Willpower

Definitions

Willpower can be defined as ”A control of one´s impulses, actions and attention” or as ”A control exerted to do something or restrain impulses.”

Kelly McGonical´s book The Willpower Instinct is maybe the best source for willpower. You can find the link below the text.

Four uses of willpower

You use willpower to control your thoughts, emotions, impulses, and attention. You have some predetermined thoughts that conserve willpower, because you are not seeking the best answer and you settle for them. Deliberate thinking uses lots of willpower and you should avoid it when it is not necessary. You control our emotions. This is called affect regulation. It means you are focused on your moods. You are trying to avoid bad unpleasant moods and trying to concentrate on good ones. Impulse control, like resisting temptations, is the most common way of thinking willpower. It is not the only one. You also need to concentrate our attention on good things to achieve high performance. Willpower is needed for getting things done, as much as resisting doing things. I did not understand this for a long time. Maybe some readers think so too.

Modeling willpower as a muscle

The best way to think about willpower is considering it as a muscle. You can practice to gain more willpower. It atrophies, when we do not use it. You can also use it too much and it gets fatigued. You can have many ways of improving willpower. You can improve your physical conditions. You can practice by trying to achieve bigger willpower challenges. For example, you can try to push through a physical barrier after having a long run or you can push through even though you feel fatigued. You can also try cutting back on sweets or making a smaller budget for groceries, which is harder to manage. You should not start exercising by trying to get big results. Willpower should be exercised by taking small steps first. Then getting bigger ones later.

You make decisions all the time. Each decision consumes your willpower. When you use willpower, your self-control system of the brain becomes less active. Your brain uses the energy reserved for willpower first, because it is one of the biggest drains of energy in your brain. Your impulsive shelves have more power after you have used all the willpower. You make more decisions based on your impulses and cannot think straight. All of this happens, because your brain is interested in getting more energy for survival, not to think properly. Like your muscles, willpower get stronger with having right nutrition. It also gets weaker with wrong nutrition. When willpower is down you give into temptations and your muscles do not function accordingly, if their energy level is low. Muscles also atrophy if you don´t use them. Same goes to willpower. You need to give it challenges like you have to move your muscles.

Willpower is psychological and physical

Prefrontal cortex controls willpower. When you lose your control in this part of the brain, you lose your willpower. Every willpower challenge is a conflict for our decision making system. Its impulsive and rational parts are fighting together. you can succeed in our willpower challenges by using your impulsive system into our advantage. You can program our impulsive system to overcome willpower challenges by using your rational system. This will take some time. During willpower challenges, your psychological state matters. Without getting into details, you need to slow down your internal state. One of the ways of acknowledging the amount of willpower you currently have is how strong your emotional states are. When you are having lower willpower, your emotional state is stronger. Higher willpower means less emotional state of mind.

Willpower is also a physical state. You can change your physiology into a state where willpower is the strongest. Willpower is tied into our body´s natural cycles and the fluctuation of its energy supply. Controlling your brain´s glucoce level is the key. Your willpower is low, if your glucose level is not optimal. With low glucose level, your willpower cannot function properly. Then, your brain moves to the path of least resistance and starts giving in to our impulses. You should eat slow burning foods to keep it in the right level. Then you use our willpower when it matters the most.

Willpower´s friends and enemies

Willpower has many friends. I have mentioned that right nutrition is needed to keep your glucose levels stable through the day. In the short term, you can sometimes settle for the less effective solution. If there is a situation, in which you need willpower temporarily, like making a big decision, when you are tired, willpower can be acquired by eating something sweet. Exercise is one of the best ways to increase your willpower. It has a short and long term effects. Strengthening willpower can happen through exercise that lasts only five minutes. Relaxing is also good for willpower. When you are in a state with physical and mental rest, your brain takes a rest from thinking about the future and analyzing the past.

When you see other people following their impulses, you give in to our temptations more easily. It is even worse when you identify oyurself as like them. This works fortunately both ways. It is easier for you to use our willpower, when you think these people accept the behavior. Resisting temptations become easier in the short term. All you need is about fifteen minutes of exercise and your willpower increases in the short term. Exercice also reduces one of the biggest enemies of willpower, stress, in the long term, stress in the long term. Remembering why you are doing something is a friend too. When you come into a situation, in which you need to make choice about giving into an impulse or resisting temptation, remembering why to resist can help you overcome your temptations.

Lack of sleep is one of the enemies of willpower. When you haven´t slept enough, your cells have trouble absorbing glucose from our bloodstream. Your brain and body become desperate for energy. And they start craving glucose and are ready to find it from anything. Sleeping one night well and long can restore your brain to work in an optimal level. During the day, even short naps may be enough. Chronic stress is bad for willpower. When you are stressed all the time, our body diverts energy from long-term needs to attacking short term emergencies. It reduces the energy your brain uses. Then, both of them are ready to fight stress and our willpower becomes low.

