The former remains fixed over our lifetime. The latter, however, is very much subject to change. What does this mean? If you want greater success in life, the lever to work on is self-control.
Improve your willpower, improve your chances of success in life. Simple as that. Poor self-control correlates with just about every kind of individual trauma: losing friends, being fired, getting divorced, winding up in prison. You may not realize it, but most of your problems result directly from a lack of willpower.
Health issues? Poor diet? Lack of exercise? Bad relationships? Finances going awry? So many seemingly different problems, but only one major cause.
Can you imagine how your life changes when you fix that cause? Baumeister goes on to mention how people with greater willpower are healthier, happier, and more satisfied in their relationships. They are further ahead in their careers and make more money. They even live longer than their less disciplined peers. More impressive yet, willpower is a stronger determinant of effective leadership than charisma, more important for marital satisfaction than empathy, and a better predictor of academic achievement than intelligence.
Think about that for a moment. About half the time, people were feeling some desire at the moment their beepers went off, and another quarter said a desire had just been felt in the past few minutes.
Many of these desires were ones they were trying to resist. The researchers concluded that people spend at least a fifth of their waking hours resisting desires — between three and four hours per day.
We tend to think of willpower as some magical force to be summoned in emergency situations only. In one study, Baumeister and his colleagues monitored a group of more than two hundred people. The participants wore beepers that went off at random intervals seven times a day, prompting them to report whether they were currently experiencing some sort of desire or had just recently felt such a desire.
In total, more than ten thousand momentary reports were recorded. The results are described in the quote above. Some of the more common ones are the urges to eat, sleep, nap, take a break, watch TV, play video games, have sex, check email, or hop on social media.
This makes it really obvious why willpower is so important. The experiments consistently demonstrated two lessons:.
The first lesson — commonly referred to as ego depletion — is beautifully illustrated with a classic study called the radish experiment. Baumeister and his team presented hungry college students with a bowl of radishes and a bowl of chocolates. Both bowls were placed in front of each student. Half of them were told to eat chocolates, but no radishes. The other half to eat radishes, but no chocolates.
The researchers expected the radish-eaters to use up a significant amount of willpower. To find out if that was the case, the researchers gave each student a difficult — in fact, unsolvable — puzzle to solve. What interested the researchers was how long students would work on it before giving up. Lo and behold, the radish-eaters gave up much faster than the chocolate-eaters did. They had used up a lot of willpower resisting the chocolates and were left exhausted when trying to solve the puzzle.
This experiment has been replicated countless times, and the results are always the same. You probably experience this in your life all the time. When you come home after a stressful day at work, what are you more likely to do: the easy thing or the hard thing?
Watch TV or exercise? The second lesson is that we use the same reservoir of willpower for pretty much everything. No matter where you exert self-control, it draws on the same source of energy — you use the same supply to deal with tempting food, annoying colleagues, frustrating traffic, or demanding bosses. They smoked fewer cigarettes and drank less alcohol. Publication Type. More Filters.
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Frontiers in Psychology. Highly Influenced. Baumeister, John Tierney. Download for offline reading, highlight, bookmark or take notes while you read Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Free PDF editor for download. The PDF editor contains a lot of useful features and is very easy to use. About the PDF24 Creator. One of the best features of this free program is that it is incredibly easy to use. Baumeister, teams with New York Timesscience writer John Tierney to reveal the secrets of self-control and how to master it.
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