Willpower

things, it becomes a grim, thankless form of defense. But when you use it to gain something, you can wring pleasure out of the dreariest tasks. We’ve criticized the everybody-gets-a-trophy philosophy of the self-esteem movement, but trophies for genuine accomplishments are fine. As we saw in the chapter on parenting, the most successful strategies for promoting self-control involve rewards, whether they’re being offered by British nannies, Asian-American mothers, or computer-game designers. Young people who seem hopelessly undisciplined in school or on the job will concentrate for hour after hour on games that involve the same skills needed for more productive work at the computer: Look at information on a screen, balance short-term and long-term goals, make a choice, and click. The computer-game industry’s astounding growth—by age twenty-one, the typical American has spent ten thousand hours playing computer games—occurred because its designers had an unprecedented opportunity to observe people’s responses to incentives.
    Online games became essentially the largest experiment ever conducted into motivational strategies. By getting instant feedback from millions of online players, the game designers learned precisely which incentives work: a mix of frequent small prizes with occasional big ones. Even when players lose battles or make mistakes or die, they remain motivated because of the emphasis on rewards rather than punishment. Instead of feeling as if they’ve failed, the players think that they just haven’t succeeded yet.
    That’s the feeling we should aim for in the real world, and we can do it by steadily rewarding ourselves for successes along the way. Achieving a big goal, like quitting smoking for a year, deserves a big reward—at the very least, use the money you would have spent on cigarettes for some extraordinary indulgence, like a meal at a hideously expensive restaurant. But it’s just as important to have lots of little rewards for little feats. Never underestimate how little it takes to motivate. How do you get people to devote a full two minutes to brushing their teeth and gums? Sell them an electric toothbrush that displays a smiley face after two minutes of brushing, as some of Braun’s models do. Dopey drawings may not work for you, but something else will. Esther Dyson likes to tell how, after years of failing to floss regularly, she finally hit on the proper incentive. As we mentioned earlier, she was quite disciplined in most other parts of her life, including forcing herself every day to do an hour of swimming. One evening she had an epiphany: “If I floss my teeth tonight, I’ll let myself take five minutes off the swimming tomorrow. That was four years ago, and I’ve flossed just about every night since. It’s incredibly silly but amazingly effective. Everybody needs to find their own little thing. It’s got to be a reward that’s relevant.”

The Future of Self-control
    Until fairly recently, most people relied on a traditional method for maintaining self-control: They outsourced the job to God. Or at least to the fellow members of their religion. Divine precepts and social pressure from the rest of the congregation made religion the most powerful promoter of self-control for most of history. Today, even though the influence of religion is waning in some places, people are learning other ways to outsource self-control—to friends and to smartphones, to Web sites that monitor behavior and enforce bets, to neighbors meeting in church basements and to social networks linked electronically. We have new tools for quantifying just about everything we do and sharing it with new congregations. Meanwhile, more and more people have come to recognize that weak self-control is central to personal and social problems. When societies modernize, the newly affluent people at first tend to gorge themselves on previously forbidden (or unaffordable) fruit, but eventually they look for a more satisfying way to live.
    The point of self-control isn’t simply to be more “productive.” People today don’t have to work as hard as Ben Franklin and the Victorians did. In the nineteenth century, the typical worker had barely an hour of free time per day and didn’t even think about retiring. Today we spend only about a fifth of our adult waking hours on the job. The remaining time is an astonishing gift—an unprecedented blessing in human history—but it takes an unprecedented type