Rusky

Title speaks for itself. Best book on willpower in my opinion. This isn't your typical motivation hu ra ra book.





heres a soundbook torrent link.
Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength - Demonoid

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Green Green, Yellow.

DanWesson

Good stuff. This reminded me of reading a NYT article about Baumeister's research a few months back.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/ma...pagewanted=all

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Staccs

I love these threads. Thanks for the recommendation.

dtea206

Thanks for the share,

LOL at the marshmallow test and the kid trying to nibble on the corner.

megatabbers

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ebtek

Just dld the audio book would prefer pdf but cant find it anywhere

-God-

I've read a lot of what he talks about before, in various books. I love psychology, so I'll get on this. It'd have to be a superb book to compete with Neil Fiore's - The Now Habit, which is is one of the best of it's kind in my opinion.

I have download links for the audio of it, but with this not being a "plz thank and rep me for teh share" forum, I'm loathe to post links. PM me and I'll happily supply them though.

BluAffiliate

I have this for kindle if anyone wants it.

ebtek

can i get it on my galaxy tab in that format?

blank_czech

There's a few different ebook readers for Android that support .mobi iirc. Worst comes to worst, you can just convert it with Calibri or a similar program. It's also available on google books for $15.

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Will write for you 2BTC/100 words. Currently not really taking orders. If it's interesting, we'll see.

dchuk

took me about 7 seconds to find a copy of it online to download. Stop being a pirating newb.

Also, I suddenly realized today I don't give a shit about my 5000th post. Fuck it.

EDIT: Interesting, I'm down to 4997 posts. Something must have gotten deleted recently. weird.

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soulbyproxy

Thanks for the Torrent. I've found some useful stuff in the first four mp3s that Ive listened to.

faceblogger

Lot of people are waiting for your epic 5000th post thread. Don't disappoint!

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dchuk

I'll probably end up being about halfway through with this book by the end of today, it's pretty good so far. I'm a big fan of "accessible psychology" that is easy to read without having to look shit up as I'm reading.

I'll try and think of something, but honestly I don't know what I would write about. I suppose I could share my stance on products and entrepreneurship but not sure how many people want to hear me ramble.

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Russ86

7:20

"Outsourcing Self-Control"

HAHAHAHAHA

Also, completely unrelated to this thread, Filestube.com is a great website...

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wiredniko

This book was indeed great. Here are my book notes on it

Introduction
- The personal qualities that predict positive outcomes in life are two traits, intelligence and self-control
- We are a generation of "other-directed" people, guided by our neighbor opinions rather than strong inner moral convictions
- In the early 1900s there was "Believe it, achieve it", followed by 1960s "if it feels good, do it"
- The idea that we are not responsible for our own fate, our issues are based on social, economical factors
- Marshmallow experiment. 4 year old kids were brought in a room individually, show them a marshmallow and offer them a deal before leaving them alone in the room. The children could eat the marshmallow whenever they wanted to but if they waited until the experimenter returned they could get to eat two marshmallows. Some kids ate the marshmallow immediately, others try to resist but failed, some children succeeded waiting 15 minutes, they succeeded by distracting themselves. Year later the kids that resisted would end up having higher SAT scores, better body mass index and be liked by their peers more
- Multiple tests have been done comparing student grades to personality traits. Self-control is the only trait that predicted a college student's GPA better than chance
- People with good self control seem exceptionally good at forming and maintaining secure, satisfying attachments to other people, they were more stable emotionally and less prone to depression, anxiety, paranoia, OCD, eating disorders and drinking problems
- Study in New Zealand tracked 1,000 children from birth until the age of thirty two. Kids with more self control had higher paying jobs, better physical health, better teeth, and fewer STDs. They were also more likely to stay married. Among those with the lowest self control 40% of them had a criminal conviction
- The first step of self control is to set a goal
- Ultimately self-control lets you relax because it removes stress and enables you to conserve willpower for the important challenges

