Willpower Doesn’t Work by Benjamin P. Hardy (BOOK NOTES)

Willpower Doesn’t Work by Benjamin P. Hardy (BOOK NOTES)

PART 1: YOUR ENVIRONMENT SHAPES YOU

• culturally-accepted addictions fuel one another, putting people under constant stress and sleep deprivation, aka survival mode.
• Addiction has become the norm.
• Willpower is for people who haven’t decided what they want to do in their lives.
• True commitment: you’ve built several external defense systems around your goals. (investing up front, making it public, setting a timeline, installing several forms of feedback/accountability, removing/altering anything in the evironment that opposes your commitment)
• We adapt to our environments. A conscious personal evolution = control/create environments that shape us into who we want to be
• We’ve been conditioned to ignore context/focus on ourselves.
• Create conditions to make success inevitable.
• Your internal/external worlds aren’t clear-cut/delineated. They play off each other.
• Design your worldview by actively shaping inputs (info you consume, people you are around, place you go, experiences you have)
• We all have internal, external, interpersonal enviros
• External shapes internal. Worldview, values, beliefs come from outside of you.

You shape the garden of your mind by planting specific things from the environment

• your environment is the only way a person can really change
• If you don’t shape the enviro, it will shape you.
• Don’t adapt to a negative enviro. Change the environment.
• Nurture > nature in every way.

CHAPTER 1: Every hero is the product of a situation: Understanding the power of surroundings

• Will Durant, author of The Story of Civilization: history was shaped by demanding situations, not great men.
• Our culture believes in the hero’s journey. Individualism runs deep, but it’s not the whole story.
• Extreme individualism and complete determinism are both dangerous.

the ability of the average man could be doubled if…the situation demanded — Will Durant

• Equality of Opportunity Project, project by Dr. Raj Chetty and Dr. Nathaniel Hendren: likelihood a person will improve their economic situation in the US — based on the county you live in.
• Jim Rohn: We’re the average of the 5 people we spend the most time with.
• We’re also the average of the 5 people our 5 friends spend time with.
• Negative secondary connection: if friend’s friend gets fat, your chances also increase. You aren’t j ust what you eat, but what you eat eats.
• Every idea of yours comes from what you’ve been exposed to.
• You’re either rising up to or shrinking from the demands of your situation.
• Enviro + you = two parts of the same whole. Changing one changes the other.
• Total free will doesn’t exist (you can’t fly at will). External variables CONSTRAIN, but don’t fully DETERMINE behavior.
• There’s a range of possibilities in each circumstance.

When the stakes are high enough, any form of behavior is possible

• It’s not free will or determinism, but each person has a contextual agency
• Dr. Jeffrey Reber: our physical world/bodies don’t cause us to act, but they constrain our choices.
• We are never independent of context.
• It’s not free will OR determinism, choice OR enviro, but BOTH. It’s the choice OF environment.
• Environmental design: your greatest responsibility. Free will = choosing your environment.
• Dan Ariely, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: the body and mind influence each other.
• We judge ourselves the way others judge us: by our actions
• Precognition: Personality is shaped by behavior. Alter your identity by altering your behavior.
• Even wearing different clothes, changing your hairstyle, etc., can make you feel different!
• Change is inevitable. Growth is optional. You are evolving right now.
• Changes are minor day to day (which is how we see ourselves) but measured in 6 month intervals, changes can be stark.
• Your environment reveals you to yourself and to others. The clearest indicator of your internal identity is your external environment. Where you are comfortable says a lot about you.
• All environments have an agenda

If you live with a lame man, you will learn to limp — Plutarch

• You need a coming-of-age, point-of-no-return moment like Simba (Lion King)

CHAPTER 2: How your environment shapes you: The myth of willpower

• Focusing on goal-setting and attitude only works for a small subset of behaviors (Dr. Neal, Duke U)
• Almost all behaviors are outsourced by your environment. Do something enough in the same place = it becomes subconscious (automaticity)
• Most people outsource their behavior to an environment that contradicts their goals. Environments can trigger smoking at (seemingly) random/unexpected intervals
• In a negative environment, willpower’s all you have left — a backup life raft.
• It’s impossible to change yourself without changing your enviro
• Each enviro has rules/norms, determining people’s behaviors because there are consequences to breaking rules.
• Social norms are better at controlling your behavior than your deepest ideologies/desires
• Others’ expectations helps you make your own rules/expectations (Pygmalion effect)
• Even gene exression depends on enviro signals/choices
• Idea: play piano (or do something else) when you get home to emotionally transition from one enviro to another
• You don’t have a fixed, unchanging identity. It’s all relative. The relationship between things is the reality, not the things themselves. (think of chess pieces — each piece’s power is relational. — Josh Waitzkin)
• Not all soils can grow specific types of plants. Plant and soil are parts of a whole.

