What is keeping your from your Goals?

There’s a silent but unstoppable force that prevents you from achieving your goals.

It’s not just you. It’s every single person on this planet.

What’s even worse is, there’s no amount of willpower or discipline or diets or vitamin pills that will make this go away. It’s just something you’re born with.

And you must learn to live with it… or your goals will forever remain beyond your reach.

It’s the force that keeps you from eating healthy - and instead of a carrot, it makes you reach for a donut. Instead of writing an email to your list, it makes you open a new tab and check out what’s new on Facebook (and 30 minutes later, you can’t even figure out what it is you were looking at). Instead of saving up your money for a reasonably priced TV, you sign up for monthly payments for a 60” LED monstrosity which is too big for any reasonable living room.

It’s a force that keeps people locked in prisons. Literally. (Well, figuratively too.)

When researchers examined 1,112 judicial rulings over a 10-month period to see what factors impacted whether or not a judge would approve a criminal for parole, they thought they were going to find something sensible, like type of crime committed, or what particular laws were broken.

Well, no such luck.

The choices made by judges were impacted by all kinds of things that shouldn’t have any effect in the courtroom. Such as…

The time of the day.

At the start of the day, a judge would likely parole about 65% of the prisoners. However, as the day went on, the likelihood of a criminal getting a favorable ruling steadily dropped to zero. After taking a lunch break, the judge would feel rested and refreshed, and the likelihood of a criminal getting a parole would jump back up to 65%… and then, slowly dwindle back down to zero by the end of the day.

Just like your decisions on whether to eat healthy or not, or to work on your online business or not, or to be financially responsible or not, these judges relied on…

Willpower!

Willpower is often compared to a muscle - it will get tired the more you use it. (It also implies that you can exercise it, but that’s not really true). The term they use for it is ego depletion… which is something I discovered a few decades ago.

However… it seems like the researchers have jumped to conclusions a bit.

(Which makes it all the worse that the self-help industry mostly clings to this belief).

There might not be such a thing as ego depletion. Instead… if you see willpower as a finite resource, it will be a finite resource for you. If you don’t know it’s a finite resource, it won’t be.

The ego depletion hypothesis is making people less likely to succeed - because it gives you a reason to quit when you could’ve otherwise persisted.

Michael Inzlicht, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, believes willpower is more like an emotion. Just like you don’t feel happy or sad all day long every day, you will have ebbs and flows of willpower.

Meaning, it’s fine to cut yourself some slack every now and then.

And then get back at it. You have more willpower than you think. And there’s no mystic tank in your head filled with ego that can be depleted, as far as I can tell.