Is Willpower More than a Metaphor?
- Using your willpower takes a physical toll on your body. Your brain consumes 20-25% of your energy
- The Radish Experiment. Students that were fasting were placed in a room with cookies and radishes. Some could eat cookies, others radishes, others did not go to that room at all and they were left hungry. The radish group was tempted, some of them smelled the cookie or touched it, but no one ate one. Then the students where given geometry puzzles that were unsolvable. The chocolate chip cookie group worked on the puzzle for about 20 minutes before giving up, as did the hungry group. The radish eaters gave up in eight minutes. It appeared that using willpower had left them with less energy to tackle puzzles
- Movie experiment, three groups, one was instructed to suppress their emotions, the other to amplify their emotions, and the third to just watch the movie. Afterward they all took the stamina test by squeezing a hand exerciser. The control group squeezed for the same amount of time before and after the movie, the unemotional and amplified emotions group quit much sooner
- Ego depletion is the diminished capacity to regulate your thoughts, feelings and actions
- Based on experiments ego depletion causes a slowdown in the anterior cingulate cortex, the brain area that is crucial for self control
- Ego depletion creates more intensified feelings as well, both negative and positive
- Stress depleted your willpower, which diminishes your ability to control your emotions
- You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it
- You use the same stock of willpower for all manner of tasks
- Willpower has four broad categories, control of thoughts, control of emotions, impulse control (resist temptations), performance control (right combination of speed and accuracy for the task at hand, managing time, persevering when you feel like quitting)
- Based on ego depletion studies focus on one project at a time. If not you may succeed for a while but it leaves you more depleted and more prone to serious mistakes later

Where Does the Power In Willpower Come From?
- No glucose, no willpower. The pattern shows up time and time again as researchers test more people in different situations
- Replenishing glucose helps you regain willpower
- With ego depletion your brain does not stop working, its just that the self control part works less and other parts like emotional responses work more
- Sugar can give a short boost of glucose but its not the solution. Foods with low glycemic index
- When you are sick save your glucose for your immune system
- When you are tired sleep. By resting we reduce the body's demands on glucose

A Brief History of the To Do List, From God to Drew Carey
- The first step in self control is to set a clear goal
- Self control is called self regulation by researchers, regulating means changing but only a particular kind of intentional, meaningful changing
- The problem is not lack of goals for most people but too many of them
- We can be even more unrealistic in setting longer term goals
- Keep any eye out for goals that are conflicting. You end up worrying a lot, you get less done, your health suffers, physically as well as mentally
- Various experiments suggest that addicts of any kind have a preference for short term payoffs
- Proximal vs distal goals (short vs long term). Children ages 7-10 who were having difficulty in math took a course featuring self directed learning with many arithmetic exercises. Four groups, set proximal goals (6 pages per session), distal goal complete 42 by the end of seven sessions (same total as group 1), third group had no goals, fourth group did not do the exercises. Proximal goal group outperformed everyone. Even though they spent less time per session, they got more done, thus progressing through the meterial faster. At the end when faced with hard problems, they persevered longer and were less likely to give up. It turned out that distal goals were no better than having no goals at all
- Dutch researchers did a study for distal goals. High school boys who cared about long term objecting tended to do better in school. Regardless of whether they reached their goals they moved forward by seeing the connection between their distant dreams and daily life
- Goal specificity. Three groups learning how to study, one group made daily plans, another monthly plans, third no plans. Monthly planners performed better and improved. A year later they continued to out-perform, daily planners had largely abandoned planning, daily or otherwise
- Zeigarnik effect: Uncompleted tasks and unmet goals tend to pop into one's mind. Once the task is completed the stream of reminders comes to stop
- With the Zeigarnik effect your unconscious mind is asking the conscious mind to make a plan

Decision Fatigue
- Making multiple decisions also drains your willpower. Experiment with two groups, one had to decide which gift they wanted at the end of the experiment, had to compare what they wanted with other items, the other group was aware of the gifts. Both groups had to hold their hand under cold water. Decision making group quit earlier
- Making decisions about things you like is less depleting, but you still run out of willpower
- Making decisions for others instead of yourself is easier
- Part of the resistance against making decisions comes from the fear of giving up options
- Compromising is one of the first thing that declines when willpower is depleted

