Willpower

use for self-control is self-regulation, and the “regulation” part highlights the importance of a goal. Regulating means changing, but only a particular kind of intentional, meaningful changing. To regulate is to guide toward a specific goal or standard: the speed limit for cars on a highway, the maximum height for an office building. Self-control without goals and other standards would be nothing more than aimless change, like trying to diet without any idea of which foods are fattening.
    For most of us, though, the problem is not a lack of goals but rather too many of them. We make daily to-do lists that couldn’t be accomplished even if there were no interruptions during the day, which there always are. By the time the weekend arrives, there are more unfinished tasks than ever, but we keep deferring them and expecting to get through them with miraculous speed. That’s why, as productivity experts have found, an executive’s daily to-do list for Monday often contains more work than could be done the entire week.
    We can be even more unrealistic in setting longer-term goals. When that great self-help pioneer Benjamin Franklin wrote his autobiography late in life, he recalled with some amusement the mission he had set for himself in his twenties: “I conceiv’d the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection. I wish’d to live without committing any fault at any time; I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into.” Soon enough, he noticed a problem. “While my care was employ’d in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another. Habit took the advantage of inattention; inclination was sometimes too strong for reason.”
    So Franklin tried a divide-and-conquer approach. He drew up a list of virtues and wrote a brief goal for each one, like this one for Order: “Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.” There were a dozen more virtues on his list—Temperance, Silence, Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation, Cleanliness, Tranquility, Chastity, and Humility—but he recognized his limits. “I judg’d it would be well not to distract my attention by attempting the whole at once,” Franklin explained, “but to fix it on one of them at a time.” The result was what he called a “course,” and what today would be marketed as 13 Weeks to Total Virtue. Long before Steven Covey’s seven habits and leather-bound organizers and planners, long before the Daily Affirmations recited by the likes of Stuart Smalley, Franklin devised a regimen complete with a “table of virtues” and an inspirational prayer:
    Father of light and life, thou Good Supreme!
O teach me what is good; teach me Thyself!
Save me from folly, vanity, and vice,
From every low pursuit; and fill my soul
With knowledge, conscious peace, and virtue pure;
Sacred, substantial, never-fading bliss!
    In a paper notebook, Franklin drew lines of red ink to make thirteen weekly charts, one for every virtue. Each chart had columns for the days and rows for all the virtues, starting with the virtue of the week. At the end of the day, he would go down the column and put a black pencil mark in the row of any virtue that he’d failed to uphold. In one chart, compiled during a week devoted to Temperance, he gave himself black marks for other virtues: not enough Silence and Order on Sunday, more disorder and too little Industry on Tuesday, a breakdown in Resolution and Frugality on Friday. But he met his weekly goal by keeping the row for Temperance blank every day. Encouraged by that progress, he could then move on to a different virtue the next week, with the hope that the first week had left him with a “habitude” for Temperance that would persist even as he concentrated on different virtues. Franklin compared himself to a gardener removing the weeds from one of thirteen flower beds at a time, and then returning to repeat the course again, each time finding fewer weeds: “So should I have, I hoped, the encouraging pleasure of seeing on my pages the progress I made in virtue, by clearing successively my lines of their spots, till in the end, by a number of courses, I should be happy in viewing a clean book, after a 13 weeks’ daily examination.”
    It didn’t quite work out that way. The marks kept appearing on the pages. In fact, as he kept repeating the course, erasing the black pencil marks from the paper