Willpower

and school, while the weakest effects were involved with eating and dieting. Although people with relatively high self-control did a little better at controlling their weight, the effect was much weaker than in other aspects of their lives. (We’ll discuss the reason for that disconnect—and the case against dieting—in a later chapter.) Their self-control yielded moderate benefits in helping them to be well adjusted emotionally (being happy, having healthy self-esteem, avoiding depression) and to get along with their close friends, lovers, and relatives. But the greatest benefits of their self-control showed up in school and in the workplace, confirming other evidence that successful students and workers tend to rely on good habits. Valedictorians are generally not the sort who stay up studying all night just before the big exam—instead, they keep up with the work all semester long. Workers who produce steadily over a long period of time tend to be most successful in the long run.
    Among university professors, for example, getting tenure is a major hurdle and milestone, and at most universities tenure depends heavily on having published some high-quality, original work. One researcher, Bob Boice, looked into the writing habits of young professors just starting out and tracked them to see how they fared. Not surprisingly, in a job where there is no real boss and no one sets schedules or tells you what to do, these young professors took a variety of approaches. Some would collect information until they were ready and then write a manuscript in a burst of intense energy, over perhaps a week or two, possibly including some long days and very late nights. Others plodded along at a steadier pace, trying to write a page or two every day. Others were in between. When Boice followed up on the group some years later, he found that their paths had diverged sharply. The page-a-day folks had done well and generally gotten tenure. The so-called “binge writers” fared far less well, and many had had their careers cut short. The clear implication was that the best advice for young writers and aspiring professors is: Write every day. Use your self-control to form a daily habit, and you’ll produce more with less effort in the long run.
    We often think of willpower in heroic terms, as a single act at a crucial moment in life—sprinting at the end of the marathon, getting through the pain of childbirth, enduring an injury, dealing with a crisis, resisting the seemingly irresistible temptation, beating the impossible deadline. Those are the feats that remain in memory and make the best stories. Even the most critical biographers of Stanley hailed his bursts of literary productivity on deadline. After finishing that awful trek through the Ituri Forest and returning to civilization, he quickly produced an international bestseller, In Darkest Africa. By working from six in the morning until eleven at night, he wrote the two-volume, nine-hundred-page work in just fifty days—binge writing at its most extreme. But he could never have chronicled the expedition so quickly without the copious notes and orderly records he routinely kept along the way. By making his diary a habit, like his shaving, he kept writing day after day while conserving his willpower for the next nasty surprise in the jungle.

But Enough About Me
    At age thirty-three, not long after finding Livingstone, Stanley found love. He had always considered himself hopeless with women, but his new celebrity increased his social opportunities when he returned to London, and there he met a visiting American named Alice Pike. She was just seventeen, half his age, and he noted in his diary that she was “very ignorant of African geography, & I fear of everything else.” But he was smitten, and within a month they were engaged. They agreed to marry once Stanley returned from his next African expedition. He set off from the east coast of Africa carrying her photograph, wrapped in oilskin, next to his heart, while his men lugged the pieces of a twenty-four-foot boat named the Lady Alice, which Stanley used to make the first recorded circumnavigations of the great lakes in the heart of Africa. Then, having traveled thirty-five hundred miles, Stanley continued westward for the most dangerous part of the trip. He planned to take the Lady Alice down the Lualaba River to wherever it led—maybe the Nile (Livingstone’s theory), maybe the Niger, maybe the Congo (Stanley’s