In the book “Willpower Does Not Work,” the author writes about why achieving goals is not easy if you work only on yourself, fight your weaknesses and temper your character. He proposes to expand the view of the problem of "self and purpose" by adding the concept of "the environment in which you operate."
Benjamin Hardy explains that most people are doomed to failure or partial success that does not meet ambitions and claims. The reason is that the aforementioned majority thinks in the spirit of attitudes from the psychology of the past or the century before last, when the leading role was assigned to personal qualities, personal perseverance, work on oneself, character, one's mood, one's vision … This individualism, inherent in Western psychological thought, engenders darkness recommendations and books with titles such as "How to Strengthen Willpower", the readers of which have approximately no specific result.
The author proposes to use the environment in which people are, to delegate to it the obligations of coercion to work, so that people do not even have to think about it (he uses the Freudian term "unconsciousness"). He talks about the formation of a stimulating environment in which a person does not have a choice of “I can dig, I can not dig,” because such an environment does not imply inaction or slow progress.
The point is that a person no longer relies on personal qualities, but puts himself in such conditions where he has the right or is completely deprived of the opportunity to exude weakness, laziness, lack of focus, cannot be distracted by funny pictures, procrastinate.
Such an environment is created, among them, among others, include:
- high investment;
- social pressure;
- novelty.
High investments are when a person, for example, has paid in advance for a certain service, and now he cannot miss, say, a webinar. He will never forget, he will make a note on the calendar, start an alarm, set a reminder. A person knows, for example, that if he comes across free material, he then lies unviewed for months. And if someone wants to develop, acquire a new skill, solve a problem and invest in it with personal money and time, he considers it valuable and, accordingly, will make an effort to get what he wants.
Social pressure was widely used, for example, by Mayakovsky. When he published an article entitled “What are you writing?”, He mentioned there several works that he had not yet written. Mayakovsky had many readers, they all received a copy of the newspaper with this article and saw that soon such and such works on such and such a topic should be expected from the poet. Accordingly, these expectations did not allow the author to relax, to postpone things for later, to allow himself a rest, and so on, he had to work hard in order to meet expectations and not be branded as idle talk.
Another example of social pressure - when the writer Yuri Nikitin went on a diet, he notified everyone on his website (he has the most visited Russian-language site dedicated to science fiction) that by such and such a date it would weigh so much, a public meeting was scheduled for a specific date and time, those wishing to bring the scales with them. On the site there were always those who liked to poke Nikitin into his mistakes, many of them expected that they would not be able to lose weight in such a short time, and such social pressure (especially from ill-wishers) stimulated the author and did not allow him to run to the refrigerator at night.
Newness is understood here in the sense in which Napoleon Hill put it: "A good shake often helps the brain, which has atrophied under the influence of habits." For example, a person works and earns about the same as he spends. I want more, but lazy. If such a person leaves his usual place of work, he will have to look for a new one very quickly, because he has no savings, but the bills are coming. A new job will require full inclusion in the process, because not only a new job, but also a team, a place of work, and this is a new route … Thus, a person gets involved and works (at least for some time) better than the usual one.
The moral of the book is that the king is made by the retinue, and if you want to achieve high goals, this cannot be achieved on the fuel of personal qualities, you need to place yourself in an environment where you will not have a choice.
Let this sound as much as possible against the conviction of our time that a person should always have a choice.
