The Flourish Philosophy
Anyone Can Build Willpower
Willpower is the product of two things anyone can have: desire and belief. Anything you’ve ever accomplished, you’ve done because you wanted to do it and believed that you could. Anything you haven’t accomplished, you’ve left undone because you didn’t truly want to do it, or you didn’t truly believe you could do it, or both.
The other day I happened across a video of a muscular gentleman, evidently a fitness influencer, interviewing other muscular gentlemen at the gym: “How many hours per week do you work?” The answers ranged from 40 to 60 hours. “And yet you’re here,” the influencer noted approvingly.
The point of this video is clear enough: It’s not that you don’t have time to work out; it’s that you don’t make time to work out. In other words, getting to the gym is a matter of willpower.
That’s all well and good, but what, exactly, is willpower? More specifically, why do some people seem to have an endless supply of it while others seem to have none at all?
The way most people talk about willpower, you could be forgiven for thinking of it — paradoxically, and pessimistically — as both a mark of virtue and an innate personality trait. In other words, it’s something everyone should have but also something many unfortunate people might have been born without.
It follows, then, that there are two types of people: the “driven,” and the “lazy.” These labels get slapped on us by our parents and teachers as early as elementary school, when some of us prove eager students and others do not, and it’s not at all obvious that they can be peeled off.
When willpower is misunderstood this way, the concept becomes useless, even harmful. Once you’ve internalized the idea that you’re lazy, the notion of self-improvement becomes a cruel joke. Videos like the above, far from being motivational, merely serve to rub your nose in your own inferiority. And if you’ve internalized the idea that you’re driven, life can be reduced to an endless series of competitions with other members of the rise-and-grind class.
Desire is personal. People who care about muscles work out a certain way; people who don’t care about muscles do not. The former cohort is neither more nor less virtuous than the latter. There is no right and wrong in matters of taste. If there’s something you haven’t gotten around to doing, be honest with yourself: Do you really want to do it? Whether society thinks it’s a good idea is irrelevant. All that counts is your desire. When you center your life on your own passions, willpower materializes effortlessly.
Belief is cultivated. You may have identified a desire to do something but fear that you can’t pull it off. If so, break your goal down into manageable steps, then focus only on one step at a time. As you complete each step, don’t forget to pause and celebrate. As you compile these small victories, your confidence will grow. You’ll pursue your goals with more aplomb and develop the resilience to take the inevitable failures in stride.
And any time you grow especially discouraged, think about it: Wouldn’t you rather spend your finite years on this earth failing at something you love than succeeding at something that makes you feel numb? The world is already spilling over with miserable successful people. It doesn’t need you to join their ranks.
There Is No Recipe for Success
Define success and failure for yourself. Do what you want to do. Build a life around your interests, and if you don’t know what your interests are, assume responsibility for unearthing them. Don’t follow someone else’s recipe; create your own dish.
Here’s the sage advice so many of my students in high school and college receive, overtly or subliminally: Research the highest-paying, most in-demand professions, pick one you think might suit you, then plan your education accordingly. First look to STEM careers, and if that fails, be prepared to get a professional degree. Nowadays, a Bachelor’s in liberal arts simply isn’t enough to give you an edge. Given the cost of college nowadays, it might even be worthless.
And here’s the problem with that advice: While perfectly rational, it’s not at all motivational. Why? Let us count the ways:
It’s based purely on extrinsic motivation, the weaker form of motivation. Money is great. Job security is great. But as motivators, they simply cannot hold a candle to passion.
It places the payoff far off, in a distant, imperceptible future. Why go to school? To get a good job. What’s a good job? One that earns you enough money. Enough money for what? For a comfortable retirement — oh, and also for your children’s education, so they can keep the hamster wheel spinning.
It describes life as essentially transactional. Underlying this message is the implicit suggestion that career choices boil down to cost-benefit analysis — that is, you should be willing to spend x hours per day doing something you don’t necessarily enjoy as long as you make x dollars per year in return.
