Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney make mention of two facts in the beginning of "Willpower": One, the two personal qualities that predict "positive outcomes" in our lives are intelligence and self-control. Two, researchers have concluded that we spend a quarter of our waking hours resisting desires. This book is meant to improve the first (self-control) while making the second (resisting desires) easier. They achieve their aim with the use of solid research, effective story telling and varied examples to drive their points home. After an early examination of the sense of willpower through time, the authors use interesting studies like the "marshmallow" and "radish" experiments to show how researchers have attempted to prove brilliant theories that help us understand where willpower comes from and how to improve it. They give good, quick advice in recommending that we focus on one project at a time for the simple reason that our willpower can only go so far and it is better to give all our focus on changing one thing than a multitude. Hence, their specific instructions to never make New Years Resolutions. Showing the best ways to increase willpower - proper diet, setting clear goals and monitoring behavior - the authors give vivid examples as varied as Drew Carey getting organized, Eric Clapton getting dry or Lord Stanley shaving every day to make it out of Africa to show the different tools we can all use to increase our willpower. They go on to show how making multiple decisions affects our willpower (why do they put the sweets near the checkout line?) to willpower workouts and Bright Lines and other tricks to strengthen our willpower muscle. Raising children & dieting chapters end the book and give further stories and research into bringing willpower to bear on these most important subject areas. In sum, "Willpower" is chock full of valuable advice based on scientific research and actionable material that the average reader will surely find useful in some area of their life they are trying to improve through the application of willpower. A definite must read.

"However you define success - a happy family, good friends, a satisfying career, robust health, financial security, the freedom to pursue your passions - it tends to be accompanied by a couple of qualities. When psychologists isolate the personal qualities that predict "positive outcomes" in life, they consistently find two traits: intelligence and self-control. So far researchers still haven't learned how to permanently increase intelligence. But they have discovered, or at least rediscovered, how to improve self-control. Hence this book." "The first step in self-control is to set a goal, so we should tell you ours for this book. We hope to combine the best of modern social science with some of the practical wisdom of the Victorians. We want to tell how willpower - or the lack thereof - has affected the lives of the great and the not-so-great. We'll explain why corporate leaders pay $20,000 a day to learn the secrets of the to-do list from a former karate instructor, and why Silicon Valley's entrepreneurs are creating digital tools to promote nineteenth-century values. We'll see how a British nanny tamed a team of howling triplets in Missouri, and how performers like Amanda Palmer, Drew Carey, Eric Clapton, and Oprah Winfrey applied willpower in their own lives. We'll look at how David Blaine fasted for forty-four days and how the explorer Henry Morton Stanley survived for years in the African wilderness. We want to tell the story of scientists' rediscovery of self-control and its implications outside the laboratory." Now, I hope these two quotes from the Introduction give a sense of what this book is about - it's one-half psychology and one-half self-help. It's a great read and I would think everyone would have something to gain because the subject matter is universally applicable - learning tricks to strengthen our willpower and recognizing the warning signs that our willpower is being exhausted. Here are some other practical quotes: "Ego depletion thus creates a double whammy: Your willpower is diminished and your cravings feel stronger than ever." "What stress really does, though, is deplete willpower, which diminishes your ability to control those emotions." "You could sum up a large new body of research literature with a simple rule: The best way to reduce stress in your life is to stop screwing up. That means setting up your life so that you have a realistic chance to succeed. Successful people don't use their willpower as a last-ditch defense to stop themselves from disaster, at least not as a regular strategy...people with strong self-control spent less time resisting desires than other people did." In sum, this is a very helpful book. I would recommend it to anyone interested in the psychology of human motivation, or someone looking for a practical self-help book. I would say that either Peck's book, The Road Less Traveled, 25th Anniversary Edition : A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth , or Ellis's book, A New Guide to Rational Living , would make a fine follow-up of to this book.

This book is not what one would or might imagine. It's not a traditional self-help book that'll get you no where and hardly ever work. This one is filled with simple and many studies that can be very surprising and very easy to understand. Surprisingly enough, glucose depletion severely lowers our ability to exercise self-control. A studied and true, and for me, new concept. A main premise of this book is why and how self-control, self-regulation or monitoring can be learned. That virtually anything from deciding where to eat, what movie to watch, or even which road to take depletes our willpower. Considering that we start the day with a certain amount of willpower, each little decision or even deciding not to decide, depletes energy and thus willpower. worldwide studies have been conducted on all these concepts. Many results surprised the researchers. Many old but tried and true adages have been shown to work. A good breakfast is really the most important meal of the day! It's true. It's been studied, tested and has been found to work. Starting with a full tank of glucose is critical and more important, easy. Once started on self-control, in any area, eventually will become a habit. No more decisions to make on that one. Self-control, having been created in one aspect of life tends to generalize across others. Habits finally enable us to dispense with most decision making, lowering stress, expending less effort, reserving more willpower for those more critical decisions that we encounter less frequently. I've a MS in psychology, and what I've learned from this book amazes me! This, to me, is a must read and we'll worth the small cost. I'll be reading it again. I'm hoping you'll give it an earnest try. You won't be disappointed.

