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Willpower is conventionally considered to be control over one’s behavior, though if there is no such thing as free will then willpower may not exist either, at least not in the way we imagine it.
Why Buddhism Is True described a novel explanation for willpower:
It’s in this way that in a modern environment, gratification can reinforce behaviors quite different from the kinds of behaviors it was designed to reinforce. There are two virtues of describing the “self-control problem” this way: as a module getting stronger rather than some all-purpose muscle called “self-discipline” getting weaker and weaker. First, this perspective helps explain why the problem would be so treacherous in the first place. It’s hard to imagine why natural selection would design a “muscle” called self-discipline in such a way that a few early failures lead to enduring impotence. But it’s easy to imagine why natural selection would design modules that get stronger with repeated success, and why natural selection would use as its working definition of success gratification in one sense or another. The second virtue of conceiving the problem of self-discipline in modular terms is that it can suggest new ways of addressing the problem. There is a difference between thinking of the goal as strengthening the self-discipline muscle and thinking of the goal as weakening a module that has grown dominant… Suppose you think of the problem as instead being a particular module that has formed a particular strong habit. How would you try to overcome the problem then? You might try something like mindfulness meditation.
…and examine the urge until it goes away, as you’d do with any other bothersome feeling. “What part of your body is the urge felt in? What is the texture of the urge?… Getting close enough to feelings to take a good look at them winds up giving you a kind of critical distance from them.
Or, as Habits puts it more pithily:
Every action is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
Procrastination
Procrastination both arises from and contributes to self-criticism in a reinforcing feedback loop, and the way to break it is to show self-compassion:
In fact, several studies show that self-compassion supports motivation and personal growth. Not only does it decrease psychological distress, which we now know is a primary culprit for procrastination, it also actively boosts motivation, enhances feelings of self-worth and fosters positive emotions like optimism, wisdom, curiosity and personal initiative.
This is important advice for management as well: if a teammate is procrastinating, pressuring them to get it done is only going to make things worse. Show compassion, help them show themselves compassion, and ask questions to get at the underlying problem: whether the task is unclear, just sucks, or they don’t feel confident in tackling it.
The Marshmallow Experiment
In 1970, Stanford’s Walter Mischel performed a study testing children’s ability to refrain from eating a marshmallow with the promise of two marshmallows later. He later followed up with the research subjects and found that the kids who were able to delay gratification in this way grew up to be more successful. A common conclusion from the study is that willpower is both innate and bears heavily on our success in life. However, an important follow-up study at the University of Rochester questioned this conclusion, showing that whether or not the kids trust the researcher to deliver on the promise of an extra marshmallow could have a significant effect. In other words, it’s not that willpower leads to success in life, but that having grown up in a supportive environment leads to both greater trust of adults (the real cause of their behavior, not willpower) and greater success in life. In general, whenever it appears that A causes B, we should consider whether instead A and B share a common cause C.