Where Have All the Dollars Gone?
- Self awareness makes you comparing yourself to self created standards
- Self awareness evolved because it helps self regulation
- After setting a goal and monitoring your behavior, what should you focus on how far you have come or how much remains to be done? You will be happier looking at what you have accomplished, but to stoke motivation and ambition focus on the road ahead
- Comparing yourself with others gives you additional benefits
- Public information has more of an impact than private information about yourself

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wiredniko

Can Willpower Be Strengthened?
- Practicing your willpower on simple things can strengthen your willpower for bigger challenges
- Exercising self control in one area seems to improve all areas of life
- Having a stronger willpower means that it gets depleted slower

Outsmarting Yourself in the Heart of Darkness
- Hot-cold empathy gap is the inability during a cool, rational, peaceful moment to appreciate how we will behave during the heat of passion and temptation
- Willpower is humans' greatest strength but the best strategy is not to rely on it in all situations
- There are mental tricks that can help you reserve willpower, paradoxically they require willpower to implement
- Precommitment. Lock yourself on your path. Recognize that you will face temptations that will stray you and your willpower will weaken..so make it impossible or somehow unthinkably disgraceful or sinful to leave the path
- Creating a contract with social circles can help you stay on your goals
- Precommitment can become a habit
- Behaviors can be automatic or mainly controlled. High self control people were distinguished for things they did automatically for the most part
- Automatic behaviors linked to habits
- Self control is more effective when people use it to establish good habits and break bad ones
- Use self control to form daily habits and you will produce more with less effort in the long run
- Mental processes can be moved to high or low levels. High levels are defined by abstraction and long term goals. Low levels are the opposite
- Experiments show that a narrow here and now focus works against self control. A broad abstract, long term focus supports it

Did a Higher Power Help Eric Clapton and Mary Karr Stop Drinking?
- Social support groups operate in two different ways. Research suggests that being alone in the world is stressful
- A personal goal can seem more real once you speak it out loud, particularly if the audience will be monitoring you
- Research on religion suggests that religion reduces internal conflicts among different goals and values
- Conflicting goals empede self regulation
- Religion affects two central mechanisms for self-control. Building willpower and improving monitoring
- Belivers' self control comes no merely from a fear of God's wrath but from the system of values they have absorbed which gives their personal goals an aura of sacredness
- Atheists can look for their own set of hallowed values
- Hyperbolic discounting: we can ignore temptations when they are not immediately available but once they are we lose sight of our long term goals
- Bright lines: zero tolerance, total abstinence with no exceptions any time are a good rule to follow, especially if its backed up with the belief that the bright line is sacred


Raising Strong Children - Self Esteem vs Self Control
- Every social problem can be tracked back to lack of self love
- High self esteem does not make people more effective or easier to get along with
- Good grades leading to high self esteem has been tested, in reality good grades lead to good self esteem, but good self esteem does not lead to better grades
- High self esteem increases initiative and it feels good
- At worst case scenario self esteem can become narcissism
- Parenting strategy, set clear goals, enforce rules, punish failure, reward excellence
- The basics facet of punishment are speed, severity and consitency
- Consistency is important in discipline
- All experts agree children need cea rules and be helf accountable for obeying the rules
- Setting up a reward system for good behavior must be communicated before hand and consistently be given
- Older children can be involved in setting up rules
- Video games help with self control, it forces players to set clear goals and keep trying to accomplish them

