Willpower Doesn't Work

Willpower Doesn’t Work shows you how to change your life in a more efficient way than relying on sheer grit alone by identifying the importance of your environment and other factors that affect your productivity so you can become your best self.

If you’ve read any of the books on willpower, you know that it’s like a muscle. In the same way that you can lift weights to improve your strength, you can grow this muscle with exercise.

Improving yourself shouldn’t be that hard then, right? It’s as easy as just pushing a little harder each day to make reaching your goals easier tomorrow!

Unfortunately, however, willpower isn’t a very strong muscle. There are many outside forces that quickly exhaust it, making it hard to stay afloat. But the good news is that it’s not your fault.

The obesity epidemic is a good example. You might have caught yourself thinking that if we all just ate healthier we wouldn’t be so fat. If only we had more willpower, right?

Actually, it’s not our problem but the environment of sedentary work and fast-food that has made us all overweight. If we can intentionally design this and any other environment, we’ll make improving ourselves almost inevitable.

Consider the difference between the two types of evolution:

Natural Evolution, which is where organisms evolve based on their situations.  Domesticated Evolution, that involves controlling the environment of an organism to make it evolve as you want it to.

Most often we just let ourselves evolve naturally, succumbing to the negative effects of a world that tries to make us fat, depressed, and in debt.

But when we intentionally design our environment, like in domesticated evolution, everything changes. Let’s get into how to do this in our next lesson.

The COVID-19 pandemic has completely altered our world. Hidden in all of the restrictions it’s brought with it are some benefits, like you being able to work from home. But, as you’re well aware, that added time with your family comes at a cost. Productivity isn’t easy when you work and play in the same location. And if you’ve got kids, as I do, that adds a whole other struggle to this dilemma. It’s not easy to get in some deep work when you’ve got a 4-year-old and 2-year-old asking for breakfast! “Work hard, play hard” is a good mantra to live by but it needs some adjusting for this day and age. We need to add the idea that we must do each in a different place if we want to be the most efficient! Not having any stress might sound nice, but it robs you of the benefits of healthy stress, or eustress, which can…