Willpower

Could they ever be attracted to a twelve-year-old girl? To get a woman to have sex, would they falsely tell her they loved her? Would they keep trying after she said no? Would they try to get her drunk, or give her a drug to lower her resistance?
    When the men answered these questions sitting by a computer in a laboratory—an eminently cold state—they honestly thought they would be quite unlikely ever to do any of those things. In another part of the experiment, however, the men were instructed to answer the questions while they were masturbating and in a state of high sexual arousal. In that hot state, they gave higher ratings to all those possibilities. What had seemed highly unlikely began to seem more within the realm of possibility. It was just an experiment, but it showed how the wilderness might find them out, too. Turn up the heat, and the unthinkable becomes surprisingly thinkable.
    We’ve said that willpower is humans’ greatest strength, but the best strategy is not to rely on it in all situations. Save it for emergencies. As Stanley discovered, there are mental tricks that enable you to conserve willpower for those moments when it’s indispensable. Paradoxically, these techniques require willpower to implement, but in the long run they leave you less depleted for those moments when it takes a strong core to survive.

The Ties That Bind
    Stanley first encountered the miseries of the African interior at the age of thirty, when the New York Herald sent him to find Livingstone somewhere in the mysterious continent. He spent the first part of the journey slogging through a swamp and struggling with malaria, which left him delirious for a week with what he called “its insane visions, its frenetic brain-throbs & dire sickness.” Then the entire expedition narrowly escaped being massacred during a local civil war. After six months of travel, so many men had died or deserted that, even after acquiring replacements, Stanley was down to thirty-four men, barely a quarter the size of the original expedition, and a dangerously small number for traveling through the hostile territory ahead. Stanley was beset by new bouts of fever and depressed by warnings from veteran Arab travelers that he would die if he continued. But one evening, during a break between fevers, he wrote a note to himself by candlelight:
    I have taken a solemn, enduring oath, an oath to be kept while the least hope of life remains in me, not to be tempted to break the resolution I have formed, never to give up the search, until I find Livingstone alive, or find his dead body.... No living man, or living men, shall stop me, only death can prevent me. But death—not even this; I shall not die, I will not die, I cannot die!
    Even allowing for the fevers and insane visions, it’s hard to imagine that Stanley really believed he or his note had any sway over death. But the act of writing it was part of a strategy to conserve willpower that he used over and over with great success: precommitment. The essence of this strategy is to lock yourself into a virtuous path. You recognize that you’ll face terrible temptations to stray from the path, and that your willpower will weaken. So you make it impossible—or somehow unthinkably disgraceful or sinful—to leave the path. Precommitment is what Odysseus and his men used to get past the deadly songs of the Sirens. He had himself lashed to the mast with orders not to be untied no matter how much he pleaded to be freed to go to the Sirens. His men used a different form of precommitment by plugging their ears so they couldn’t hear the Sirens’ songs. They prevented themselves from being tempted at all, which is generally the safer of the two approaches. If you want to be sure you don’t gamble at a casino, you’re better off staying out of it rather than strolling past the tables and counting on your friends to stop you from placing a bet. Better yet is to put your name on the list of people (maintained by casinos in some states) who are not allowed to collect any money if they place winning bets.
    No one, of course, can anticipate all temptations, especially today. No matter what you do to avoid physical casinos, you’re never far from virtual casinos, not to mention all the other enticements perpetually available on the Web. But the technology that creates new sins also enables new precommitment strategies. A modern Odysseus can try lashing himself to his browser with software that prevents him