Willpower Doesn't Work

Willpower doesn’t work.

Let’s be honest, you’ve tried to improve your life a million times—and a million times you’ve come back to the drawing board, frustrated. You’ve tried willpower to kick a bad habit but fell back into old patterns. You’ve tried New Year’s resolutions, but by February, everything reverts back to how it was the year before. You’ve set big, life-changing goals but seem to find yourself far short of them despite hard work. After enough failure, it’s easy to conclude that you are the problem. You must not have what it takes—the 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 wasn’t 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 memberships—and 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 crisis—for example, genetics, personality, a lack of willpower, or bad habits. But these aren’t 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 addictions—primarily 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. There’s too much in our environment that’s 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 doesn’t work. It never did. Instead, you need to create and control your environment.

Willpower Doesn’t Work

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 Association’s annual Stress in America Survey, a lack of willpower is frequently cited as people’s 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 haven’t decided what they actually want in their lives. If you’re 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 can’t stop looking at your phone.

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

At least, that’s what you’ve 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 don’t know what you want, and are thus internally conflicted.
• Your desire (your why) for your goals isn’t strong enough.
• You aren’t 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, you’ll 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 you’ve built several external defense systems around your goals. It means you’ve 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 don’t.

You Can Design Your Environment to Propel and Sustain Success

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.

You are who you are because of your environment.

Want to change? Then change your environment. Stop the willpower madness already.

These ideas run counter to a lot of self-help advice, which tends to focus on what you can do, by yourself and for yourself. The pervasive self-help advice is to focus on yourself. This makes sense, because we live in a highly individualistic culture. We’ve been conditioned to ignore context and obsess about ourselves.

Environmental design is different. It’s about creating conditions that make your success inevitable. For example, if you want to be focused at work, you need to remove all distractions from your physical and digital workspace. If you want to eat healthy, remove all of the unhealthy foods from your house. If you want to get creative insights, get out of town and relax for a day or two. If you want to be more motivated, take on greater responsibility and increase the stakes for both success and failure.

Those who focus on environmental design recognize that a person’s internal and external worlds are not clear-cut with fine lines. Although psychological research, for instance, distinguishes between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, the reality is that the internal and external play off each other. When you change your environment, such as surrounding yourself with different people, your thoughts and emotions change. These inner changes then alter your values and aspirations, which requires you to further alter your external environment. Thus, it is by tweaking your conditions that you proactively shape who you become.

You design your worldview by proactively shaping your external inputs, such as the information you consume, the people you surround yourself with, the places you go, and the experiences you have. Most people, however, reactively and mindlessly respond to whatever environments they find themselves in, and thus develop a worldview leading to ineffective behavior and victimhood.

Which brings me to the very definition of “environment.” In a strict sense, we all have internal, external, and interpersonal environments. However, for the sake of simplicity, in this book environment is that which is external, not internal. For example, your environment includes your physical surroundings, the people you choose to form relationships with, the information you let in, the foods you consume, and the music you listen to.

That which is external shapes that which is internal. Put more simply: Your worldview, beliefs, and values didn’t come from within you, but from outside of you. If you grew up a white person in the southern United States during the 1950s, your worldview would likely have been shaped by that perspective. The same is true if you grew up in Europe during the Middle Ages, or in North Korea during the Communist rule, or in 2005 as a digital native with access to the Internet. Your goals, beliefs, and values are shaped by the cultural context in which you live.

Although the environment has never been more extreme or more stressful, it is certainly not your enemy. In Western culture, particularly in psychological and self-improvement circles, the environment has been vilified. Perhaps the most common phrase among these groups is “to be a product of your choices, not your circumstances.” At surface level, this is actually quite good advice. But it’s also naïve and inaccurate.

Yes, your life is the product of your thoughts and choices, as many self-help books explain. But where do those thoughts and choices come from? They don’t self-generate out of nowhere. You shape the garden of your mind by planting specific things from your environment, such as the books you read, experiences you have, and people you surround yourself with.

As will be shown, by shaping your environment directly, you’ll be shaping your thoughts and behaviors indirectly. Furthermore, you’ll create conditions allowing for desired behaviors which are not optional in common conditions. When you shape your environment, you’ll have greater control over your thoughts and choices. Thus, instead of making the environment or “circumstances” your enemy, which has been the traditional advice of self-help, it’s important to realize that your environment is actually the only way you as a person can truly change. New information, new relationships, and new experiences are how you change. You must gather and plant the right seeds from your environment to make a bounteous garden of your life. Consequently, although most environments will indeed shape a distracted and unfulfilled version of you, to attempt to be devoid of “environment” or “circumstance” altogether is not only impossible, but also foolish if you’re seeking growth. Your environment can become your best friend. And as you’ll see, you and your environment are one.

If You Don’t Shape Your Environment, It Will Shape You

Unlike the common prescriptions of self-improvement—such as willpower and changing your attitude, which often are met against a negative and defeating environment—when you purposefully shape your environment, you can make quantum and radical leaps in your development. If you so choose, you can proactively place yourself into situations that demand ten times or a hundred times more than you’ve ever dealt with before.

How?

You adapt to your new environment.

Crafting highly demanding situations and then mindfully adapting to those situations is the key to success. Charles Darwin said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

It’s actually quite remarkable how quickly you can adapt from one environment to the next. Human beings are highly adaptive. For instance, Viktor Frankl reflected on his experience in a Nazi concentration camp sleeping comfortably next to nine other people on a small bed. Said Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning, “Yes, a person can get used to anything, just don’t ask us how.”

No matter how extensive the jump from one environment to the next—and, per Frankl, no matter how horrible the environment—a person can and will adapt. Rather than adapting to a negative environment, as the majority of the global population is doing, you can adapt to whatever environment you choose.

This book will teach you how to purposefully shape your environment. It will also explain why your environment shapes you. As such, a primary objective of this book is to show you that you can change in both small and extreme ways. You are not a fixed, independent, and unchanging being. Psychologically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually, your nurture is far superior to your “nature.” And you are entirely responsible for your nurture; thus, you can guide who you become. Consequently, by the end of this book, you will be left with no excuses. You won’t be able to point to your DNA, your past, or any of the other reasons why you believe you are stuck. Rather, you will understand the principles and be equipped with the strategies to create the environments that will ultimately create you.