Willpower Doesn't Work Quotes

“Success isn’t that difficult; it merely involves taking twenty steps in a singular direction. Most people take one step in twenty directions.”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“Surround yourself with people who remind you more of your future than your past. —Dan Sullivan”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“The belief that you cannot change leads to a victim mentality. If you are determined by nature to be what you are, then there is nothing you can do about your lot in life. Conversely, the belief that you can change leads you to take responsibility for your life. You may have been born with certain constraints, but you can change those constraints, allowing yourself to improve and grow.”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“If you want a different life, you must be a different person.”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“Carol Dweck, a prominent Stanford psychologist, has found that people who believe their intelligence is fixed and unchanging have a very difficult time learning. The moment these people experience any form of difficulty or negative feedback, they mentally break and give up. Conversely, people who believe their intelligence is fluid and malleable are far more likely to grow and change. They are clay that can be transformed through experience, especially challenging and new experiences.”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“Your behavior doesn’t come from your personality. Rather, your personality is shaped by your behavior. When you act a certain way, you then judge yourself based on your actions. Hence, you can quickly alter your identity simply by altering your behavior.”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“If we do not create and control our environment, our environment creates and controls us. —Dr. Marshall Goldsmith”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“Don’t join an easy crowd; you won’t grow. Go where the expectations and the demands to perform are high. —Jim Rohn”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“Most people have an avoidance orientation toward life. They aren’t acting according to their deepest desires. Instead, they’re playing it safe. They’re calculating their moves to ensure they don’t look stupid. They’re hedging their bets, creating several backup plans in case their dreams don’t quite work out. Ironically, they end up dedicating the majority to their backup plans, and that becomes their life.”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“We are kept from our goal not by obstacles but by a clear path to a lesser goal. —Robert Brault”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“Pain, discomfort, shock, boredom, impostor syndrome, awkwardness, fear, being wrong, failing, ignorance, looking stupid: Your avoidance of these feelings is stopping you from a life greater than your wildest imagination. These are the feelings that accompany a life of success. And yet, these are the very feelings most often avoided. They are avoided because, as stated previously, most people have developed an extreme avoidance orientation toward life.”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“You need to deepen the quality and intimacy of your relationships with other people. Our culture is being shaped to isolate us more and more from each other. Addiction is becoming an epidemic. When you have deep and meaningful relationships, your chances of unhealthy addiction are far less. The following are four principles for overcoming harmful defaults in your environment.”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“Thus, it’s not free will or determinism. It’s not choice or environments. Instead, it is choice and environment. More directly, it is the choice of environment. You are responsible for shaping and choosing the environments that will ultimately shape the person you become and the destiny you have. Environmental design is your greatest responsibility. Choosing and shaping your environment is at the center of what “free will” really means, because your choice of environment and external influences will directly reflect in the person you become.”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“You shape the garden of your mind by planting specific things from your environment, such as the books you read, experiences you have, and people you surround yourself with.”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“Human beings evolved needing two key types of environments: high stress and high recovery”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“True learning is a permanent change in cognition and/or behavior. In other words, learning involves a permanent change in how you see and act in the world. The accumulation of information isn’t learning. Lots of people have heads full of information they don’t know what to do with. If you want to learn something quickly, you need to immerse yourself in that thing and immediately implement what you’re learning. The fastest way to learn Spanish, for instance, is by immersing yourself in a Spanish culture. Flash cards for fifteen minutes a day will eventually get you there. But you’ll make deeper connections with a few days fully immersed than you would in months of “dabbling.”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“You thrive on it. You intentionally create situations to jack-up the pressure even higher, challenging you to prove what you’re capable of. —Tim Grover”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“Momentary pleasure and true happiness are two very different experiences. As scientist and spiritual leader James Talmage wrote, “Happiness leaves no bad after-taste, it is followed by no depressing reaction; it brings no regret, entails no remorse. True happiness is lived over and over again in memory, always with a renewal of the original good; a moment of pleasure may leave a barbed sting, [as] an ever-present source of anguish.” Ancient philosophies such as stoicism and spiritual beliefs such as Buddhism and Christianity fundamentally oppose a hedonistic approach to life. Embracing challenges, pain, and difficulty are among the primary paths to meaning and growth according to these perspectives. Rather than a hedonistic worldview, ancient philosophy and most spiritual perspectives embrace a eudemonic worldview, which advocates seeking a virtuous and meaningful life of growth and contribution.”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“Conversely, when you do the same things over and over and in the same environments, it’s easy to zone out. Your brain isn’t being required to assimilate new information into its existing model. You’re not being challenged by necessity to figure things out. Hence Napoleon Hill has said, “A good shock often helps the brain that has been atrophied by habit.”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“You can change your patterns. You can change your roles, but you can only do that by altering your environment—whether that means having frank conversations to reestablish boundaries and expectations, or whether that means physically separating yourself from certain individuals or places. If you remain stuck in the same roles and patterns, it doesn’t matter how much willpower you exert; your efforts will continue to be confined within the limiting context of your role. You’ll remain hostage to a context that you mistakenly believe to be fixed identity. But you absolutely can change your roles, even abruptly and dramatically. People mistakenly believe they must be fully qualified to take on a particular role. But this is false. You actually become qualified through the role itself. For example, when Lauren and I became foster parents, we didn’t have any parenting experience. Sure, I read several books on the topic, many with smart ideas and innovative solutions to try. But theory and experience are two radically different things. I imagine all first-time parents go through a similar trajectory—you learn through doing.”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“Moving was one thing that helped me understand what our environment does to us. Another was becoming a foster parent. Our foster kids were born in a county that borders Clemson, where we lived. Their county is in the ninth percentile for upward income mobility—it’s a very poor area with few jobs and fewer opportunities. Due to the legalities surrounding foster children, I cannot go into much detail about their early environment, but suffice it to say their home situation was far from ideal. The chances for these bright, intelligent, loving children to improve their lot in life, as well as their opportunities for happiness and fulfillment, if they had remained in their native environment were practically zero percent. But as Dr. Raj Chetty and Dr. Nathaniel Hendren stated, “The data shows we can do something about upward mobility…Every extra year of childhood spent in a better neighborhood seems to matter.”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“Who you are and what you can do in one situation is starkly different from who you are and what you can do in a different situation. Yet it is the Western way to isolate and decontextualize, whether it be variables in a science lab or ourselves. We’re really good at putting things in boxes and missing the interplay between everything.”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“The very fact that willpower is required comes from several fundamental sources: You don’t know what you want, and are thus internally conflicted. Your desire (your why) for your goals isn’t strong enough. You aren’t invested in yourself and your dreams. Your environment opposes your goal.”
― Benjamin P. Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“Charles Darwin afirmó: «La especie que sobrevive no es la más fuerte, ni la más inteligente, sino la que mejor se adapta al cambio».”
― Benjamin P. Hardy, CAMBIA TU ENTORNO, CAMBIA TU VIDA

