Willpower

This idea is again from the book The Power of Habit.  The last chapter I read talked about the significance of will power.  It was some stuff I had read before, like the cookie experiment for instance.  Basically, they had college kids put in a room with two plates, one with chocolate chip cookies and one with radishes.  One group was told they could eat the cookies while the other group wasn’t allowed to.  Afterwards they were given an unsolvable math problem to see how long they would work on it before giving up.  The ones who had to resist the cookies gave up 60% earlier on average than the ones who were allowed to eat the cookies.  The point of the experiment was that willpower is an exhaustible resource, we only have so much of it.

What I found interesting in this chapter though was how he talked about willpower as a muscle that can be strengthened.  I hadn’t considered it like that before.  He gave the example of Starbucks and how they’ve taught their employees willpower as part of their curriculum.  Basically they have them visualize different parts of the job that might be particularly stressful and how they will react to it.  They give them a scenario and then have them fill out how they would react.  That way when it happens they’re already prepared for how they’re going to react.

Another example was a Scottish psychologist who tried an experiment with a group of people whose average age was 68 and had gone through knee or hip surgery.  What was interesting was that they gave each participant the same exercise booklet but with one group they also had blank pages at the end and asked them to plan how they would exercise.  Where would they do it?  When would they do it?  What if they encountered difficulty?  What would they do then?  The group who was told to make a plan and specifically how they would handle difficulties along the way recovered twice as fast or something insane like that.  Wow.  A little planning goes a long way certainly comes to mind there, doesn’t it?