You should have willpower in use, when it is most needed. You should plan our days and design our environments in ways you can optimize its use. Especially, when you know you have some important decisions to make, you should avoid all the unnecessary decisions. The other way is to plan naps or exercise before making the important decision.

Sources: 

Willpower:, Roy Baumeister
The Willpower Instinct, Kelly Mcgonical
The Marshmallow Test, Walter Mischel

-TT

Edge / Comparative Advantage

Definitions

I would define a personal edge as ”A possibility to achieve, produce or offer something with less amount of time and better than others.” Comparative advantage can be defined as ”A country should specialize in the goods or services it can produce at the lowest opportunity cost, and then trade with another country. I will concentrate on the personal edge.

Talent+Motivation+Deliberate Practice = Personal Edge

Personal edge is best achieved in the field of competitive expertise, when all the three components are combined. Depending on the competitive field, it is possible to have an edge with two of the three components in place. If you think about professional athletes in sports like tennis, basketball and golf, they need all of them. There are some exceptions, but they are extremely rare. In the less competitive fields of expertise, you can live without one component. It usually is talent or motivation. 

Your brain has almost hundred billion neurons. Each of them have from one thousand to ten thousand connections with other neurons. The amount of possible brain states exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe. The idea that talent do not matter is insane. It is not the only thing that matters when you are trying to gain a personal edge. People relying only on their talent, will have a faster development, when they are young. When time goes by, the edge is gone without practicing enough. When people with talent do the same things as people without talent with the same amount of time, the people with talent get better. When you talk about highly competitive fields of expertise, margins with winners and losers can be small. In these situations, talent makes the difference. You should concentrate on the fields of expertise where you are talented. This may be the only way of competing against billions of people.

Motivation is the second component. To be honest, I am having a hard time to answer the question: ”Is motivation to practice hard a talent or a learned skill?” Some people say it is a form of talent, others say you can learn it. I still haven´t made any conclusions about it. I quess it is a combination of both. Being interested in some field of expertise helps you to gain an edge. All people are not interested in the same things. Some people like sports, others music. In a highly competitive field of expertise, you need a desire to practice. Especially, deliberate practice is almost impossible without intrinsic motivation. The question is how to find a field of expertise, in which we have intrinsic motivation? One way of doing it is think about our childhood and what we liked to do then. All of us do not need intinsic motivation. Outer sources work for them better.

Some people can have a bigger need to please others. They can get motivated by an authority figure like a coach or father. Sometimes you get impulses from around you which can increase or decrease your motivation towards something. The right kind of environment and people around you is important in motivating you. It is even better to have these external factors with intrinsic factors to have a motivation to get better at something. Everything is easier with better motivation. 

Deliberate practice is a last component of the edge. It is probably the most important one. It can be also the most complicated one. In many areas of expertise, there are no established practices for getting an edge or being great at it. Developing skills have the same neurological effects in whatever you are practicing. Therefore, practice is the only obligatory components for gaining an edge. And deliberate practice is the best way of developing skills. 

You are in trouble in the information age without an edge

You live in a highly competitive world. Information age gives more equal opportunities for people around the world. Millions of people get better chances to show how good they are in something. Competition gets tougher every year, especially, in intellectual and creative fields of expertise. Record companies had all the power to decide who could succeed before. Now every singer, for example, can download her performances to youtube. It is a platform in which millions of people compete against each other for viewers. The best singers can reach millions of people. This wasn´t possible about twenty years ago. At least, not in this scale. This doesn´t only mean tougher competition. It also means winners take it all effects. A few people get most of the profits and glory around the world.

Having an edge is necessary in a modern world. You should ask yourself ”When competition gets tougher, what can I do to have an edge? You have to remember that edges are always relative. You compare yourself with others. You do not have to compete with millions of people. You have to remember it is easier to be the best in a niche. Being the best singer using, for example, Dutch is lot easier than being the best singer using English. Being the best Dutch Jazz singer is easier than being the best Dutch R&B singer. You can also have a combination of micro skills to have an edge. When you have a combination of skills which is unique, you do not need to be best at anything. You cannot forget a need for demand. If there is not enough people or companies to pay for the edge, it is not useful.

I am not saying we should all leave our current jobs to get an edge in other. But you should definitely try to get one before it is too late. Without an edge you may get into trouble. My advice to all the younger people is to start developing and edge and think about in which field of expertise they have intrinsic motivation and talent. Then find out what are the characteristics of deliberate practice and design your own ways of doing it if necessary.

Sources:

Poor Charlie´s Almanack, Peter Kaufman, Charles T. Munger
Peak, Anders Ericsson
Drive, Daniel H. Pink

-TT