Benjamin Hardy - Willpower Doesn’t Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success

W illpower doesnt work.

Lets be honest, youve tried to improve your life a million timesand a million times youve come back to the drawing board, frustrated. Youve tried willpower to kick a bad habit but fell back into old patterns. Youve tried New Years resolutions, but by February, everything reverts back to how it was the year before. Youve set big, life-changing goals but seem to find yourself far short of them despite hard work. After enough failure, its easy to conclude that you are the problem. You must not have what it takesthe grit, the inner strength, the willpower. Perhaps you should just settle for the life you have

But what if that assessment was all wrong?

What if the problem wasnt you at all?

Take the near-universal struggle to lose weight. A large portion of the global population is getting heavier despite exerting more and more effort to be thin. Billions are spent on fad diets and gym membershipsand for what? It is projected by several health experts that by 2025, more than 50 percent of all humans on planet Earth will be overweight or obese. Sadder still, those who are trying the hardest are struggling the most. There are a variety of explanations for this global crisisfor example, genetics, personality, a lack of willpower, or bad habits. But these arent the cause of the obesity epidemic. Our radically changing environment is.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the world became industrialized, which drew masses of people away from farms and into cities. Rather than working outside as laborers, the trend over the last 100 years has been for people to work indoors, generally while sitting down. Rather than eating local food, most people eat food from a package.

Although the Industrial Revolution was a huge environmental shift, the information and technological age, beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, accelerated the changes to the now-global environment. Technological advancement is now moving at an exponentially faster rate, and very few human beings can adapt to the changes currently shaping our environment.

Most people are the casualties of these rapid environmental changes. Unequipped to properly govern themselves in a new world with new rules, many of them succumb to various addictionsprimarily to technology, but also to stimulants such as caffeine, fast-absorbing foods containing high amounts of carbohydrates and sugar, and work.

All of these culturally accepted addictions fuel one another, putting people under constant stress and sleep deprivation. Put simply, most of us are in survival mode. To be addicted has become the norm, and if you want to control your life, willpower should not be your strategy of choice. Theres too much in our environment thats pushing against us. Addiction expert Arnold M. Washton, PhD, has said, Many people think that what the addict needs is willpower, but nothing could be further from the truth.

The key to getting out of survival mode and overcoming the cultural addictions is not to exert more willpower. Your willpower is gone. It was gone the moment you woke up and got sucked back into your smartphone. It was gone when you were bombarded by a thousand options and choices. White-knuckling your way to change doesnt work. It never did. Instead, you need to create and control your environment.

Willpower, or the power to exert your free will against internal or external obstacles, has only recently bombarded the psychological world. But it has done so with force. According to the American Psychological Associations annual Stress in America Survey, a lack of willpower is frequently cited as peoples top reason for not achieving their goals. Researchers across the globe are studying how people develop willpower and overcome willpower depletion. To be frank, willpower is for people who havent decided what they actually want in their lives. If youre required to exert willpower to do something, there is an obvious internal conflict. You want to eat the cookie, but you also want to be healthy. You want to focus at work, but you also want to watch that YouTube video. You want to be present with your kids, but you cant stop looking at your phone.

According to psychological research, your willpower is like a muscle. Its a finite resource that depletes with use. As a result, by the end of your strenuous days, your willpower muscles are exhausted, and youre left to your naked and defenseless selfwith zero control to stop the nighttime munchies and time wasters.

At least, thats what youve been taught.

Clearly, the research on willpower explains human behavior. But only on the surface level. The very fact that willpower is required comes from several fundamental sources:

• You dont know what you want, and are thus internally conflicted.
• Your desire (your why) for your goals isnt strong enough.
• You arent invested in yourself and your dreams.
• Your environment opposes your goal.

Once these four principles are aligned within yourself, the internal debate is over. Thus, all future decisions regarding that matter have also been made. No questions.

So, are you serious about this?

Or are you just talking?

Are you still on the fence, or have you decided?

Until you decide, youll be required to use willpower and will continue making minimal progress.

When it comes to achieving goals, making committed decisions involves:

• investing up front;
• making it public;
• setting a timeline;
• installing several forms of feedback/accountability; and
• removing or altering everything in your environment that opposes your commitment.

Rather than relying solely on your own internal resolve and strength, true commitment means youve built several external defense systems around your goals. It means youve created conditions to make the achievement of your goals inevitable. Everything has been put in place. You now have no choice but to act according to your highest desires. Too much is at stake if you dont.

We adapt to our environments. Thus, a conscious personal evolution involves purposefully controlling and creating environments that shape us into the person we want to become. Everything in life is a natural and organic process. We adapt and evolve based on the environments we select.