You Can’t Solve Problems With Willpower

You can’t solve problems with willpower. You can’t achieve any of your goals with willpower. You can’t improve yourself or your life through willpower.

You just can’t do it. Don’t even try. If you do try, you’ll just end up failing. And then you’ll hate yourself, because you’ll think your failure was your own fault for not having enough willpower.

I’m sure a lot of people are shocked by this assertion. How can I tell you not to even try? It goes against everything you’ve ever been taught by guidance counselors, self-help books, and motivational posters.

“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

“People on their deathbeds regret the things they didn’t do.”

“If you aim for the moon and miss, you’ll still end up among the stars.” (Which makes no sense astronomically. The closest star besides the sun is 150 million times as far away as the moon. If you aim for the moon and miss, you’ll either crash back to Earth in a fiery wreck, or end up drifting eternally in the cold expanse of empty space.)

I’m not saying you shouldn’t try things or take risks. I’m saying you shouldn’t try things that rely on willpower for you to succeed.

Why do I say that you can’t solve problems through willpower? I’ll explain below.

The Problem with Self Help Gurus

My claim that you can’t solve problems through willpower, or in fact rely on willpower to make any changes in your life, is contrary to the advice of almost all self-help gurus.

Maybe they don’t specifically tell you to use willpower. They’ll refer to it by another term. Or give advice that is dependent on willpower.

They’ll tell you to:

• Dig deep.
• Have more grit.
• Work harder than anyone else.
• Adjust your priorities.
• Stop wasting time on unimportant things.
• Make time for what matters.
• Be diligent.
• Have discipline.
• Practice more.
• Work on your side hustle every day.
• Do elaborate, time-consuming, difficult exercises.
• Completely uproot every aspect of your life and dedicate hours every day to following their complex instructions so that you “don’t have to rely on willpower.”

In The Weight Loss Habit, I talk about how quite a bit of diet advice boils down to “Eat healthier and exercise more,” as if we’re all complete idiots who have never thought of that.

I’m sure there are knitting blogs that say you can become a champion knitter if only you’re willing to knit harder than everyone else.

And none of this advice actually works.

Because it all boils down to telling you, “Have more willpower.”

Why Trying to Solve Problems Through Willpower Doesn’t Work

Here’s the problem with this:

You already have the willpower you have.

You can’t just choose to have more.

If you could just decide to have more willpower, we all would. In fact, we’d already have done that.

It’s not like anyone sits around thinking, “You know, I could be living a better life, but nah. I’d rather not.”

And that’s the issue.

If there’s an improvement you could make to your life that needs willpower, and you have the willpower necessary to do it, you’d already have done it.

If you have the willpower necessary to eat healthy and exercise, you’d already be eating healthy and exercising. Someone telling you to eat healthy and exercise isn’t going to help.

If you have the willpower necessary to give up TV and social media, you’d already have given up TV and social media. Someone telling you to give up TV and social media isn’t going to help.

If you have the willpower necessary to get up at 4:00 AM every day to work on your side hustle, you’d already be getting up at 4:00 AM to work on your side hustle.

You get the idea.

That is why you can’t solve problems through willpower.

That is why you can’t improve your life through willpower.

Any improvements you can make through sheer force of willpower have already been made.

Any problems you can solve through willpower have already been solved.

That doesn’t mean you can’t improve your life.

You just have to do it through other means than willpower.

I’ll discuss that more, but first I want to briefly say something about willpower-shaming.

Don’t Let People Willpower-Shame You

Willpower-shaming is considered widely acceptable, and a certain kind of self-help guru is eager to engage in this behavior.

They’ll insist that anyone who isn’t willing to sacrifice or work the hardest doesn’t deserve to succeed or be happy.

That if you aren’t capable of following their advice, any failure is your own fault.

That if it’s too hard for you to exercise every day, give up TV, and get up at 4:00 AM to work on your side-hustle, you are an inferior person who should feel like a loser.

Do not believe this nonsense.

If people can’t follow their advice, their advice doesn’t work.

And if their advice doesn’t work, that’s a problem with their advice, not with you.

The self-help guru probably has more willpower than you. So what?

You probably can’t bench-press 400 pounds, sing an opera, perform brain surgery, slam dunk a basketball, write a sonnet, read ancient Etruscan, fly a helicopter, run a sub-3-hour marathon, or build a multi-billion dollar corporation.

