Willpower Doesn’t Work and What You Should Do Instead: A Summary of Benjamin P. Hardy’s book Willpower Doesn’t Work

I have been quoting this book a lot lately and wanted to give it a good summary. My hope is that this will encourage you to read it for yourself and soak in its message. What I am about to share with you though may come off the wrong way, but if you understand the underlying principles it can help you reshape your life.

Willpower is like a muscle

The first thing to understand is that our willpower is in limited supply. It has often been equated to a muscle. You can only use for a short about the amount of time before it gives out. You can strengthen it. It can atrophy.

This isn’t anything new. Psychologists have known this for quite some time. Most people then seek to strengthen their willpower. But willpower will only get you so far. It will eventually give out like a muscle. Willpower is a poor choice for success because eventually, you will fail.

Make Willpower Irrelevant

Because willpower is such a finicky and finite resource, we want to use it as little as possible. Hardy goes even further suggesting that by shifting our environment, we don’t even need willpower.

To do so requires us to envision our future. What could possibly stop you from meeting your goals? In the case of eating well, it would be junk food. Now, what do you do? Get rid of it. You need to rid of everything that stands in your way.

The most powerful resource we have is our imagination. Imagining the future will help you to plan. Every night I try to go through and imagine my next day. It helps me to be aware of other people and the choices that I will make, like what to make for dinner.

If you we spend more time imaging our future, we can become more aware of ourselves. Self-awareness is where we go from reacting to what happens to us and start making conscious choices.

Greatness comes from difficult situations

Will Durant’s historical record of the world The Story of Civilization, uncovered a secret about some of the greatest people known. They discovered most of them were average people that chose to take a stand. It appears that demanding situations created the need for greatness. History was not shaped by great men, but by demanding situations.

Ben relates his own story when he and his wife began raising their foster children (now adopted). He recounts the immense pressure he felt. He hadn’t written a single post in his life, but now if he wanted to give these kids the life he deserved, he had to do something.

We often shy away from being responsible or doing something hard. But it is the difficult moments in our life that can mold us into doing great things. As Hardy has said on multiple occasions:

With great responsibility comes great power

It is through difficult high demanding responsibilities and challenges that we are transformed. If you think about a diamond, it is simply a piece of coal placed under immense pressure. The end result is 100 times more beautiful and valuable.

Forcing Functions

We don’t have to wait for things to happen to us, we can consciously shape our environment to achieve the results we want. We can place things in our lives that force us to do what we want. Hardy calls them, forcing functions.

A forcing function is what it sounds like, something placed in your life that forces you to behave a certain way. Hardy gives an example of how one award nominated artist, consistently uses forcing functions to publish great music. When wants to release a new album he schedules the recording studio three months in advance. He tells all of his fans about it, gets them excited about it. He cancels any gigs he has between then and his time at the studio so he can write.

He forced himself to write this album not by trying to sit down a little bit each day and focus. He got social and monetary pressure on him to put out this album and make it good.

You can similarly place things in your life that force you to succeed. Like scheduling and paying for a marathon a few months in advanced. Obligations to partners can cause you to stretch your ideas. Deadlines make you cut to the chase and get it done. There are many things that can act as a forcing function.

Another example, that is even simpler was of an entrepreneur who would go to a coffee shop to write every day. The catch here is that he would leave his charger at home. The forced him to solely focus on writing. Another simple thing you can do is leave your phone in your car or at home when you go out with friends and family. You are forced to interact and focus on them because you have you don’t even have the choice to look at your phone.

Forcing functions can be as big a thousand-dollar investment or as small as leaving your phone at home. But no matter how big or small, you can use forcing functions to drastically change your life.

I hope that this quick article will encourage you to go and actually read the book. There is so much more than it covers. This book has changed my life and I hope that it will do the same. Check it out here.

Call To Action

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