This is Five Minute Friday episode number 98: Willpower.
Welcome to the SuperDataScience podcast. I hope you’re having a great week and you’re looking forward to the weekend ahead. Today I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about willpower. The idea for this episode came about when I came back from the roadtrip. So you might know that this summer Hadelin and I were doing a roadtrip through Europe. We were meeting students, and it was a great time. And what happened afterwards is I came back to Australia, and I tried to get back into my normal working routine, into my normal habits. And I found it extremely difficult.
You see, the thing is, before the roadtrip, I had developed certain working habits where I was working for a very, very long time every day. So I was working for 10, 11, sometimes 12, or even 14 hours per day. And this is not just on occasion, this was consistently for months in a row. For several months, I was doing that. I’m not saying that that is healthy in any sort of way, but it just became a habit, because there was lots of things that needed to be done. And it wasn’t a problem for me.
And so naturally, as we were on this roadtrip, a lot of things piled up again, and I came back, and I needed to get through them, and I calculated how much time it would take me, and so on, and I started working. But I found it extremely hard. I found it hard to pay attention, to stay focussed, to keep working. I was getting distracted, I was looking at doing other things. I’m not even talking about 10 or 14 hours, I couldn’t sit straight for 2 hours, and had to get up and do something. And I was very surprised at myself. I was not recognising myself.
And that’s when I remembered the whole concept of willpower. That willpower is not just something that you develop and then you have. It’s something that you have to maintain. If you’re not using it, you will lose it. And there is a great book that’s written about that. It’s actually written about habits, but willpower is a big element of this book. And the book is called, “The Power of Habit”, by Charles Duhigg.
And there he talks about willpower as a muscle, as something that you have to train, like your biceps, or your abs. And so as long as you train it, it will grow, it will become stronger, you will be able to use it to achieve more results. So, for instance, if you train your biceps, you can lift heavier boxes. And the more you train, the more heavy boxes you’ll lift. Or if you keep lifting those boxes every day, you will keep those biceps at that level. But if you don’t use it, if you, for instance, go on holiday, or whatever, then 3 months later, guess what, you’re not going to be able to lift those boxes. You’re going to have to start training again. And willpower works exactly the same way. It’s a fascinating concept. And so that’s a very interesting thing to remember.
Because I personally believe willpower is a huge component of success in anything, in work, in hobbies, in sports. I’m not sure about relationships. I haven’t thought about it in that way. But maybe it has some role there as well. But I really believe that you have to have strong willpower in order to make yourself get things done and go in the direction that you need to go. And so thinking of it as a muscle is valuable, because then you will remember to train it, or you will know the consequences of not training it.
The other thing about thinking of it as a muscle, which is very interesting, is that it can get fatigued. So this is something that I didn’t think about before reading the book. That your willpower throughout the day gets exhausted. For instance, if you’re using your normal muscles, let’s say if you’re running or walking around. You’ll get tired towards the end of the day. And you won’t be able to run as fast. And your muscles will start hurting. They will be weaker.
Same thing with your willpower. When you wake up in the morning fully recharged (if you had a good night’s sleep of course, and if you’re feeling healthy), you’re fully recharged, you have full capacity willpower, you can do lots of things. But as you use it throughout the day, it wears out. And that’s why, towards the evening, it’s so much harder to make yourself do things. It’s so much harder to go to the gym in the evening, much harder to go to the gym in the evening than in the morning. It’s much harder to work on your hobbies. It’s much harder to work on your business, or on your side projects. And that’s why a lot of people wake up early in the morning, at 5 am or so on, and work on their side projects, because they know in the evening it’s easier to do things like spend time with family, things that require less willpower.
So there you go. That’s willpower and how it works, or at least my take on willpower. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Check out the book. It’s called “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg. You might find that useful as well. And the main takeaway, if you were to take away one thing from this episode, then it would be that willpower is a muscle. And if you also recognise the importance of willpower in your life, in your projects, in your career, then you do need to train it, you do need to maintain it, in order to keep it at a level that will keep you going, that will keep you pushing yourself forward. And on that note, thank you so much for joining me here today. And I look forward to seeing you next time. Until then, happy analyzing.
