Willpower Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney
now willpower can help you in all aspects of life and there's popular belief that children with
higher levels of willpower do better than children with lower levels of willpower
later on in their life now willpower is a thing that you've got and it gets used up and it doesn't
just get used up and is specific for one thing so for example if you're using your willpower
at work or you're using it to overcome the urge to eat something later that day
you may have less willpower left in your tank to resist a completely different temptation
now there's some suggestions about how to improve your life for example monthly planning as opposed
to daily planning simply because daily planning takes up too much time and there's others about
trying to increase your self-discipline and there's an association between self-discipline
and people who are donating to charity and are generous with their time and in part this may be
because you need a certain amount of self-control to do that and then over
time this increases your self-discipline but the very nature of thinking with others can help
if you want to do something make a public pledge so for example i pledged i would put 50
book reviews out on YouTube in 2021 and I'm just starting that i really appreciate the
support in this journey think about automatic behaviours now these tend to be linked to habits
and whereas a controlled unusual behaviour you're perhaps doing as a one-time thing
automatic behaviours are due to habits so really if you can use your self-control to develop good
habits and get rid of bad habits that really is the best way to get your life moving smoothly now
another thing is about keeping motivation that's about getting a higher sense of purpose the book
suggests actually that religion's good for the higher sense of purpose in part because you need
self-discipline to pray regularly or do other things such as avoiding certain types of food
but also what you're finding is the higher sense of purpose can help you
if you're thinking about thinking why questions are the ones that really focus
you on the higher levels of future of thinking and on the future how questions are more lower
levels of thinking and taking you really to the present moment so there's a few different studies
I'll quickly mention there's a lot here one was college professors they found that the people
who did their work in sprints i.e. you've got a deadline or a grant to do you'd do it just before
they did worse in terms of publication record and obtaining substantive university jobs than
those who developed a habit and did their writing all the time another thing was about alcoholics
anonymous now this has got a well-known 12-step program and the evidence is varied um however
this book does suggest some of the good things and because it's got regular check-ins it encourages a
mentor you're taking one day at a time and you're using positive peer pressure to overcome things
now it also had a concept related to alcoholics anonymous called warehousing that I hadn't heard
of and that is simply by doing something you're not doing an undesirable effect and amusingly to
me people would use that term about schooling but also thinking about a when people tell their story
they're having to plan it out and then they're verbalizing it to others so that can help develop
self-control and willpower there's a little bit about giving feedback make it clear and try and
make provider instantaneously now when you're thinking about delaying things
there is this urge to some people have to binge and if they've stopped something they start again
they binge they have a lot of it now this book is suggesting that actually
perhaps if you say I'll have that later it means when later comes actually you'll have less than if
you thought you had stopped it and then restart it again also finally to sustain motivation
give yourself frequent rewards for what you're achieving so please subscribe
respond down below I'd love to hear your comments and i shall see you all next time bye for now