CHAPTER 3: Two types of “enriched” environments: High stress and high recovery

• Story of Courntey Reynolds, entrepreneur: spends half a month each in Denver (work location) and Las Vegas (rest and recovery).
• Eustress: positive stress
• Adrenal Reset Diet, Alan Christianson and Sara Gottfried: we need to create space to unplug or our body will store fat not burn it.
• Best creative breakthroughs happen during mental recovery after hard work.
• Enriched environments can help with this.

PART II: HOW TO MAKE WILLPOWER IRRELEVANT

CHAPTER 4: Reset your life: Make powerful decisions outside your routine environment

• Abraham Maslow: peak experience: rare, exciting, deeply moving, mystical effect
• Peak experiences most likely to occur in enriched environments optimized for rest/recovery.
• Peak experiences change people’s lives.
• Most people make weak decisions without conviction from a non-peak state
• To have clarity about your life/goals, you must rest regularly.
• Most people are addicted to technology and work.
• Use your journal: start with gratitude, reflect on your life/relationships, write about the people who matter to you, write about how far you’ve come, record your history, write down commitments and key changes.
• Writing can help you reconnect with your why
• Weekly journaling: reflect on the previous week (good/bad/wins/losses/significant events) and plan for the next
• Put yourself in a peak state before journaling

CHAPTER 5: Designate a sacred space: Establish a daily environment to stay on course

• Seemingly inconsequential aspects of life can ripple into waves
• Continually make course corrections or you will naturally go WAY OFF COURSE
• Morning routine: to put yourself in a peak state. You need a morning ritual to trigger something beyond your old ways of acting.
• Go somewhere out of your routine, don’t start your day in a reactive state. Create a sacred daily enviro for visualization/journaling
• The story of Jim Carrey: wrot ehimself a $10 million check 10 years before he made it.

CHAPTER 6: Remove everything that conflicts with your decisions: Subtraction is productivity

• Everything you have in your life is energy and it creates an equal/opposite reaction.
• You are carrying lots of physical stuff as well as suppressed emotions.
• Don’t avoid a small amount of work — you’ll just get a lifetime of pain
• You are where you are because of who you are. Outsiders can’t change the enviro for you, you’d just go back.
• The less you own, the more you have.
• Less Doing, More Living by Ari Meisel: Set upper and lower limits on everything.
• Upper limits are easy: inbox emails, work hours, social media time, spending money, etc.
• Lower limit ex’s: trips/month, running miles/week, cooking times/week
• Every environment is optimized for SOMETHING. Most people’s environments have dopamine-seeking triggers: distractions!
• The Paradox of Choice by Dr. Barry Schwartz: the more choices you have, the fewer decisions you make. Eliminate options.

Once I made a decision, I never thought about it again — Michael Jordan

• No FOMO, no questioning your judgment
• Every choice involves opportunity cost, you can’t have it all
• Everything of true value comes with sacrifice. Embrace the opportunity cost
• Eliminate bad options so willpower and working memory are unaffected
• A comfortable web of relationships can be a self-made prison
• It’s costly to keep things in working/short-term memory — you can’t ponder/reflect
• Eliminate working memory by writing down ideas the instant they come, free your working memory space
• Your life is the product of your standards
• Delete: physical things, distractions, attractive but ultimately bad decisions, people who “don’t make sense,” commitments you shouldn’t have made, working memory