“There are websites such as listenonrepeat.com that allow you to loop YouTube videos.”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“Many of my relationships began with an idea from a journaling session, which then led to actively reaching out and, over time, cultivating a transformational relationship. In order to maximize this experience even further, you can become proficient at directing your subconscious mind-wandering while you sleep. Inventor Thomas Edison said, “Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.” While transitioning from being awake to being asleep, your brain waves move from the active beta state into alpha and then theta before eventually dropping into delta as we sleep. It is during the theta window that your mind is most receptive to reshaping your subconscious patterns. Just before falling asleep, think and visualize about what you want your mind to focus on as you sleep.”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“When you create enriched environments of positive stress and high demand, your motivation to succeed is sky-high without any conscious effort on your part. You are not in conflict with your environment but being pulled forward by it. The specific strategies detailed in this chapter for outsourcing your motivation to enriched environments included: Installing several layers of external pressure and accountability; Making your goals public; Setting high expectations for customers and fans; Investing up front on your projects and scheduling them in advance; Surrounding yourself with people who have higher personal standards than you have; Competing with people who have a much higher skill level than you do by viewing competition as a form of collaboration; Making a commitment and then practicing or performing these in public settings. The external pressure of performing for others only heightens your internal pressure to succeed; Getting enough clarity to move forward a few steps toward your goal; Hiring a mentor who is world-class at what you want to do; and Joining a mastermind group filled with role models and people who will help you elevate your life.”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“As Joe Polish frequently states, “Life gives to the givers and takes from the takers.” Consequently, once registered and paid, I immediately signed up to speak at the next small-group meeting in Arizona. I hired and worked extensively with Joel Weldon, a public speaking coach, to ensure I delivered my best strategies in the most effective way. I wanted my talk to be so easy and actionable that people would be naturally motivated to implement the principles. I used my journal as a visualization tool, in addition to several sessions with Joel.”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“This entire approach to learning and growth is experiential, not theoretical. Rather than having all the answers, you want just enough information to move forward. The fastest way to get relevant information is through failure and real-world experience. Your environment for success can’t be a classroom or a therapy couch. It has to be in the trenches of experience. Environmental design for powerful learning involves experience in real-world situations. These situations are inherently challenging, the stakes are high, and the consequences immediate. Additionally, your training is practical, not theoretical, and you’re getting feedback and coaching from mentors and experts. This is the most challenging and painful way to learn, and thus it is also the most effective.”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

“Repetition until Your Learning Becomes Unconscious (Outsourced to Environment) While I implemented what I learned, my teacher would watch me from a distance. He let me struggle as I tried to remember what he had just shown me. The first time, applying what he taught took a lot of time and effort. So we did it again, and again, and again. Over time, I became competent and thus confident. Learning something new is all about memory and how you use it. At first, your prefrontal cortex—which stores your working (or short-term) memory—is really busy figuring out how the task is done. But once you’re proficient, the prefrontal cortex gets a break. In fact, it’s freed up by as much as 90 percent. Once this happens, you can perform that skill automatically, leaving your conscious mind to focus on other things. This level of performance is called automaticity, and reaching it depends on what psychologists call overlearning or overtraining. The process of getting a skill to automaticity involves four steps, or stages: Repeated learning of a small set of information. If you’re playing basketball, for instance, that might mean shooting the same shot over and over. The key here is to go beyond the initial point of mastery. Make your training progressively more difficult. You want to make the task harder and harder until it’s too hard. Then you bring the difficulty back down slightly, in order to stay near the upper limit of your current ability. Add time constraints. For example, some math teachers ask students to work on difficult problems with increasingly shortened timelines. Adding the component of time challenges you in two ways. First, it forces you to work quickly, and second, it saps a portion of your working memory by forcing it to remain conscious of the ticking clock. Practice with increasing memory load—that is, trying to do a mental task with other things on your mind. Put simply, it’s purposefully adding distractions to your training regimen.”
― Benjamin Hardy, Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success