Something Better Than Willpower

Here's a goal achieved: Eat my way through NYC's Chinatown. Done.

A lot of advice about life is entirely true--and entirely useless by itself.

Here's one: To tame the challenges posed by dopamine, look for more enjoyment in the here and now. That's good advice--and useless by itself. The question remains: How the heck am I supposed to find that additional pleasure?

The usual answer is big, broad, and discouraging: try harder. And it doesn't work. We run out of energy and end up back where we started.

In this article, the author mentions three ways to get more out of the here and now by improving "self-control." What she provides are ways to do more of what you intend and less of just what's easy:

1) Create a routine. When there's something you want to achieve, like reading a difficult book, doing regular exercise, praying more often, or finishing a big project, "calendarize" it. Set up a calendar (paper will do, and Google and Microsoft 365 have them built in) and set a time to do this thing every day. You will be surprised at how that daily reminder motivates you, especially if you match it with what's next:

2) Monitor your progress. When you do that thing, check it off. When I finish the task, I change the color of the entry to green. Every day, my calendar gets greener and greener--there's something about a chain of achievement that makes me work hard to not miss a day. And since I list several things for each day, I get to see my progress as the day progresses, too.

The author of the article lists a third thing, get rid of people who waste your time, but that's a lot easier to advise in an article than to do yourself, so forget that. If you're going to set goals, make sure they're doable. That one isn't, at least not without a plan for carrying out such a plan.