Willpower Project 1 of 11: My Willpower Challenge

This is the first in a series of posts that I will be writing as I work my way through Kelly McGonigal’s The Willpower Instinct. I picked up the book after attending her five hour intensive session on the Science of Willpower and Compassion. The session had a significant impact on me as I wrote about earlier and it left me wanting more. A lot more.

Much to my chagrin, The Willpower Instinct is structured to be read one chapter at a time for ten weeks, like taking a class, with exercises and observations to make during the week. (My usual impulse is to fly through books very quickly, but I’m going to give McGonigal the benefit of the doubt here and read it her way.) I may end up reviewing the book at the end of the process, but that is not my current plan. I will also not be summarizing the content of the chapters except where absolutely necessary.

I will be using these posts to track my thinking throughout the process as well as to create some external accountability for my willpower challenge. Ten chapters and a summary of the whole thing: eleven posts over as many weeks. (I’m even starting on my birthday. Auspicious? Sure.)

Introduction: The Willpower Challenge
The willpower challenge is the heart of the project. In the introduction McGonigal has the reader select a specific willpower challenge that serves as a focus area for the ideas and techniques throughout the book. This focus is necessary because there are simply too many aspects of willpower that we could choose to work on, therefore in order to see progress with the techniques, and within the time frame, one should focus on a single aspect of willpower from any of the three categories: I will, I won’t, I want. I chose from the “I want” category, meaning an “important long-term goal you’d like to focus your energy on.”

I’ve been working for a long time on developing my identity as a thinker and writer through this blog, and I’m somewhat happy with the results, but definitely not satisfied. To this end I am selecting to improve my consistency and frequency in posting to this blog as my willpower challenge. There are a number of immediate wants and impulses that impede my ability to write consistently from the pull of television and video games to my love of exercise, but it is not as though I am incapable of making the time to write. Thus, the idea of posting my thinking as I work through the book was born. These posts may not be the only writing I will post, but they’ll be the lion’s share for a while.

Chapter 1, I Will, I Won’t, I Want: What Willpower Is, and Why It Matters
This chapter is all about defining and identifying willpower. As such the willpower experiments for the week focus on tracking willpower choices and brain training to improve self-awareness. In order to change something we have to know what it is first.

Tracking our willpower-impacted decisions is important because we need good data. People tend to dramatically underestimate the number of willpower-impacted decisions we make each day and as such estimation is unreliable. By deliberately tracking my decisions I should see how often, and under what circumstances, I choose activities that are impulse-driven versus intentional and thoughtful. I should then be able to observe the impact that my decisions have on my long-term goal of writing more frequently and consistently.

The brain training exercise is regular meditation. There are strong links between meditation and a variety of self-control skills. By practicing regular meditation I should be able to improve my self-awareness and goal-focused decision making. (I am dramatically oversimplifying here.) The key to both the tracking and the meditation is to do them without judgement. The task is to observe when and why I make the choices I do, not to evaluate them, or pile on any guilt on myself when I give in to impulse. Similarly the meditation is not about completely emptying my mind, but noticing how my mind wanders and continually refocusing on my breath. This is the observation stage of the scientific method.

See you next week for a report on week one and a look at the second chapter.