The Perfect Storm of Dieting
- If you are serious aobut losing weight you need the discipline to follow these three rules. 1) Never go on a diet, 2) Never vow to give up chocolate or any other food, 3) Whether you are judging yourself or judging others, never equate being overweight with having weak willpower
- The Oprah Paradox: even people with excellent self control can have a hard time consistently controlling their weight
- The problem is compared to other things that require self control, the body takes dieting as a threat to its well being
- When a dieter messes up a day they stop counting how much food they eat and over indulge
- If you are on a diet, resisting food that is close to you leads to ego-depletion
- By going on a diet you train yourself to stop listening to your body when its hungry...unfortunately that also makes it so that you stop listening to your body when its full
- Catch 22, in order not ot eat a dieter needs willpower. In order to have willpower a dieter needs to eat
- If the yearning for sweet foods seem overpowering use the postponed pleasure ploy. You can have a small sweet dessert later if you still want it. According to studies telling yourself that you can have some later gives temporary relief and even when the opportunity later presents itself you will eat less of it
- When you are not starving and you have glucose in your system you can prepare for the battle with some classic self control strategies
- Precommitment: keep foods out of reach and out of sight (to conserve willpower). Brushing your teeth after dinner can prevent late night snacking
- Using implementation intention. Making highly specific plans for automatic behavior in certain situations. If x happens I will do y. This allows you to automate the process and less effort is used
- Weighing yourself daily makes people more successful at keeping the weight from creeping back up, less likely to go on eating binges
- The more carefully and frequently you monitor yourself, the better you will control yourself
- Tracking food allows people to lose twice the amount of weight than the people that do not track their weight
- If you are guided by external queues instead by your own appetite you are more vulnerable in gaining weight

The Future of Willpower - More Gain, Less Strain
- People with good self control use it to develop effective habits and routines. Using self control not to get through crisis but avoiding them
- Don't keep putting things off. Procrastination comes from being impulsive, overcome it. Procrastinators test worse and do more poorly academically
- Your supply of willpower is limited
- You use the same resource of willpower for many different things
- Life depletes our willpower in multiple way. Even making decisions creates depletion
- Watch yourself for subtle signs of ego depletion. Do things bother you more than they should? Is it suddenly hard to make up your mind about simple things? Releft ont he last few hours and see if it seems like you have depleted willpower
- Use the calm periods in your life to plan for changes
- Have goals, a vague five year objective along with more specific intermediate goals, like monthly plans. Have an idea of what you want to accomplish in a month and how to get there
- Have a to do list or at least a don't do list to avoid constant mental reminders of things you had to do
- Avoid planning fallacy. Most people under-estimate how long it takes for a task to get finished
- Sleep and food help replenish your willpower
- Neatness boosts self control
- Bad habits are strengthened by routine. Changing your routine makes it easier to change bad habits
- Postponement strategies do help for negative behaviors (not as an excuse to procrastinate)
- The nothing alternative. Setting up specific time allotments that you have to work on a specific task. The options are simple, you can either do nothing or work on the task, both are acceptable
- Pre-commitment is an ultimate willpower weapon
- Monitoring is crucial for any kind of plan you make. The more carefully you keep track the better
- When you set a goal, set a reward for reaching it, and then don't stiff yourself. A mix of frequent small prizes with occasionally a big one (video games, player dies but tries again by focusing on the reward not the failure)

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Russ86

Wiredniko,

Wow, great notes. Thanks for that, I'll definitely be picking up this book now... and to start off a new pattern of routine, instead of downloading the book, I'll actually buy it so that I may appreciate it a little more.

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profitordie

@wiredniko
Great notes man! +rep

@dchuk
Cmon man! We want your 5000th post... Mix something in.. Your thoughts on industry, entrepreneurship, some motivation, your mindset, books you like, automation and some boobs and you got a winner!

Dankface

Wired niko a god

lose lose win

Thanks wiredniko

+rep

OrionSyndicate

Thanks for the book reco. I really like this stuff.

Anyone here try meditation?

The mind is like a computer, it needs a re-boot once in awhile.

medway

Reading this now, some good stuff so far.

ebtek

revisiting this thread / bump. going on a 6 hr drive on saturday. need some educational entertainment in the form of audiobooks

ebtek

also, verbal judo looks pretty interesting

Verbal Judo | Dr. George Thompson | Verbal Self Defense | Art of Communication

BassHead

great book and great notes niko! + rep

Phoenixz

hey thanks for the coles notes

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Hale.Pane

I disagree with some of the testing involved especially the ones involving money. When they offered subjects either 100 now or 150 later, the conclusion they come up with is that 150 is nobrainer. I disagree. 100 now is a better investment because of the time value involved. A mere 50 dollars is a piss poor reward for 672 hours.

