A Mason's Work

I want to take today's episode to talk about something we don't talk about much, but a

lot of folks struggle with, and that is willpower.

Willpower is this idea that you will through determination alone be able to overcome the

obstacles ahead of you.

And part of the reason why that so sort of enchanting as a concept is that it becomes

very much this idea that it is virtuous to persevere and in that perseverance, you know,

create outcomes.

There is in a lot of settings, no merit in that whatsoever.

And you'll see it right now, there's kind of a backlash and it's an odd backlash of folks

that are taking things like GLP1 to help lose weight.

And they will self-deprecate and say, yes, I'm doing it the fake way or I'm not doing

it the right way.

I'm using medicine or what have you.

And the reality of that kind of evaluation is that if you try to do things by willpower

alone, you are guaranteeing that you will get exhausted, get fatigued.

And then the moment you find yourself low on dopamine or you find yourself low on

serotonin, you will go and, you know, violate your own precepts, which happens to everyone

all the time, or at some point in their lives, let's put it that way, that, and then they

will go and essentially consider that a moral failing or a failing of their willpower.

So there's been just a magnitude of studies done about willpower and what it is and why

it is willpower is this idea that you will be able to through sheer force of will alone

accomplish an objective.

It is very closely related to concept called decision fatigue.

So when you put somebody in a situation where they have a lot of decisions to make in

a high stress environment, their decision quality erodes over time.

They get fatigued for making these decisions and it starts to have, you know, psychological

and physiological impacts on their health and well-being.

Willpower is very, very closely related to decision fatigue.

So it's not just the decision to face adversity, for example, once it's the decision on a moment

by moment basis to persevere through that.

And so it as a muscle kind of conceptually, you have the ability to grow your willpower

as a capacity.

And this can be done with lots of exercises and lots of stuff out there, but I'm going

to suggest you that growing your willpower actually is probably while it's useful and for

sure you should definitely do it is probably not going to get you the outcomes you're looking

for.

And I'll give you a discrete example as someone who struggled over for years with diet and

exercising and things like that.

We often don't analyze our own behaviors and then put ourselves in regular positions

to fail.

So in the context of diet and exercise, I would go to the store, I would buy all the things

I like and bring them home.

And then through the willpower sort of problem by the end of the day, because my house was

stocked full of things that I really like, I would be wrestling the temptation of that

for the entirety of the day.

And inevitably at the end of the day, I would fail.

Because I have made a problem, a willpower problem.

The best place to have willpower, the best place to apply it in this situation is actually

at the store.

And if you can prevent the stuff from entering your house, you don't put yourself in a position

to have a decision for tea on a regular basis.

All of a sudden you've freed up the cognitive bandwidth to kind of move on from that.

You can talk about why and all the addictive behaviors and stuff that comes with it.

And there's plenty of other episodes in the series here that talk about addiction as

it were.

But when you start talking about willpower and the kinds of positive changes you want to

make, the best place to have willpower is actually in the early decision and planning processes

as much as you can.

If you can determine, for example, to eliminate a tension, eliminate a temptation, consciously

go into an experience where you will not have access to the things that you might get

derailed by.

You are essentially short-cutting the willpower problem at the jump.

And by doing that, you're going to have a much, much higher probability of achieving the

outcomes you're looking for.

So again, this isn't a don't develop willpower.

This is use the decisions you're making and make them at the right time in the process

so that you don't have to make them every single second of the day for the rest of your

life.