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, “The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.” The”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“Dieters have a fixed target in mind for their maximum daily calories, and when they exceed it for some unexpected reason, such as being given a pair of large milkshakes in an experiment, they regard their diet as blown for the day. That day is therefore mentally classified as a failure, regardless of what else happens. Virtue cannot resume until tomorrow.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“We’ve seen parents successfully use a variant of this approach when an infant cries to be fed. Instead of immediately feeding the crying child, the mother lets the child know that the signal has been received but then waits for her or him to quiet down before offering the breast or the bottle. Again, it’s hard to ignore the cries at first, and we realize that to some parents it sounds too cruel to even try. But”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“Emotional control typically relies on various subtle tricks, such as changing how one thinks about the problem at hand, or distracting oneself. Hence,”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“Sometimes we are devils to ourselves
When we will tempt the frailty of our powers,
Presuming on their changeful potency. —Troilus, in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“At first Baumeister and his German collaborators were puzzled. Self-control is supposedly for resisting desires, so why are the people who have more self-control not using it more often? But then an explanation emerged: These people have less need to use willpower because they’re beset by fewer temptations and inner conflicts. They’re better at arranging their lives so that they avoid problem situations. This explanation jibed with the conclusion of another study, by Dutch researchers working with Baumeister, showing that people with good self-control mainly use it not for rescue in emergencies but rather to develop effective habits and routines in school and at work.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength

“The strongest evidence yet was published in 2010. In a painstaking long-term study, much larger and more thorough than anything done previously, an international team of researchers tracked one thousand children in New Zealand from birth until the age of thirty-two. Each child’s self-control was rated in a variety of ways (through observations by researchers as well as in reports of problems from parents, teachers, and the children themselves). This produced an especially reliable measure of children’s self-control, and the researchers were able to check it against an extraordinarily wide array of outcomes through adolescence and into adulthood. The children with high self-control grew up into adults who had better physical health, including lower rates of obesity, fewer sexually transmitted diseases, and even healthier teeth. (Apparently, good self-control includes brushing and flossing.) Self-control was irrelevant to adult depression, but its lack made people more prone to alcohol and drug problems. The children with poor self-control tended to wind up poorer financially. They worked in relatively low-paying jobs, had little money in the bank, and were less likely to own a home or have money set aside for retirement. They also grew up to have more children being raised in single-parent households, presumably because they had a harder time adapting to the discipline required for a long-term relationship. The children with good self-control were much more likely to wind up in a stable marriage and raise children in a two-parent home. Last, but certainly not least, the children with poor self-control were more likely to end up in prison. Among those with the lowest levels of self-control, more than 40 percent had a criminal conviction by the age of thirty-two, compared with just 12 percent of the people who had been toward the high end of the self-control distribution in their youth.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength

“When the dessert cart arrives, don't gaze longingly at forbidden treats. Vow that you will eat all of them sooner or later, but just not tonight. In the spirit of Scarlett O'Hara, tell yourself: Tomorrow is another taste.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“The result suggests that telling yourself 'I can have this later' operates in the mind a bit like having it now. It satisfies the craving to some degree—and can be even more effective at suppressing the appetite than actually eating the treat...the ones who'd postponed pleasure ate even less than the people who had earlier allowed themselves to eat the candy at will.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“The page-a-day folks had done well and generally gotten tenure. The so-called “binge writers” fared far less well, and many had had their careers cut short. 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.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“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”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“Napoleon once summarized his idea of strategic military planning: “You engage, and then you wait and see.” By making contact with the enemy and then improvising, he triumphed and made his armies the envy (and the scourge) of Europe. His”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“Getting Things Done,”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“The problem with adolescents—from the parents’ point of view—is that they have a child’s power of self-control presiding over an adult’s wants and urges.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

“Changing personal behavior to meet standards requires willpower, but willpower without self-awareness is as useless as a cannon commanded by a blind man.”
― Roy F. Baumeister, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength