Sometimes, I see someone on the internet say something that I think is so completely backwards, so 100% off, that I feel thankful for their help in locating what is actually true. Their statement provides a sort of True South that can be used to locate True North.
In this case, it’s this tweet about willpower — which, without actually using the word willpower, propagates the idea that there are two kinds of people: those who can act according to willed precommitments (“Type 1”), and those who can’t (“Type 2”).
To illuminate my thinking about this tweet, and the subject of willpower generally, I’d like to share the following facts about myself.
In undergrad, I earned two degrees in four years, while working multiple jobs and serving as editor in chief of the student newspaper. I went on to graduate near the top of my class at Yale Law. For most of those years, I was drinking alone every night to the point of blacking out.
I once made an extremely stupid weight loss bet that required me to fast five days a week for eight weeks straight. I won. Now, I take Ozempic to make it hard to overeat, and I take testosterone to make it easy to exercise.
I lost more than 3 years of my life to a drug addiction that cost me my job, savings, most of my friends, and for a time the ability to walk. I got clean dozens of times during that period, but relapsed over and over. I just could not stop. In the 4 years after I got sober, I worked my way up from a friend’s personal assistant to the CEO of a multi-billion-dollar organization.
Every morning I get up two hours early to work on the book I’m writing or on a Substack post before going off to work. And every evening I waste about an hour on activities that I don’t endorse, that don’t make me happier or better rested or more fulfilled — that probably have the opposite effect, actually.
So: Which kind of person am I, Type 1 or Type 2? How would you rate my ability to “simply decide to do something and then do it”?
How much willpower would you say I have?
Here is what I think: Willpower is an incoherent concept invented by smug people who think they have it in order to denigrate people who they think don’t. People tacitly act as though it’s synonymous with effort or grindy determination. But in most cases where willpower is invoked, the person who is trying and failing to adhere to some commitment is exerting orders of magnitude more effort than the person who is succeeding.
During my time in 12-step programs, I met plenty of people who’d lost their kids to addiction — sometimes to divorce, sometimes to foster care. I can guarantee that, in their efforts to resist that outcome, most of them tried harder, exerted more “willpower,” than the average person has applied to anything in their life. And yet, faced with a slew of cases like this, many people will think “what a damnable lack of willpower,” and not “wow, addiction must have a kind of power I’ve never experienced in my life.”
Not many of us will lose our kids to addiction, but it’s not because we’re out there trying so much harder not to.
The word should be thrown in the garbage. It is a concept that rots our imagination. It obscures the fact that motivation is complex, and that there is massive variation in how hard some things are for different people.
When self-applied positively, e.g. “I did this through willpower, and that other person did not,” the word allows us to convert the good fortune of excess capacity into a type of virtue — twice as lucky, to have the sort of luck that’s mistaken for virtue. Resist the temptation to be confused by this, or it will make you childish, and callous.
When self-applied negatively, e.g., “I wish I had more willpower,” the word is a way to slip into a kind of defensible helplessness, rather than trying to compose intelligent solutions to behavioral issues.
And it’s this last thing that really gets me about the idea of willpower. At first blush it sounds like the kind of idea that should increase agency. I just have to try harder! But, in fact, the idea of willpower reduces agency, by obscuring the real machinery of motivation, and the truth that if your life is well-designed, it should feel easy to live up to your ideals, rather than hard.
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Learning this was part of the education addiction gave me. To win against addiction, you have to make the fight as easy as possible by totally remaking your life. On top of all sorts of other work, you have to put as much distance as you can between yourself and the people, places, and situations that trigger you to use. The point is not to valiantly struggle; the point is to minimize the struggle that is necessary.
Having won this fight, I have zero compunction about making my goals as easy as possible to achieve. For example, my body has made it totally clear that I need to do resistance training, or I’ll be rewarded with poor physical health and poorer mental health. But my mind has made it totally clear that I will not go to a gym to do it, regardless. So, I have a personal trainer come to my house twice a week and force me to pick up the weights.
Perhaps I could demand discipline of myself, or at the very least feel bad that it’s worth it for me to exchange money for someone else’s time. But I have more important things to coerce myself about.
The Myth of Willpower is the idea that virtue lies in exerting extreme effort to overcome obstacles, and that any success attained without effort is actually bad, bordering on immoral. The truth is that high-agency people are always looking for shortcuts. They are never thinking, “how can I work hard and demonstrate my willpower,” but rather, “how can I get results faster by maximizing my leverage?”
I almost always try to accomplish the thing I want to accomplish using as little effort as I can, because there are endless good uses of my time and energy, and spending less of them where they’re not needed frees them up to spent somewhere else.
To be clear, I am aware that shortcut-free hard work is sometimes necessary, and can be ennobling. Training for narrowly difficult tasks that require mastery or conditioning — like running a marathon, or playing Bach’s violin partitas — can force you to confront your physical and emotional limits in a way that is both personality-expanding and healthily humbling. I’m not saying you should never work hard, and there is probably something important about the human experience, something vital, that you miss out on if you never experience the application of grinding endurance to an endeavor that can’t be accomplished in any other way.
What I’m saying is that you should choose hard work if hard work is the desired result. If it’s not, and you can take a shortcut, take a fucking shortcut.
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I feel like I've had debates about this in some shape or another with people for my whole life.
I'm naturally inclined to work hard, to take the difficult path. But it always hurts me a little on the inside when people don't realize working hard isn't the point. Or they fail to realize that people who are struggling are in fact actually struggling i.e. trying very hard to ameliorate their issues.
The ultimate irony being that many times the implicit idea behind working hard is to make things easier in the future - you lift weights so your muscles become more efficient, you train so you (or your body) can respond faster. It's all in an effort to make things easier.
So it's a bit of a triple threat for anyone who can't solve their troubles - you try harder, achieve less, and get judged harsher.
Loved the post!
I really enjoyed reading this. Heretical and brilliant, thanks for writing it.
Willpower as a moral category is conceptually goofy. The cultural imagining of willpower as a neutral, static, cognitive trait that you can either righteously, effortlessly juice for unlimited virtuous energy or simply forsake (resulting in severe loserdom and psychogenic decrepitude) is a very funny folk-psych abstraction.
What is the animus of executive function? A hot moral muscle ain't it!
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