CHAPTER 7: Change your default options: Make positive choices automatic

• People often take the first choice given to them
• 1970s Bruce Alexander mouse-drug experiment: Using a Rat Park helped rats ignore drugs because they had other things to do. (Same results when Lee Robins researched drug addicted veterans after the Vietnam War)
• Much of your behavior is unconsciously cued by your environment — even behaviors you hate. We are integrated with the enviro.
• Disrupt your enviro to alter undesired behavior.
• Even small changes like eating with nondominant hand can alter action sequence and learned body response, and make your conscious mind consider what you really want to do
• Addictions and behaviors are environmental (smokers can go for hours without thinking about smoking…if they’re in a plane)
• Peter Drucker: what stands out about this time is not technology, but the fact that people have the most choices ever in history, and we’re unprepared for it.
• Environment is more important/influential now that we have the whole world at our fingertips. No other generation has ever been so tempted with distractions
• Most pervasive addictions in culture: tech, work, food, drugs, porn, people.
• Culture is shaped to isolate us more.
• Deep, meaningful relationships reduces chances of unhealthy addictions.
• Principle #1: Don’t be a slave to your environment. Espec. phone. Technology stresses your system. You need to have Sabbath (one day per week to recover)
• Principle #2: Wherever you are, that’s where you should be. Millenial default: always be available. Use a 1–2 min ritual to detach psychologically from work.
• Principle #3: Act on instinct and intuition not impulse and dependence. People use caffeine because of the 8-hour workday. You really only have 4–5 good mental hours of focus per day.
• Principle #4: You need deep human connections to overcome any addiction. The opposite of addiction is connection.
• Addiction = almost everything in life is related to the addiction, addicts fear intimacy. But people need to know their behavior matters not only to themselves, but to others.
• People die in quicksand from dehydration, they don’t have someone to pull them out. Addictions is the same.
• The only way out of addiction is submission, vulnerability, connection.
• Addicts aren’t bad people — addiction is a solution to resolve pain.
• You can’t change your life on your own, you need other people.

Self-actualization is a side-effect of self-transcendence — Victor Frankl

• If you aren’t honest with others about who you are and who you want to be, your relationships will be shallow
• Nothing is more important in life than other people

CHAPTER 8: Create triggers to prevent self-sabotage: Putting failure-planning to work

• Create an automated response for how to deal with challenges
• Implementation intentions: know ahead of time what you’ll do if you veer off course and define what “veer off course” means.
• When your mind thinks about how difficult something is, your chances of quitting skyrocket. The activity feels impossible. You crack.
• Ex of implementation intention: If I am tempted to eat junk food, I willl drink water.
• Automated responses divert attention from triggered temptation. Distractions can make the craving go away.
• Imagine the goal, and the if-then response.
• Planning for the worst sets you up for reality.
• Having a plan is motivating and clears mental fog from your goals.
• You need a strong link between the if-then, so that it is automatically cued. Practice it until it’s habitual. Have a strategy for when you’re at your worst.
• The pre-planned behavior should be easy, not requiring thought. It can just be a mental reminder, like a former smoker saying, when tempted: “If I was a smoker, this is a time I’d smoke.”
• Another example: when triggered to want to play video games, acknowledge the trigger by writing it in a journal, then do some stretching exercises.
• Addictions must be replaced. The void must be filled.
• Visualize the process, not just the outcome. Including obstacles and how you’ll deal.
• Specificity is more helpful “If I crave cookies” over “If I crave junk food”