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this_guy

Thanks for the notes wiredniko

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medway

If you don't need the money right away then why not wait for more? Only reason to get it now would be if it enabled you to make more than $50 in the time you had to wait.

Hale.Pane

Shouldn't that be the default decision ? Idk. 672 hours is an awful lot of time to make more than $50 I think.

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TigerUK

I read the summary on

Willpower Book Review

the bit about sugar threw me off a bit, basically saying energy increases willpower. hmmm.. yeah not shit sherlock ask any student on the last week before exams what they drink (red bull).

I found the pseudoscience a bit irritating.. and is weird angles which are inaccruate like ^.

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siri om

Not that i terribly lack that personal quality, but i'd love to have more even - bought the book and thanx for share

TigerUK

I think willpower is something that we all think we lack, I'm pretty sure GSP thinks he lacks willpower after 8 hours of physical training in a day because he couldn't do one more hour.

If you want to put some perspective on it, we work off our own backs day in, day out. We don't rely on a boss to motivate us (whether carrot or stick), we voluntarily put in the hours in our businesses and make it grow, day in day out.

This course is designed for the mainstream, maybe some obese fucks who eats a whole tray on krispy kreams and moans about putting on weight, or spends 3 years coming up with a business plan and never puts it to practice.

We're all beyond that, and I get the feeling that the author is talking about those [average] people.

Or maybe I'm completely off the mark on this, I was just perplexed after I read the dumb comment about take sugar to increase willpower.. What the fuck??

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7Radu

have you read the book or are you just commenting on the sugar stuff?

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guerilla

He read a summary of a review. In other words, he's an e-expert.

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Change Your Life
Twitter ^ YouTube

Thank you for your attentiveness,
the forward thrusters, engage on you busters,
I cut the mustard.

cantstop01

I like where this was going, some real lessons here that can help people. But with the glucose thing... that's where I kind of tuned out.

Dumbass

Thanks for the great thread!

Supergeek

Someone on Reddit posted a link to a short ebook on motivation that is free today, entitled "How can I stop procrastinating?" by Keith Williams. I can't find the link, but here's a summary:

1. Make lists of your goals and separate them into a "must do" A list and a "should also do but less important" B list. Focus on the A list.

2. Break your overwhelming-seeming tasks down into steps he calls "chunks." For example, if you want to clean your house, you would list each room separately. If cleaning a room seems daunting, split that up into areas, e.g., 1) clean the stove, 2) clean the refrigerator, etc. When faced with a large task like cleaning your whole house or writing a book, your mind can run away in fear and decide to procrastinate instead. Creating a list of easily-achievable goals is more appealing, and by checking off things you've done, you create a positive-enforcement loop of pleasure and achievement.

3. Visualize success over failure. Imagine yourself in the future if you fail to live up to your potential and waste your opportunities. See that person, fat, useless, homeless, loveless, friendless, alone, poor (whatever you fear the most). Imagine in detail the scorn your neighbors and ex-friends feel for you because you turned out to be a waste of a person.

Now, remove that image and imagine yourself in a future where you took advantage of your opportunities and became very successful. You are successful, wealthy, fit, with many friends and you have whatever relationship successes you desire, whether that is a perfect wife or whatever you wish for the most. Practice picturing the "Loser You" and quickly erasing and replacing him in your mind with the "Successful You."

4. Reduce stress by meditating every day for 10 to 20 minutes.

5. Exercise every day; it will increase your energy level. Eat healthy and well.

6. Track everything you do so you can see your progress. Having achivements under your belt creates a positive feedback loop, and a lack of achievement demonstrates you're doing something wrong and need to analyze what you're doing.

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