I usually avoid self-help books because they have no basis in anything other than the author's opinions. THIS book is just the opposite. What you have here are the results of literally thousands of professional experiments, and that alone should make the "no-free-will" contingent squirm. What you can take as gospel, after reading this book, is that you have a "muscle" which acts as your mechanism of self-control, will-power, AND decision-making. Like any muscle, it will collapse when too much strain is placed upon it --- therefore you should not decide to quit smoking, quit drinking, take up a vigorous new exercise regime, and lose a hundred pounds on the same day. Make reasonable plans, monitor yourself, and -- when you reach "ego depletion," for God's sake STOP making decisions. Grab a bite and take a nap; replace your glucose so you are ready for the next challenge. I was delighted to see the idiotic "self-esteem" movement receive the final nails in its coffin, and a decent burial. We Americans don't need unearned self-esteem: we very much need self-control (or, as Theodore Dalrymple would put it, "self-respect.") There may not be much difference. A teenage girl in Britain who gets horribly drunk on the weekend and passes out on the street after soiling herself is obviously lacking in self-control AND self-respect. A surprise boost is given to religion, and to religious practices. After all, most religions give us a pretty thorough training in required exercises, and those are the things that strengthen our "muscle" of will-power and self-control. More amazing, and inexplicable, is the experience of people like Eric Clapton, a notorious boozer right up until the moment when he collapsed, gave up, and "surrendered." Quite amazingly, he rose from the floor knowing he would never drink again. This may be similar to the experience of George W. Bush, who simply reports, "I haven't had a drink since 1986." Psychologists have no explanation of the experiences of those who "surrender" to a higher power, but churchmen think they do. This book is tough to summarize: I recommend that you get it and put it in your library. You may find yourself consulting it frequently.

Lots of really good ideas presented in ways you can put directly into practice. Already have recommended this book to others and have discussed it with a friend who had already read it. The conclusion did a great job of reinforcing many of the ideas.

I have been contemplating on the subject of willpower for a while and was very excited to get this book when it came out. While there is a good amount of interesting material here on the science of self-control, overall, I would say this title didn't quite live up to my expectations. As one of the reviewers pointed out, there is a multitude of different pop sci books out there. Some are written by the researchers themselves and others by journalists who digest and interpret the information second-hand. In my experience, there is a clear distinction in style between someone who is a primary subject matter expert and someone who is just synthesizing secondary information. The researcher-authors tend to focus more on the actual experiments, strike a decent balance between pop and hard science, do a much better job explaining the meaning of the findings, and are usually pretty cautious about overly extrapolating the results. Journalist-authors tend to err much more on the side of watering down the science (perhaps because they have an incomplete understanding themselves) and generally strike a "let me explain this to an idiot" type of tone. Unfortunately, despite the fact that this book is co-authored with the primary researcher, it really falls into the "journalist-author" bucket. I get a distinct impression that John Tierny was responsible for most of the writing, where Roy Baumeister is cited as an author only because the book is mostly based on his research. I think Tierny tries way too hard to oversimplify the science and calls on very extensive celebrity examples to illustrate some of the findings. I don't have a problem with "case studies", but I really don't need to read through pages upon pages about Drew Carey's disorganized personal life and how some fellow who claims to be a personal organizer guru helped Carey get his life back on track. Additionally, I didn't need extensive biography of Eric Clapton to explain self-control in case of alcoholism and the lengthy example of Oprah to illustrate the limitations of willpower when it comes to weight loss. I and probably 99% of the educated public understand the applications and implications of the research findings without having it explained in great detail through the lives of celebrities. At best, this tactic is a space filler and at worst, an insult to the reader's intelligence. Despite these major flaws, the book does contain a lot of interesting research. Probably the most important finding is that willpower behaves similarly to a muscle, in that it can be exhausted with overuse and trained with various exercises. The authors establish a clear case for a link between high self-control and improved life outcomes and discuss in detail the research behind the success of various techniques to boost willpower as well as the types of adverse events that can result from willpower depletion. Overall, I would still recommend this book to those who are interested in the subject of self-control and its implications. As I mentioned, there is a lot of good research described, I just wish the book didn't contain as much space filler regarding the "case studies" from lives of celebrities and generally adhered to a more intellectual prose rather than reading like a "science column" in a popular newspaper.

