“I realized I’d been blaming myself all these years for being overweight, and I have a predisposition that no amount of willpower is going to control…..Obesity is a disease. It’s not about willpower — it's about the brain.”
—Oprah Winfrey talking about why she takes Ozempic
If you are relying on willpower to accomplish anything, you are going to fail.
Willpower, discipline, and motivation are all different words for the same thing.
They’re different words for giving yourself the option not to do whatever it is you decided you were going to do.
If you decided you were going to run a mile every morning and then relied on willpower or discipline to make yourself do it, eventually you’re going to find a reason not to.
If you decided you were going to change your diet and start eating healthy, and then you relied on willpower to stick to your diet, one of these days, your willpower will fail and you’re going to cheat.
Willpower, discipline, and motivation are the forbidden fruit. If someone puts a big, juicy red apple in front of you and says, “Whatever you do, don’t eat that apple,” eventually you’re going to eat it. This is just human nature.
The solution is not to rely on discipline to make yourself do it. The solution is to make your chosen activity a habit.
You make the decision that you’re going to do it. You make that decision only once, make a commitment, and you never revisit that decision again.
You don’t think about it. You don’t question whether you should. You just do the thing and forget about everything else.
This is how any activity becomes ingrained and habitual—without effort, without decision, without thought.
You remove all decision-making from the process and do it automatically.
Research indicates that high performers in any given field spend less effort and brainpower on whatever they’re doing than beginners.
High performers don’t think about what they’re doing. They don’t analyze their performance. They’ve already gone through that process long ago.
Olympic athletes and other high performers make their chosen activity look easy—because, for them, it is easy.
It’s easy because they’ve habitually practiced whatever it is thousands of times. They’ve fine-tuned their routine over countless hours of repetition. Now the person can do the routine with their eyes closed—without thought.
We see this pattern repeated in high performers across every domain of life. Steve Jobs famously wore the same outfit every single day. He did this to remove the decision fatigue of making up his mind about what to wear every morning.
Every high performer uses ritualized routines they stick to with obsessive intent. They do this because the routine optimizes every department of their life. They set their life on autopilot so it runs in the best possible way with the least amount of effort and attention. This frees the person to focus on more important things.
If you make a decision to do something, make that decision once and never make it again.
If you wake up for your early-morning run and think, “Will I or won’t I?” eventually, the day will come when the answer will be no.
The good news is that you get all the benefits of whatever it is regardless of whether you use discipline, willpower, or habit.
Say you decided to write one thousand words every single day for a year. You would finish the year with a completed novel.
The same goes for exercise. If you worked out for an hour every day for a year, you would get a noticeable result.
You would get exactly the same result if you worked out for an hour every day for a year and agonized, dithered, and doubted about it as if you worked out for an hour every day for a year and didn’t agonize, dither, and doubt about it.
Working out for an hour every day for a year without agonizing, dithering, and doubting about it would be a hell of lot easier than if you went through the entire decision-making process every single day for the entire year and had to force yourself to do it every single time. That sounds like my idea of Hell.
Discipline, motivation, and willpower aren’t necessary or even desirable to get the result you want. Consistency is necessary. The surest predictor of consistency is habit.
I’m going to take a wild guess and say that the reason you aren’t achieving that result right now is because you have some counter habit you’re doing instead of whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish.
The solution is to replace one habit with another. The solution is to make the new habit as automatic and as much a part of your everyday life as the non-productive habit that’s holding you back.
Once you do this, you won’t even miss the old habit. You won’t even think about it.
The new way of doing things becomes just the ordinary way you do things. It becomes normal and second-nature.
This is how people make lasting change in their lives.
If you decide to go on a certain diet for a certain amount of time, you will fall off the diet as soon as it ends.
The alternative is to make it the normal, everyday way you eat from now on. You make the decision—only once—that you’re going to eat like this from now on—for the rest of your life.
The effect might be gradual, but it will accrue over the course of years. The same goes for exercise, an art form, or any other activity you want to get good at or a goal you want to achieve.
Doing it any other way might bring you a temporary result, but it won’t last. You won’t stick to it. You’ll revert back to your old way of doing things—your old routine and ingrained habits. You consider them normal—your automatic default setting.
The solution is to change your default and reprogram your being to a completely different combination of habits.
This in turn makes you a completely different person—a better person—which is what we all want.
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