Willpower: Discover It, Use It and Get What You Want

It is one the most helpful books I ever read

Clear and informative

The problem with willpower is you need some to read this book.. But having finally made it through the first chapter and started to work through the first two questionnaires I now know that my willpower isn't as bad as I thought (which is motivating) and that my problems with completing projects are due to a lack of organisation (light bulb moment). Now I know I need to break tasks down into a list of sub-tasks to do and tick them off when they are done. That way I'll monitor what I do in an organised way, instead of just doing whatever comes to mind and hopping from task to task and never getting things finished (my biggest problem).The book is divided into 5 big chapters - each with smaller subsections and I'm only in the first 25 pages and already identified my main problems and now I'm looking for the solutions and motivated to finish the book.The book contains useful motivational tools, interesting questionnaires to identify learning style, negative thinking, optimism and lots of general examples of other people who successfully improved their willpower.Getting started with the book was a little bit of a struggle - chapter 1 gives a lot of information on the brain and willpower research and if that doesn't interest you, I think you could easily skip all that and just do the questionnaire on p4 and then skip on to Part 2 which starts on p23.

I don't consider that I have much will power and yet for things that I enjoy I can be very focused. This book let some light into how you go about getting on top of stuff that you have years of negelecting - both personal, work and social.The key it turns out is to develop small changes in behaviour that don't take huge effort and then keep repeating them for a few weeks. A bit like learning scales on an instrument until they become part of your muscle memory. Then when it comes to learning new riffs it is so much easier becasue the building blocks are in place. So have I got more will power. Well yes and no. But I think this book is helping.

In many ways, this is fairly typical of self-help books that I’ve looked at, filled with a mixture of tests, advice, and allusions to scientific studies to back up the author’s claims. However, the focus isn’t really what I was expecting, from a book called ‘Willpower’.Probably the main take-home message is that bringing about a desired behaviour change – whether it be quitting smoking, exercising more, or whatever – is going to require willpower at first but ultimate success requires that the behaviour in question becomes a habit, at which point there’s little if any need for willpower. This all sounds very plausible, it’s just that much of the discussion is therefore not about willpower. I note that the back cover suggests one can “be a master of self-control” and I’d say that this more accurately reflects the book’s content than the title.This minor gripe aside, lots of the advice contained in the book sounded useful for self-improvement, but I did struggle to follow any overall logic to the presentation. At times, the discussion seemed to jump from point to point with very little connection. Even if all the advice was good, it was hard to see any connection – and this, along with the lack of an index, also means that I’d be hard pressed to re-find any particular point that I want to revisit.My final complaint is that no references are provided, not even notes at the end. I understand that academic-style referencing can be off-putting in a book written for a general audience, but the author frequently alludes to studies that support her theories, occasionally name-dropping a particular psychologist or journal or the like, but without providing sources it would be difficult to check these claims. To be fair, I guess most people don’t want to go through scientific papers themselves to confirm the findings, but there are occasions where Taylor sides against popular notions, such as ego depletion; it would be good to know whether the studies that support her views really do stand up to scrutiny or whether they’re outliers in the face of much contrary evidence.On this subject, there’s one particular matter where her presentation does seem suspect. She frequently repeats the claim that it takes 3 weeks to learn a new behaviour and another 9 weeks of repetition for this to become a habit. That suggests 12 weeks total, yet the ‘stages of habit formation’ described on pp. 63-64 only cover 9 weeks total, while a UCL study mentioned on p. 62 apparently found that it takes, on average, 66 days (i.e. 9.5 weeks). It’s difficult to see where the oft-repeated 12 week figure comes from, so this is one particular thing I would have liked the opportunity to follow up. As it is, I’m left with doubts as to whether Taylor is accurately reporting research findings.