Don't let the title fool you. This is not a book about willpower in the sense of "the power of positive thinking" but a review of how humans control urges and stifle desires, or not. The authors Baumeister and Tierney present the latest research on facets of human self-control. Some of the findings will surprise you--at least they did me, as they often did the scholars who originally performed the studies. One of the most novel findings is announced early and it is this--we only have so much self-control to use in a day and as we deplete it our ability to control our urges and tendencies weakens. We must then eat, sleep, and/or, possibly, exercise to restore it. I am a regular reader of works of popular science--physics, biology, psychology, etc. The writers' prose is accessible; I would judge an above average twelve-year-old wouldn't have any problem reading it. Those in later adolescence should probably read it to understand urges better and, maybe, as a result, find them easier to control. The authors explain their points well. Don't expect the analogies and metaphors that some writers use so eloquently to explain their subjects, but, then, the subject here is pretty easy to grasp anyway once the studies' hypotheses and results are explained--not the complexities of physics or micro-biology, for example. My criticisms of this book are these: The authors sometimes seem to forget that there are females reading their work. It seems to me that they sometimes speak to females as if they are a subset of their audience that is mainly male. In one topical entry, readers are asked to imagine a scenario in which they have a choice of selecting A, B, C, D, and their corresponding choices are all female prostitutes vividly described with whom they should expect to have a sexual liaison. I was offended, and not because of the sexy descriptions, but because of the presumption. Why the authors set up the entry in this fashion I can only imagine. Where were their editors on this one!! Another criticism is with their use of case studies to demonstrate their points, such as the use of the case of Eric Clapton to discuss the new research in self-control with regard to alcoholism, Oprah Winfrey in the case of dieting, and others. I thought these discussions lingered too long on the personalities at the expense of the topics, but, on the other hand, many readers will be pleased to read about celebrities' personal lives. They are the "pop" in this popular science read. In the main, I found the research discussed in the book fascinating.

This book is very interesting if you are curious about the science and research behind willpower. The author backs up all his major claims by experimental data. The portions about experiments are dispersed between interesting portions about personal stories of famous individuals such as Drew Cary and David Copperfield. After finishing this book, I found myself getting a better grasp of my own behavior and those of the people around me. For instance, one of the main topics covered in the book is how your willpower gets drained as you make decisions and resist temptation throughout the day. The situation is made worse if you haven't eaten for a few hours and your glucose levels are low. Knowing this, I was able to view my traffic-filled commute home in a different light. What's part of the reason why people are so angry while stuck in traffic? Well, they have been making decisions throughout the whole workday and now their willpower is drained. Furthermore, they most likely have not had dinner yet and their glucose levels are low, which is the fuel your brain uses to exercise willpower and restraint. Now, when I view all these angry drivers yelling and honking or giving rude stares, I don't blame them anymore. I understand that the reason they are behaving like this is perhaps out of their conscious control. This understanding allows me to be more peaceful and realize that there are many factors outside my control and other people can sometimes not even consciously control their behavior. The above is just one example of how I have applied this book into my daily life. Reading books such as this allows you to view reality in a richer and more diverse perspective. I highly recommend Willpower if you are curious about understanding yourself and other people a bit better.

I just finished reading this book and, seeing myself in the behaviour of so many of the experimental subjects, ended up laughing out loud at times. Its primary conclusion is that we have a finite amount of willpower, and if aware of this, can make better decisions and effectively conserve it for the important "stuff" and recognise when we have depleted our reserves and take need to take action to charge up again. It also provides research observations and evidence which you are likely to find explain some of the behaviours you have engaged in from time to time but never understood, which is generally my test of whether a book like this is worth reading. It is a well researched book but written in a very readable style which comes us up with some surprising evidence and conclusions, at the same time as giving straightforward advice on how to conserve/effectively use willpower while not beating yourself up because you can't be supremely efficient all the time. One of the things I do like about it is that it doesn't pretend to offer a "silver bullet". I really enjoyed it and would recommend it to anyone who wants to get a little bit more done with a little less stress.

The book is based on social psychology entirely. Everything is based on experiments. So, that makes it already not competing in the league of self improvement books. Need I to say more? Second, in spite of this "scientific" or at least systematic and rational approach, it does not get boring like many other books in this category, quoting to much researches and not thinking enough on the consequences. So it is full of insights, I am no psychologist but I can easily believe Baumeister is a very recognized professional in his field, really understand the problem and make it easy to understand for you, so that you can implement real steps in your real life to start improving on this basic and so fundamental skill / characteristic. (I also liked the approach he has on new technologies and the way these can help people progress in their quest for a better and more controlled self.:))

The authors do a good job of explain the history and the nuances behind the word willpower and uncover a lot of myths along the way. The structure and writing is also really good and it gives a lot of practical, scientific advice on how to build and train willpower. The topics range from discipline in school, diet and sports to explorers and stars to addictions. A nice read and really helpful guide!

This book is incredibly helpful into understanding human willpower and bettering ones self in every aspect of ones life. The book is well written, interesting, entertaining and informative at the same time. I would highly recommend this book. The look of the book is also quite sleak, though after time the cover can have some visible fingerprints on them, though they wipe off pretty well if you're concerned.

Excelente! Abordagem aprofundada desta função tão primordial da nossa Mente consciente. Recomendo após ler este livro a leitura do Desbloqueie o Poder sua mente do Michael Arruda.