WILLPOWER QUOTES II
quotations about willpower
Most of life's actions are within our reach, but decisions take willpower.
ROBERT MCKEE
Story: Style, Structure, Substance, and the Principles of Screenwriting
Willpower can produce short-term change, but it creates constant internal stress because you haven't dealt with the root cause.
RICK WARREN
The Purpose-Driven Life
Oatmeal for breakfast. Salad for lunch. Chicken and veggies for dinner--and a bag of chips, some ice cream, a glass of wine, and two cookies for a midnight snack. If this sounds like a typical day, you're not alone. It's a classic example of depleting willpower. Research suggests that willpower may actually be a finite resource, rather than something over which you always have complete control. Studies have shown that people who make one virtuous choice find it harder to choose right when faced with the next decision--as if willpower ran out.
JAMIE DUCHARME
"Is This Phenomenon Ruining Your Healthy Diet?", Boston Magazine, March 15, 2017
Willpower is not going to be enough. You need some type of program.
CHRIS URAN
"From prescription pills to heroin addiction: How a Racine man was able to break the cycle", Fox 6 Now, January 27, 2016
The higher life begins for us ... when we renounce our own will to bow before a Divine law.
GEORGE ELIOT
Romola
Bad habits are hard to break -- and they're impossible to break if we try to break them all at once. The human pre-frontal cortex is like a muscle. It has to be trained. If you joined a local gym, you would never dream of starting out lifting a 300-pound barbell on your first session. You'd start with a 2-pound weight for a 2-minute session, working up slowly to heavier weights and longer periods of endurance. Trying to keep a New Year's resolution to quit smoking or lose a bunch of weight, is expecting your pre-frontal cortex to pick up the equivalent of a 300-pound barbell on the first attempt -- and to keep doing it for hours on end. It's not possible.
MARY HUNT
"Everyday Cheapskate: Sticking to New Year's resolution requires baby steps", Twin Cities Pioneer Press, January 23, 2016
One notable study showed a seemingly miraculous way to restore willpower: by consuming sugar. The study claimed that participants who had sipped sugar-sweetened lemonade demonstrated increased self-control and stamina on difficult tasks.
NIR EYAL
"The Way You Think About Willpower Is Hurting You", Huffington Post, November 22, 2016
Willpower is likely the most important keystone habit there is. Willpower has more of an impact on individual success than intelligence, talent or education level.
P. JAMES HOLLAND
The Power of Habit
If you have a will to win, you have achieved half your success; if you don't, you have achieved half your failure!
LEE LABRADA
FaceBook post, May 13, 2011
There's a lot of psychological disagreement about whether or not willpower is a limited resource. For many years, psychologists believed that self-control was finite, and could be "depleted" after you use too much of it. The classic study supporting this point of view found that students who'd had to resist eating chocolate-chip cookies did much worse on a self-control test afterwards than those who didn't have to resist the cookies beforehand. But we're increasingly discovering that our perceptions of willpower may shape our self-control more than anything else. Various studies have discovered that if people believe that their willpower is limited, they'll exercise it less often -- they make fewer New Year's resolutions, for instance, or take a break after a task that involves a lot of self-control and show less self-control afterwards. If they believe that willpower is infinite, though, they'll just keep showing it, no matter how many other bits of self-control they've exercised that day.
JR THORPE
"Why Are Some People Good At Saving Money? And What Can We Learn From Them?", Bustle, March 28, 2017
We tend to think that habits like eating junk food are a matter of willpower--too little willpower, too much sugar and fat in our diets. But the more we learn about the malleability of the brain, the more we know that "willpower" is a far too easy explanation for what's really going on. The truth is that habits change how our brains work. What begins as a behavior morphs into changes in brain circuitry, and with repetition and time those changes strengthen and endure.
DAVID DISALVO
"Why Breaking Habits Is Even Harder Than We Think", Forbes, January 24, 2016
Willpower, or lack thereof, has been blamed for failed diets, missed fitness goals, credit card debt, and other regrettable behavior since the third century B.C., when the ancient Greeks began to study self-control as a means of overcoming destructive behavior.
DARIA MEOLI
"7 Things You Didn't Know About Your Own Willpower", Shape, January 26, 2017
He who is firm in will molds the world to himself.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Hermann und Dorothea
Nothing can withstand the power of the human will if it is willing to stake its very existence to the extent of its purpose.
BENJAMIN DISRAELI
attributed, Effortless Willpower
Willpower apparently gets depleted if we use it too much -- a growing body of research shows resisting repeated temptations takes a mental toll.
FISHER FUNDS
"Fisher Funds: Willpower keeps bears at bay", New Zealand Herald, February 5, 2016
A strong will deals with the hard facts of life as a sculptor with his marbles, making them facile and yielding to his purposes, and conquering their stubbornness by a greater stubbornness in himself.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
Deal with the dread by addressing it. As soon as you get up as this is when willpower is at its peak. So send the email you've been avoiding, do the task you've been procrastinating on, go to the gym, Do whatever it is in the knowledge that you will feel relieved afterwards and therefore lighter for the rest of the day.
SARAH BERRY
"Five scientifically proven morning rituals to make you happier every day", Stuff, January 15, 2016
The problem with blaming everything on willpower is that when failure occurs, as it often does, you end up blaming yourself for being weak or inadequate. Willpower is not sprinkled on like fairy dust or granted to the few lucky souls born with the right stuff. Instead, willpower comes from the ways people structure things to stimulate the will--where there is a way, there is a will.
GRAHAM SIMPSON
Spa Medicine: Your Gateway to the Ageless Zone
Wishes run over in loquacious impotence, will presses on with laconic energy.
JOHANN CASPAR LAVATER
Aphorisms on Man
For I am--or I was--one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all--a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named--but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not.
JAMES BALDWIN
Giovanni's Room