Willpower Book Summary - Willpower Book explained in key points

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Name: Willpower
Rating: 3.9 (168 reviews)
Author: Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney

Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney

Why Self-Control is the Secret of Success

3.9 (168 ratings)

19 mins

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Inspiration Success

Table of Contents

Willpower
Summary of 8 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 8

What’s in it for me? Harness your willpower and achieve your greatest goals.

The concept of willpower has undergone a number of fundamental transformations throughout history. From an austere personal commitment in Victorian times to a quasi-scientific, almost mystical force in contemporary thought, people have conceived the mental fortitude to pursue their goals and its source in numerous ways.

However, modern scientific experiments have finally given us a more complete understanding of what willpower is, how it works, and where it comes from: willpower isn’t the mere ability to control your actions – in fact, it’s crucial to the mind’s functionality, and intimately tied to our brain chemistry.

And with our growing scientific knowledge of willpower, we’re learning not only how it works, but also how it fails. Our willpower is imperfect and won’t solve all of our problems, but these blinks will offer insights into the ways in which we can use this knowledge to change our lives for the better.

After reading these blinks, you’ll know

why students who get self-esteem boosts score lower grades;
why Asian-Americans with low IQs land better jobs than their European-American counterparts; and
why Oprah Winfrey struggles with dieting.

Willpower is like a muscle that tires with use.

Imagine that you’ve just left the gym after a hard workout. Your legs wobble on the way to your car, and your arms are so exhausted that even tugging the door handle feels like a feat of strength. Your willpower works much the same way.

The more willpower you exercise without interruption, the less you’ll have available immediately after.

Essentially, we have a limited “supply” of willpower to use in our day-to-day – from choosing broccoli over cookies to being nice to our in-laws. Any of these tasks can contribute to willpower depletion.

This was verified in one of the author’s own studies, in which participants were placed in a room that smelled of delicious cookies and then divided into groups: one group got to eat cookies, while the other was asked to eat radishes instead.

In the second half of the experiment, participants had to solve geometry puzzles. Surprisingly, those who forwent the delicious cookies and instead ate radishes spent significantly less time trying to complete these puzzles than those who simply ate the cookies: 12 minutes less, in fact.

In other words, using their willpower to resist the cookies left them with less stamina available to tackle difficult tasks later.

In addition, our willpower and decision making are intimately tied together – each has drastic effects on the other. For example, many “deciders” – e.g., prime ministers, mayors and other people in positions of power – seem to more easily succumb to carnal temptations and get involved in sex scandals.

This is likely due to decision fatigue. Having to make so many important decisions on a regular basis exhausts their available willpower, and thus makes it difficult to resist temptations.

In the same vein, we tend to make worse decisions when we suffer from mental fatigue. For many this plays out daily, when people come home exhausted from work and find themselves bickering with their spouse instead of finding compromises.

You can train your willpower to be stronger, just like a muscle.

Some people believe that willpower is something we are born with, with a strength and quality that cannot be changed or honed. Not so!

Using your willpower to make positive changes in your behavior can strengthen self-control in other areas of your life. Even minor changes, such as making the decision to say “yes” and “no” rather than “yeah” and nope,” can strengthen your willpower and add to your supply.

Glucose, not relaxation, is what gives us the strength to control ourselves.

Psychologists once hypothesized that our willpower could improve after a period of relaxation. This thinking was based on the existence of celebrations such as Mardi Gras, in which people are allowed to indulge themselves before abstaining from their favorite things during Lent.

The idea is that if let rip and indulge, you’ll have more willpower available to resist other temptations, such as chocolate or alcohol.

Self-control starts with setting the right goals.

We generally direct our willpower toward achieving certain goals. For example, if you want to lose weight (goal), then you’ll have to refrain from eating chocolate cake every night (willpower).

However, your success at focusing your willpower on reaching your goals hinges completely on the quality and composition of those goals.

Your willpower will fail, and when this happens, you’ll need alternative strategies.

Not everyone has an iron will, and even those who do are subject to willpower depletion after strenuous exercises in self-control. Luckily, you don’t always need willpower to achieve your goals: alternative strategies, such as developing habits or avoiding temptation, will get the job done just as well.

For instance, rather than using your limited willpower to resist temptation, you can anticipate that temptation and take measures against it. If you know that you won’t be able to resist the cool satisfaction and warm buzz from a beer, don’t go to the bar.

Religion and other forms of external authority help us develop self-control mechanisms.

It sounds strange, but you need willpower to develop willpower. But what if you lack the baseline willpower necessary to train it? In these cases, it seems as though believing that a “higher power” is watching over you can have a great influence.

Indeed, religious people seem to have greater willpower than nonreligious people. For instance, religious people are more likely to do things that require self-control, like wearing seat belts, taking vitamins every day and avoiding unprotected sex.

Parents should enforce self-control over self-esteem by being authoritative.

How many times have you heard that the key to a child’s success is his self-esteem? This attitude has been popular for quite a while, but does it hold water?

Even though most Western parents make a concerted effort to consistently bolster their children’s self-esteem, there is little reason to believe that this parenting style is justified. In fact, there is no clear scientific evidence that supports the idea that this creates better social or intellectual outcomes for children.

People with great willpower are not necessarily good at dieting.

You would think that people who have strong willpower would more easily lose weight than those whose willpower is easily broken. However, it turns out that this simply isn’t the case.

Willpower alone doesn’t lead to successful dieting. In fact, this was exemplified in one study in which overweight students with high self-control were shown to have only a slight advantage over their peers in a weight-loss program.

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What is Willpower about?

Willpower brings the concept of self-control back into mainstream discussions on achievement. It takes contemporary scientific studies and breaks them down, demonstrating that, despite the previously held views of many experts, willpower can indeed be harnessed and strengthened to make the changes in your life you’ve always wanted to make.

Best quote from Willpower

Decision fatigue leaves us vulnerable to marketers who know how to time their sales.

—Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney

Who should read Willpower?

Anyone interested in behavioral science
Anyone whose fickleness gets in the way of their success
Anyone interested in how the brain works

About the Author

Roy F. Baumeister, PhD, is a prolific and world-renowned psychologist who has written 450 scientific publications and 28 books. He is currently Francis Eppes Professor of Psychology at Florida State University.

John Tierney is a science columnist for the New York Times who has been honored with awards from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Institute of Physics.

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