Willpower

and monkeys couldn’t get through meals peacefully if they had squirrel-sized brains. They might expend more calories in fighting than they’d consume at the meal.
    Although other primates have the mental power to exhibit some rudimentary etiquette at dinner, their self-control is still quite puny by human standards. Experts surmise that the smartest nonhuman primates can mentally project perhaps twenty minutes into the future—long enough to let the alpha male eat, but not long enough for much planning beyond dinner. (Some animals, like squirrels, instinctively bury food and retrieve it later, but these are programmed behaviors, not conscious savings plans.) In one experiment, when monkeys were fed only once a day, at noon, they never learned to save food for the future. Even though they could take as much as they wanted during the noon feeding, they would simply eat their fill, either ignoring the rest or wasting it by getting into food fights with one another. They’d wake up famished every morning because it never occurred to them to stash some of their lunch away for an evening snack or breakfast.
    Humans know better thanks to the large brain that developed in our Homo ancestors two million years ago. Much of self-control operates unconsciously. At a business lunch, you don’t have to consciously restrain yourself from eating meat off your boss’s plate. Your unconscious brain continuously helps you avoid social disaster, and it operates in so many subtly powerful ways that some psychologists have come to view it as the real boss. This infatuation with unconscious processes stems from a fundamental mistake made by researchers who keep slicing behavior into thinner and briefer units, identifying reactions that occur too quickly for the conscious mind to be directing. If you look at the cause of some movement in a time frame measured in milliseconds, the immediate cause will be the firing of some nerve cells that connect the brain to the muscles. There is no consciousness in that process. Nobody is aware of nerve cells firing. But the will is to be found in connecting units across time. Will involves treating the current situation as part of a general pattern. Smoking one cigarette will not jeopardize your health. Taking heroin once will not make you addicted. One piece of cake won’t make you fat, and skipping one assignment won’t ruin your career. But in order to stay healthy and employed, you must treat (almost) every episode as a reflection of the general need to resist these temptations. That’s where conscious self-control comes in, and that’s why it makes the difference between success and failure in just about every aspect of life.

Why Will Yourself to Read This?
    The first step in self-control is to set a goal, so we should tell you ours for this book. We hope to combine the best of modern social science with some of the practical wisdom of the Victorians. We want to tell how willpower—or the lack thereof—has affected the lives of the great and the not-so-great. We’ll explain why corporate leaders pay $20,000 a day to learn the secrets of the to-do list from a former karate instructor, and why Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs are creating digital tools to promote nineteenth-century values. We’ll see how a British nanny tamed a team of howling triplets in Missouri, and how performers like Amanda Palmer, Drew Carey, Eric Clapton, and Oprah Winfrey applied willpower in their own lives. We’ll look at how David Blaine fasted for forty-four days and how the explorer Henry Morton Stanley survived for years in the African wilderness. We want to tell the story of scientists’ rediscovery of self-control and its implications outside the laboratory.
    Once psychologists began observing the benefits of self-control, they were faced with a new mystery: What exactly is willpower? What did it take for the self to resist a marshmallow? When Baumeister took up these questions, his understanding of the self was still pretty much in line with the then-conventional view, called the information-processing model. He and his colleagues talked about the mind as if it were a little computer. These information models of the human mind generally ignored concepts like power or energy, which were so out of fashion that researchers weren’t even opposed to them anymore. Baumeister didn’t expect to suddenly change his own view of the self, let alone anyone else’s. But once he and his colleagues began