PART III: OUTSOURCE HIGH PERFORMANCE AND SUCCESS TO YOUR ENVIRONMENT

CHAPTER 9: Embed “forcing functions” to your environment: Make change happen

• Fundamental attribution error: attributing the cause of something to yourself rather than your situation. You downplay how surrounding shaped your decision. (Ex: if someone cuts you off, you think they’re rude instead of wondering if they’re rushing home to a sick kid)
• Martin Seligman: pessimists expalin negative events as permanent fixture of their identity (they or life are the problem, and it can’t be fixed). Optimists explain negative events as situational, short-lived, specific.
• Forcing functions: self-imposed situational factors that force you to act what you intend. (ex: leaving phone in car so it won’t disturb during dinner). Turns something you’d like to do into something you have to do.
• Build external defense systems around your goal. A type of forcing funcntion that serves as “flow triggers” forcing you to focus on what you’re doing (ex: unplug laptop so you only have a certain amount of time before power runs out)
• Best forcing functions: high investment, social pressure, high consequence for poor performance, high difficulty, novelty
• Consequences are delayed: If you got fat immediately when you ate ice cream, you’d stop.
• Operating at a mediocre level = more room for mistakes/shortcuts, so people take them.
• When you’re operating at a high level, consequences for your actions are more immediate than normal. (Michael Phelps would fail big if he started smoking)
• To perform at the highest level, your minute-by-minute performance must mean something. Create big consequences for failure.
• Sometimes a load gives us traction to move forward in life. (An empty truck spins its wheels when stuck in snow. With lumber in the back, it gains traction to drive out)
• Doing new things makes you more focused/engaged. Doing the same things makes you zone out.
• Disorienting dilemma: exposing yourself to new ideas, experiences, things you fear. Shatters your current mental model through exposure to new, contradictory things.
• It weeds out ineffective/unhealthy ways of thinking/seeing.

CHAPTER 10: More than good intentions: How to adapt to new and difficult environments

• Life lessons are like video games: You can’t get to the next level until you beat the one you’re on. Sometimes you have to start over until you beat the level.
• Lessons are repeated until they’re learned.
• Be an adaptive learner:

1. Have a growth mindset: faith that you can change
2. Commit 100% to the change you seek
3. learn to tolerate the things you fear most
4. Deal with/embrace difficult emotions

• learning styles include:

1. Imagining: come up with ideas
2. Reflecting: learn about the ideas you came up with
3. Analyzing: synthesizing, making plans
4. Deciding: choosing ONE way to go with idea
5. Acting: DOING something to attain goal
6. Experiencing: learn from multiple angles — creating, failing, attempting

• You need to use them all. But most people just have one way. They have a growth mindset toward their favorite learning style and fixed mindset toward others. (Ex: analytical learners think their math is good, and it is)
• you don’t have strengths and weaknesses exactly, but positive and negative learning habits.
• Your learnig habits are conditioned by your enviro: because you tend to put yourself in situations you’re comfortable with.
• When you commit to learning, you commit to changing.
• To adapt to a new, challenging environment, you need to be 100% committed.
• point of no return: pursuing your highest ambition becomes your only option.
• Dr. Jeffrey Alan Gray: there are 2 systems governing behavior 1) Behavioral inhibition (stops you from acting due to threats), 2) Behavioral activation system (attunes you to rewards)
• Most people have an avoidance orientation toward life.
• You can change your ID because your ID follows your behavior
• Escalation of commitment: irrational decision people make to justify initial decision
• Why people continue: 1) not lose investment 2) be consistent with behaviors they’ve done before 3) they really want a particular goal
• Humans are extremely adaptive. We’ve developed tolerances for bad things (sugar, pain, bloating, screens, fake dopamine)
• Systematic desensitization: purposefully developing a tolerance for one’s fears.
• Anticipation of an event is almost always more charged than the event itself.
• Adapting to a new behavior: you can do it slowly, but that extends pain. If you commit 100% and jump fully in, you’ll adapt quickly after an immediate high level shock. Purging can hurt.
• Marie Kondo: reset the enviro, rather than continually try to manage a broken system.
• Positive psychology of the 1990s was based on a hedonistic worldview: good emotions lead to good outcomes. But this is wrong.
• Eudemonici worldview: seek a virtuous and meaningful life of growth and contribution.
• Second wave of positive psychology: embrace both positive and negatives of life. Difficulties cause you to evolve. Avoiding pain, masking emotions = stunted growth.

The primary obstacle in your way is how you feel about what you need to do.

• Don’t do things “your way,” do what is required in the situation.

CHAPTER 11: Grow into your goals: Outsource your motivation to high pressure environments

• Illustration: Burke, new-age pianist, wrote a piece he couldn’t play and practiced up to it.
• Compete higher than your skill level. Josh Waitzkin when learning tai chi, faced off against components better than him. He got beaten over and over again and learned faster than other beginners.
• Compete with people who are where you want to be.
• Competition is a powerful form of collaboration.
• It takes more energy to compete with the average giant herd. Compete with those at the top of your industry. Stop worshipping your heroes and their work, begin studying them. (Ex: Soviet vs American space race)
• Context based learning:

