I’m on the sofa with the dogs clicking through channels on the TV when I stumble upon a new series of “SAS – Who Dares Wins” a reality show in which a dozen or so members of the public fancy themselves at passing painfully rigorous parts of the SAS recruitment course.
This time we’re in the Vietnamese jungle and at the beginning of episode one the contestants are seen travelling in boats up the river towards base camp and a rude awakening with the course directors.
Suddenly there is a command to jump into the river and swim to the shore.
“That would be me out of the competition,” I say to my daughter who is watching TikTok videos across the room.
“Do you think they’d let you have armbands?” she says without raising her eyes from the screen.
I return to the important business of deciding which boiled sweets to order as there are none left in the car.
The resource most of the hapless recruits seem to be relying upon and one shared by most of us when we’re trying to accomplish something difficult is willpower.
But willpower is a much less reliable predictor of success than a number of other factors, not least the extent to which we have to overcome distractions in the first place.
In our podcast last week we focused on “Willpower” and Martin mentioned the well-known “Marshmallow Test” where children had to decide between eating one marshmallow immediately or waiting a while to be rewarded with two.
This much-repeated test has proven to be a good predictor of impulse control in adulthood but it isn’t just an ability to “white knuckle” the temptation that underpins success.
“I don’t really like marshmallows,” Martin told me last week which would presumably have made it ironically easier for him to receive the maximum payload in the test, but he was also highlighting an important lesson.
Some of us seem to be predisposed to becoming fixated more easily than others and genetically wired in such a way that self-control is more elusive, and some of us actually enjoy challenges that others find intolerable.
I have no trouble eating healthily (apart from the odd bag of boiled sweets) because I am interested in food, like learning about it and enjoy nothing more than spending hours in the kitchen tinkering about with vegetables.
I often read cookbooks in bed but I am aware that’s too much information.
Willpower, in this regard, is a doddle when it comes to choosing between cake and kale. Unless it’s a carrot cake, but that’s got vegetables in it anyway.
What’s more, as research from the Marshmallow Test has found, wealth also plays a role.
If you come from a background where there was money enough to buy copious bags of marshmallows it’s unlikely to be much of a hardship to avoid eating one in the short term due to your certainty that life will provide an abundance of them in the future.
Perhaps most dispiriting though is the damage we do to ourselves when we feel unable to muster any willpower.
If I judge myself as no good at meeting and overcoming challenges I create a compelling self-fulfilling prophecy.
Life itself can often lead us toward a negative view of our own willpower.
If we are sleeping poorly, overly stressed, or tend towards self-loathing our reserves of willpower dwindle alarmingly quite often leading to a perpetuation of the same factors that created the deficit in the first place.
What really makes a difference in the pursuit of our goals is the steady development of good habits, a lucky absence of too many difficult hurdles to overcome, genetics, and other happy accidents of birth.
You might think that with so much in the lap of the gods, I’m suggesting we give ourselves a “free pass” whenever we find something hard to achieve but the truth is quite the reverse.
By offering ourselves kindness, and understanding, and resisting the temptation to denigrate our pathetic efforts as typical of someone so useless we are removing what many of us tend to find is the biggest obstacle of all.
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