It describes life in terms of scarcity and competition. There are only so many good jobs. The people first in line for those jobs are those who attended elite schools, which have only so many spots. Inevitably, then, there will be many more losers than winners. If the probabilities strongly suggest you’ll be one of the former, why bother playing the game?
One of my clients is a college student born into an affluent family. Since he turned old enough to be cognizant of such things, he’s had an open invitation to take over his family’s lucrative business. When I first began working with him, as a sophomore in high school, he was drifting, receiving mediocre grades in remedial courses. Nothing about his track record to date indicated that he’d be prepared for life beyond high school, let alone running a company. It wasn’t until he identified his own goal — to be an Army Special Forces officer — that I saw the light of enthusiasm in his eyes. He’s now a junior in college, thriving in ROTC and holding down a part-time job that he frankly doesn’t need while maintaining a GPA better than he posted in high school. He has asked me for help only intermittently over the last three years.
In one sense, his choice to blaze his own trail is thoroughly irrational. He will never earn as much in the Army as he would at his family’s company. In a more important sense, however, that choice is the only truly viable one. You can live someone else’s life poorly, or you can live your own life passionately.
Be a Driver, Not a Passenger
Which seat are you in, the driver’s or the passenger’s? Do you discuss what you’ve done, or do you dwell on what’s been done to you? Taking responsibility for your problems is the first step toward solving them. It’s also how you get the credit for your successes.
25 years ago, during a two-year “sabbatical” from college — I had dropped out and not quite worked up the courage to return — I picked up a job as a bartender at a pool hall in the quaint and rustic town of Klamath Falls, Oregon. As the new guy, I had to cover all the early shifts, which consisted mainly of attending to a handful of regulars: old men, grizzled blue-collar types with creased faces and gnarled fingers, who evidently couldn’t find anything better to do with their retirements than to swig beer and swap the same endlessly recycled stories and hard-earned opinions each and every day between the hours of noon and 5pm.
Among this group there were those who were reasonably content with the way their lives had shaped up, and those who were decidedly not so. It was easy to tell the difference, because the former rarely voiced complaints about “the world” while the latter were all too eager to proclaim their disaffection with its various ills and injustices.
Some grievances were general: “The [pick a nationality] took all our [pick an industry] jobs.” Some were personal: “I had a bankroll until my wife divorced me and took all my money.” Some were fantastical: “I invented the convection oven, but my good-for-nothing cousin ran off with the plans before I could have them patented.”
The stories varied from teller to teller, but the underlying theme was the same: My life would have been so much better if only fortune had deigned to smile upon me instead of smirk.
As a young man still very much in doubt as to how to make good of myself and my life, listening to these sob stories was as instructive as it was exhausting. It taught me one of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned: The surest way to end up an old coot clutching beers and clinging to resentments is to blame your problems on someone or something else. Conversely, the surest way to escape such fate is to take responsibility for your choices and their outcomes.
It wasn’t until years later that I discovered psychology had coined an expression for this idea: locus of control. If you have an internal locus of control, you believe that you have a good measure of influence over the direction of your life. If you have an external locus of control, you believe that you’re at the mercy of happenstance. In short, you either do things or watch idly as things happen to you; you’re either in the driver’s seat or the passenger’s. And study after study shows that people in the driver’s seat enjoy greater well-being.
Obviously, we are all subject to circumstances outside our control. Equally obviously, those circumstances can vary wildly from person to person. There are people born on third base, and there are people who weren’t even born in the ballpark. There are goofballs who stumble blindly into success, and there are geniuses who go unseen until they’re in the grave. The world is a magnificently complex place with an incomprehensible number of variables in play. It would be preposterous to argue that any one person could bend all of them entirely to their will.
But take stock of those around you and pay close attention to how they speak. Which seat are they in, the driver’s or the passenger’s? Do they discuss what they’ve done, or do they dwell on what’s been done to them? Are they happy and fulfilled, or angry and disillusioned? I think you’ll find the exercise as instructive as I did.
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