1. learn a concept at the surface level
2. practice concept in real-world scenario
3. immediate coaching/feedback to smooth out issues
4. repeat with more intensity and shorter time for automaticity
5. more coaching/feedback to assess skills

• Accumulation of info is not learning.
• Pay for a mentor. That is commitment.
• Learning: memory and how you use it.
• How to get to automaticity:

1. repeated learning of a small set of info. (Ex: same shot over and over in basketball. Go beyond initial point of mastery)
2. Make training progressively more difficult until it’s too hard, then bring it down a little.
3. Add time constraints. (It makes you go fast, and saps a portion of your working memory by making it focus on the clock)
4. Practice with increasing memory load (do a mental task with other things on your mind = adding distractions)

• You want your learning to be fluid/flexible, applicable to many contexts for many purposes.
• Accountability is rarely found in most environments. But it is where “the rubber meets the road”

If you want to achieve big things, your path will be unclear and hazy.

• Clarity means you’re clear on the next step or two. Not the whole thing figured out. It’s a treasure hunt.
• Be an adaptive learner: leap into a demanding situation and let it reshape your identity.
• Every learning stage has rules and lessons. Lessons are repeated until learned. Don’t get used to a set of rules and stay there. You’ll get stuck. Success can be a catalyst for failure.

CHAPTER 12: Rotate your environments: Change it up based on what the work you’re doing

• The environment you’re in should match the behavior you’re doing.
• Psychologist Ron Friedman: the first 3 hours of your day are your best for maximized productivity. (Prefrontal cortex is best right after sleep)
• Research shows: you get 3–5 quality hours of mental work per day.
• To make this window work for you: Change the context…even by using different colored paper can help keep people engaged.
• Novelty keeps the brain active. Timelines keep you on your toes. Difficulty keeps you open/humble/effortful.
• Work in different environments on different days. Rotate them.
• The longer you let an idea sit in your mind without putting it on paper, themore it taxes your short term memory. Take notes.

CHAPTER 13: Find unique collaborations: Change your world through who you work with

• Ellen Langer: Mindfulness is awareness of context and variability/alterations in that context. You are not the same person from one enviro to the next. People are blinded by cultural norms.
• When more than one person works toward a shared goal, their output is different from the sum of the inputs.

Learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist — Picasso

• Churchill: We shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us.
• R. Buckminster Fuller: You never change things by fighting the existing reality…build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
• You can’t get much work done with a lone ranger mentality. Independence is not the goal. Go for interdependence/synergy.
• Unique collabs can help you go 10x or 100x with your goals.
• Robert Kegan, 3 levels of evolution:

1. Socializing self: state of complete dependence.
2. Self-authoring self: state of independence.
3. Transforming self: few people reach this.Beyond independence. You have a worldview but aren’t fused to it. You can compare it with other filters. Now you benefit for collaboration.

• Every thought you’ve had and goal you’ve pursued was shaped by your environment.
• Avoid transactional relationships and seek transformational relationships.
• Few people reach transformational level because our culture is so individualistic.
• Independence shouldn’t be your goal if you’re trying to change the world. Combine your agenda with others’ and your agenda will transform.

CHAPTER 14: Never forget where you came from: Remember the environment where you began

• Feeling connected to a family history helps you do better when facing challenges.
• 3 types of family narratives: 1) ascending (look how far we’ve come) 2) descending (look how far we’ve fallen) 3) oscillating (both ups and downs)
• Knowing where you came from gives you a sense of being a part of a larger family, something bigger than yourself.
• Families and companies fare better when connected to their stories of origin. Traditions are established to remember.
• You’re not independent of context, you’re standing on shoulders of giants. Learn about your history. The more sense of history, the more sense of control, the more context you build, the healtheir you’ll be.
• Learning about history is not about repeating history.
• Every generation takes for granted the rules of the system in which they live.
• Fundamental attribution error: attributing success to yourself. Nope, your success depended on the environment — the situation and other people. Self-made is an illusion. Be grateful for others and let them know.

Conclusion

• Rely on higher power than own power. Why power over willpower.
• People are forced to adapt to their environment or change it. Relying on willpower leads to ruin, internal conflict, disease, loneliness.
• If you change your environment, you will change. But it must be your choice. If someone changes it for you, your chances of adapting will be low.

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