Willpower

down and read for the same amount of time. I can’t focus the same way. I don’t use my time the same way. I waste a lot of time. I’ll drink. I’ll do silly things. After a stunt I’ll go from 180 pounds to 230 pounds in three months.”
    At this point, as he chatted in his apartment in Greenwich Village, Blaine was in his between-stunts mode. He’d completed a brief stunt—brief for him, anyway—that involved a few days of hanging out with sharks, completely unprotected in the open ocean, for four hours a day, and he was starting to work on plans for drifting across the Atlantic Ocean in a glass bottle, but that project was still indefinite. So he’d been relaxing and putting on pounds. “You’re catching me at a time when I’m the opposite of disciplined,” he said. “I’ll eat perfectly for five days and then eat horrifically for ten days. I’ll eat perfectly for ten days and then eat like a maniac for twenty. And then, when I’m ready to train again, when I get really serious, I’ll drop about three pounds a week, and that stays consistent, so I’ll drop twelve pounds a month. So in five months, I’m completely transformed and my discipline levels are really high. It’s amazing. I have self-discipline in work, but I have none in my life sometimes.”
    Hanging out with sharks, holding his breath for seventeen minutes, freezing for sixty-three hours and ending up in purgatory—all that he could handle, but the mundane daily stuff could still frustrate him. His ordeal in the ice set a world endurance record, but the feat didn’t make it into the Guinness book because he never got around to filling out the paperwork. He had the papers, but he kept procrastinating. He had fasted for forty-four hours in London, but nowadays he didn’t have the willpower to avoid the food in his refrigerator. One reason, of course, was the ready availability. “I don’t think I could have succeeded on a forty-four-day-straight fast if I was in this apartment,” he said. “At the box in London, there was no way for me to be tempted because I was in that space. Which was part of my reason to make it public, because I knew that I would have to do it.” But even if he couldn’t do a seven-week fast at home, why couldn’t he simply cut back a little on the daily meals? Why did keeping up a modicum of discipline—in eating and reading and working efficiently—seem so difficult at the moment?
    Because he didn’t have the motivation. He had nothing to prove to the public or to himself. He and everyone else knew that he could control himself when he wanted to, and nobody was going to fault him for giving himself a break between stunts. For all his amazing willpower, he faced the same problem as the rest of us when dealing with the biggest self-control challenge of all: maintaining the discipline not just for days or weeks but for years and years. For that you need techniques from a different kind of endurance artist.

7.
    OUTSMARTING YOURSELF IN THE HEART OF DARKNESS
    Self-control is more indispensable than gunpowder.
    —Henry Morton Stanley

    I n 1887, Henry Morton Stanley went up the Congo River and inadvertently started a disastrous experiment. This was long after his first journey deep into Africa, as a journalist in 1871, when he’d become famous by finding a Scottish missionary and reporting the first words of their encounter: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.” Now, at age forty-six, Stanley was a veteran explorer leading his third African expedition. As he headed into an uncharted expanse of rain forest, he left part of the expedition behind in a riverside camp to await further supplies. The leaders of this Rear Column, who came from some of the most prominent families in Britain, proceeded to become an international disgrace.
    Those men, along with a British soldier and doctor who were left in charge of a fort along the route, lost control once Stanley was no longer there to command them. They refused medical treatment to sick natives and allowed Africans under their command to perish needlessly from disease and poisonous food. They kidnapped and bought young African women to keep as sex slaves. When one of the very young concubines cried to be returned to her mother and father, she was ignored; when another escaped, she was retrieved and trussed to prevent another escape. The British commander of the fort savagely beat and maimed Africans, sometimes stabbing them with a sharp steel cane, sometimes