You aren’t ashamed to lack these abilities that other people have.

Humans have an enormous range of abilities and aptitudes. Having less willpower than someone else is nothing to be ashamed of.

You Can Solve Problems Without Willpower

Things aren’t hopeless.

You can still improve your life.

You just need to do it in ways that don’t rely on willpower.

Which means finding strategies for improvement. Strategies that are easy.

As I say in Don’t Challenge Yourself, Self-Help should make improving your life easier, not harder.

So find strategies and techniques that are easy to do, which have big impacts. Or many small things that incrementally improve your life and collectively have a big impact.

Building Habits

The best thing to do is to build these strategies into habits.

Once something is a habit, you do it automatically. It takes no thought or willpower.

But to build a habit, you need to repeat it many times. And if it’s something difficult that relies on willpower, you won’t be able to repeat it enough to turn it into a habit in the first place.

Which takes us back to sticking to changes that are easy.

Things that are within your capabilities.

Things that take minimal time commitment.

Things you find actively fun.

Things that give you immediate positive reinforcement.

Strategies that fall into these categories can be built into habits without relying on willpower.

There’s one other type of strategy to build into a habit, which is useful if you want to make a big change:

That is something that starts small, and builds over time.

Because as you’re building the habit, you’re also building your willpower.

Willpower Can Be Built

You can’t just choose to have more willpower.

But you can build up your willpower.

Willpower is like a muscle. When you exercise it, it gets stronger. 

Keep using willpower to the extent that you have it, and eventually you’ll have more of it.

For example, say you want to start running regularly. But you can’t make yourself do it.

Start running for five minutes a day.

It’s just five minutes.

That’s something you are able to make yourself do.

Then every week, add another minute to your daily run.

One more minute isn’t a big deal. That doesn’t tax your willpower. And you’ll have seven days to get used to that before you add the next minute.

In six months, you’ll be running a half-hour a day. Something that’s far too difficult and takes far too much willpower for you to do now. But you built the habit and strengthened your willpower over time, so it seemed easy.

You’ll also increase your willpower through implementing small changes.

Even though they’re easy on their own, and within your current capabilities, just doing things differently to improve your life builds willpower.

If you do this enough, not only will your life drastically improve directly from all the small changes, but you’ll have increased your willpower such that you are capable of making the bigger, willpower-dependent changes.

Only you won’t make these changes because some self-help guru told you to.

You’ll make the changes that you know are right for you, once you become capable of them.

Here’s an example from my own life:

Approximately every self-help guru ever says to watch much less TV.

The ones who don’t say to chuck your TV in the trash entirely say that you should at least cancel your cable, so you can be deliberate and only watch your favorite shows via streaming or on-demand.

But this was advice I always ignored. When I was drained from a long day at work, I just wanted to plop down on the couch, turn my brain off, and watch whatever random thing I had on the DVR.

But as I kept making small changes in my life, I found myself watching less and less TV. I was just more interested in doing something productive than watching something dumb. Or I’d decide to skip watching dumb stuff so I could get to bed and wake up early the next day to be productive.

And as I was watching less and less TV, my cable company kept raising their prices more and more. Eventually I decided that cable was a waste of $200 a month, and canceled it. This resulted in my TV watching plummeting immensely from its already reduced levels.

I didn’t cancel my cable because some guru told me to, or because I read it in a self-help book. (Even though I read it in all the self-help books.) I did it to save money.

But in reality, it’s something I had been thinking about for years. I only did it once I had built up the willpower to be capable of it. And that willpower was built up through all the small changes I had made in my life.

Self-Help Gurus Get It Backwards

You can’t solve problems through willpower. The causation goes the other direction.

You gain willpower through solving problems.

This is why it’s so vital to look for quick wins, easy ways to make your life better, and incremental improvements.

There are small, easy improvements, and there are big, difficult improvements.

You could struggle to implement the big, difficult improvements. Make yourself miserable trying to fight your nature. And ultimately give up, defeated.

Or you could take many of those small, easy improvements, which will be, well, easy.

And the more small, easy improvements you do, the more those big, difficult improvements will feel small and easy.

And after enough easy improvements, you’ll be able to do previously difficult improvements as well.

That is the power of not trying to solve your problems through willpower.

If you keep solving problems without relying on willpower, eventually you won’t need any more willpower than you already have.