2 – 15 – 17 Willpower

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My first workout session went well, as did my second other than the fact that I hurt my hamstring at the very beginning of the morning running. I’m hoping it either feels better by this afternoon or it won’t matter this afternoon, which seems like a possibility considering it’s supposed to be a lifting day. When I first hurt it I had a little bit of despair run through me, I finished fourth in that race when I could have easily finished second had I not had to slow down because of my leg. Oh well, it doesn’t seem like they’re planning on cutting anyone the first week, especially if they’re well behaved and attend everything they’re supposed to attend, so I won’t be too worried about it.

It did remind me that I’m not in control however, at a time when I think I was falling back into my old thought pattern of a powerful me. Maybe that was the purpose, a slight twinge, an inconsequential injury just to slow me down for a couple days, to remind me that I need to enter and continue through this football thing with the correct mindset, otherwise it’s not going to develop the sort of traits that I was hoping it would when I tried out.

That seems to happen pretty often to me, just when I’m feeling high and mighty I’ll do something asinine or get a little insult or injury that reminds me to stay humble. Sometimes they work really well, and I recognize that I’ve been behaving improperly and adjust course. Other times these disappointments just upset me, and I seek to justify myself, blaming everyone around me, and putting myself on an even higher pedestal.

No matter how many times I get up this early, or how responsible I am at going to bed early to accommodate this, I’ve always felt the temptation to go right back to sleep when I wake up. Even this morning I didn’t wake up feeling very tired, unlike how usually, even if I sleep for nine hours, I’m tired for the first couple minutes that I’m awake. I think that’s why I checked my phone right away, because the screen is stimulating and it wakes me up, and it’s a very easy thing to do that doesn’t require much willpower.

Willpower, I don’t know how in the world people get off saying people have a limited amount of willpower. Some finite reserve that only allows us to make some number of difficult decisions in the right way every day. Whose experience are they drawing from to believe that that’s true? Or is it simply an excuse to take it easy on themselves?

I will say that there is some truth to the notion that excluding choice from an activity makes it easier to complete. The habit I was in earlier this year, wake up, write for an hour, eat breakfast, work out, and then go to class would have been a feat had I just decided to do it one morning all at once. I woke up at 6:45 and ate breakfast and worked out before class until that was normal. Then I pushed it back to six and started doing writing in the morning. Then after that was established, back to five thirty to allow for journaling. Now I’m way back at five because I have to wake up at four forty five on Tuesdays and Thursdays and I might as well be consistent.

When I’m in a habit, I don’t really think about the difficulty of what I’m going to do, it’s just what I do, every day. So even if I perceive it as difficult, I don’t reason that I might not be able to do it, I reason that I must be pretty capable, as I do it all the time. So I will say that habits could be construed as “conserving willpower” because they make these decisions easier, but the reason willpower can’t be finite is merely by the definition of willpower.

It is the strength of our will, what we want to do. As such, it is an internal, emotional, and intellectual process much like creativity and intelligence. Now it is quite obvious that some people have more of this stuff than others, Picasso has more creativity than me for example, so in that respect one might say that these things are finite because they are comparable. So they may be measurable, but are they exhaustible is the question? If you work on solving circuit equations all morning, are you dumber in the afternoon? Well you may be tired, but a cup of coffee would reveal that you still have the same intelligence.

I suppose I’ll concede that in the short term, say a day or a week, one’s willpower is relatively finite and understandable as a fixed entity. But in the long term it is completely alterable. A civilian could not step in and be a marine in a day, but all marines are made of such civilians.

How is this willpower increased over time? Like any other type of ability or strength, exercise. The critical thing here is that our short-term willpower, though it may be finite, will be much greater than what we estimate we are capable of. So those who believe in the finite will hold themselves back to far less than their potential and see their capacity entropy. But those who believe in an infinite supply of willpower each day will utilize much more of their capacity each day, perhaps enough to start strengthening it.

So in an interesting turn, the group that may be right ends up definitely worse off, while the delusional ones prosper.