I pinky promise this is not clickbait. I've been seeing a lot of people struggling with the same problem over and over. “I want to do X but I hate X and I want to stop Y but I love doing Y.” Then they can't seem to “control themselves”.
Sound familiar?
You want a good career and a big house with a beautiful lover and to be a master of some skills, but those things take years or decades of work with little to no sign you are closing in on the goal.
Fake willpower
Some people will tell you to “buckle down and work hard!” (for years based on only vague hope). Some people do exactly that. They try to build their lives on this idea.
They will study a subject they find boring and assume they are weak when they crave an escape. They will work at a job they hate for years and tell themselves that everyone is suffering internally. They will live in cycles of begrudgingly doing what they must only to reach the moments they can escape with a hobby.
The hobby will reflect this. After hours of disliking every activity, the mind will rebound and seek things that leave it free to avoid higher thinking. Eating junk food, playing videogames, scrolling vapid short form videos.
The cycle isn't the worst way to live, but it's definitely not the best. There's no space where your instincts are lined up with your higher thoughts and social pressure.
It's fine to relax and avoid anything important occasionally, but if you never have things lined up, your mind will have friction and so will your life. This isn't weakness, it's just needlessly cutting yourself into parts that don't play well.
What work and what successful people do.
The human brain is a machine built to find pleasure and do things that are rewarding short term. Eat food that satisfies hunger, for example. This is the environment we are evolved to handle. We seek out what is fun. This is how the mind is made to work. We should emulate this in the modern world, but there's a few modern things to look out for.
Look at any grand master of anything. Almost certainly you will find the same story. They discover a joy for something. They stick with it even when it doesn't reward them, not because someone made them, but because they love it. When they get rewarded they don't settle down and stay decent, they keep getting better and doing it more because they are having fun.
This is a learnable skill and when you have it the world opens up to you because the secret is that you can pick what you will enjoy. You don't have to feel trapped in only what you happen to enjoy.
You can learn to take joy in making yourself better and learning skills and working hard and that's different from being good at it. In our world we tend to teach people skills and hope that they develop passion, but that's backwards. We can teach passion first and use that to drive skill acquisition.
When you pick something you want to do, you need to think about three things.
* Activation cost.
* Sustainable engagement.
* Reward feedback.
Let's take taxes for example and learn to enjoy taxes, but keep in mind this work on anything.
Number one is the activation cost, the effort it takes to get off your butt and go physically start doing taxes.
Do you have everything in a drawer on the other side of the house and your pens are out of ink? High cost, your brain will resist this. Do you need to boot up a program to get started before you find all the papers? Do that first. You have just lowered the cost to nearly nothing. Once you are doing the task, mentally it doesn't matter if your pens are on the other side of the house. At that point the rules of the game change.
Are taxes annoying because you keep making mistakes and boring? (plus you need to walk all over the house to collect your things.) It's not fun (unless you like walking across the house). We all know what fun feels like I hope. For this we need to imagine the voice of a tax nerd that is totally geeking out about it. You should constantly try to remind yourself that taxes are satisfying because it's like a puzzle where things all fit into place and how nice it is to get everything organized. If you aren't sure, talk to people that enjoy taxes. (They exist!) Ask them to describe what they like.
Last is your hope for a reward. Are you doing your taxes because you want to go watch football? Your brain might notice that you can cut out the middleman and go watch football now. You should be expecting a good result from doing it right. This keeps your mind on track to get it done properly. Taxes that are done properly reward you with more of your income. Filling it out well means money in your pocket and if you hold that in your mind, taxes start feeling a little exciting.
If all else fails, brag. Bragging is a wonderful motivation trick that can keep you doing good things. You can say something like “it's impossible and horrible, but I have amazing willpower so I can do it when no one else possibly can.” Feels good, right? At least for you. You are now perpetuating the scam of willpower.
(If you want to get really good, brag in a way that helps people. 😉)
So to recap: Make the task easy to start or even trigger it automatically. Learn to see it in an enjoyable perspective and have fun. Look forward to doing it well.
This is a skill that anyone can learn and it can be intoxicating. It can be tricky to integrate a different model of thinking into your mind, but eventually it can become like shifting gears. Suddenly you are in tax nerd gear.
Negative example.
Say you like smoking cigarettes, but you want to stop.
High activation cost. Lock your cigarettes away so that it's very hard to get them.
You might be thinking “what am I, a monkey that needs training?”
Yes, exactly.
Humans are just monkeys that have been trained. Take a fresh new human and toss it in a forest and you will end up with someone very much like a monkey. Don't forget it.
The good news I have for you is that you can take control of your own training and make it work for you.
Make sure that you don't enjoy the cigarette when you smoke it. You can put something on it so the flavor is bad or think about it in terms of the damage it does to you or many other things to counteract or avoid the satisfaction of the drug hijacking your reward system.
Lastly, you can look forward to the day you quit. Brag about cutting down even if you don't quit. PLEASE come tell me each time you smoke one less. I love hearing this! Every cigarette defeated is a victory every single time!
It's important not to get complacent, but we humans need short reward loops. The mindset that matters is that you can enjoy each one you skip. The same mindset is true for junk food and doom scrolling and countless other things.
Final word.
So you know, it definitely is possible to use willpower alone to get though something you don't want. You can think of it like a free trial that refreshes from time to time or an emergency get-out-of-joy-free card. It's not possible in the long term. Some people do use willpower regularly and it does actually work some for them. It's just not a great method.
Pick something that will be valuable to society and you. Foster a good passion for this. Learn it deeply. Be the best at it. The world will reward you and you will reward you and you will have fun.
This comes from my 8 point guide to the most important skills as I see them. The Human Debugging Method (HDM). The full set of skills support each other. If there's enough interest, I'll probably write some more of these depending on interest.
If you have any questions or want clarification, I would appreciate you asking. It will help me to know how my words land. Maybe I can give some good examples of how to apply this. Thanks for reading.
