Willpower Doesn't Work summary

Have you ever worked from home? If you have, you’ve probably experienced some typical problems. Any parent with young children will understand the difficulty of trying to work where you live – but even for the rest of us, it can prove a challenge to work somewhere we normally relax.

So maybe the phrase “work hard, play hard” needs an update: work hard and play hard, yes, but make sure you do each in a different place! In fact, people have been shown to operate at their best when they can make use of two very different environments – one high-stress and the other high-recovery.

Tsh Oxenreider was stuck in a rut. For a while, her life hadn’t been moving in the right direction. She had plenty of goals, plans, and projects, but she just couldn’t find it in herself to commit to them fully.

Then, on a whim, Tsh and her husband decided to travel the globe with their kids. For Tsh, the effect was profound. As the family moved from place to place, she found she was able to work with a newfound sense of purpose. In short, her ideas began to flow.

Gary B. Sabin, a successful corporate CEO, tells a funny and instructive story about the illogical ways we avoid discomfort. Once, he took a group of Boy Scouts on a camping trip to the desert. They reached their destination in good time, set up camp, and hunkered down for the night. 

But when Sabin woke up in the morning, he noticed that one boy looked sleepy and disheveled. The reason? It turns out, he hadn’t used his sleeping bag that night because he didn’t want to pack it up in the morning. In other words, he’d spent hours freezing just to save himself a few minutes’ work!

We’ve all heard of “the power of positive thinking.” According to this theory, if you believe you can achieve something, you’re already one step closer to getting it done. You just need to avoid dwelling on the fact that you might fail. 

It’s a familiar notion – but what if it’s entirely wrong? What if thinking about the ways you might fail is actually a great way to ensure you meet your targets?

We don’t like to be forced to do things, right? If we think something needs doing, we can always just get up and do it voluntarily. But as you may have experienced, this isn't always the case. We know we need to start exercising, but we don’t. We know we should be working, but we continue wasting time. 

There are a number of reasons for this behavior – like laziness, discomfort, and fear – and the end results are always the same: dissatisfaction and regret for our actions. Willpower alone is rarely up to the task, so what can we do to become our better selves?