The Power of Willpower

Dear loving people,

The possession of willpower or its lack plays an important role in everyone's life. For example, you wish to be the best football player, knowing how good it is for your fame and how great you feel afterwards to be named best player, but you feel too lazy, and prefer to watch movies instead. You might be aware of the fact that you need to change your sporting habits or stop drinking too much alcohol, but you don't have the inner power and persistence to change these habits.

I can bet this sound familiar? How many times have you said, "I wish I had will power "? How many times have you started to do something, only to quit after a short while? We all have had experiences like these. Everyone has a few habits they wish they could get rid of, such as smoking, excessive drinking, laziness, procrastination or lack of assertiveness. To overcome these habits or addictions, one needs a certain degree of willpower. Their possession makes a great difference in everyone's life, bringing to the fore inner strength, self-mastery and decisiveness.

Will power is the ability to overcome laziness and procrastination. It is the ability to control or reject unnecessary or harmful impulses. It is the ability to arrive at a decision and follow it with perseverance until its successful accomplishment. It is the inner power that overcomes the desire to indulge in unnecessary and useless habits, and the inner strength that overcomes inner emotional and mental resistance for taking action. It is one of the corner stones of success, both spiritual and material.

Theodore Roosevelt, one of America’s celebrated Presidents said “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

I find everything I know about willpower in this Presidential quote. It displays what we as people are capable of when we are pushed to extremes. Every day, we are tested. Whether it’s a nice invitation to party with a date tempting us from our days plan or a warm bed coaxing us to sleep in when it’s time to work, we are forced to decide between what we want to do and what we ought to do.

The ability to resist our impulses is frequently described as willpower. The forces behind a person’s willpower have been the subject of increasing scrutiny by the scientific community trying to understand why some people overeat or abuse drugs and alcohol and others don’t. What researchers are finding is that willpower is essentially a mental muscle, and certain physical and mental forces can weaken or strengthen our self-control.

During my secondary school days, I decided I will never fall prey to the beauty of young women but will go for a woman only when I have CONCIOUSLY taken an informed decision to do so. Over seventeen years later, sticking to that principle has paid off. I must tell you that it has never been that easy but I have succeeded in resisting what some people will commonly call ‘temptation’ from some of the most charming women you can ever imagine. Not only do I not have that word ‘temptation’ in my dictionary but I have resisted pressures from numerous women that some men will plunge into head-long. I have extended this quality to many other areas in my life. I can stand up tall today and anywhere to tell whoever that will power is sheer magic.

You cannot take a conscious decision about something and later blame it on the simplistic ‘temptation’. If Jesus Christ defeated the devil after some tiresome forty days and nights in the wilderness, it was because he hadn’t that word ‘temptation’ in his vocabulary. If you are Christ-like and made in God’s image, you shouldn’t either.

Friedrich Nietzsche reordered the appellation calling it the will to power and saying that it is a prominent philosophical concept. He believed that the will to power is the main driving force in humans: achievement, ambition and the striving to reach the highest possible position in life.

If you are just starting and plan to “willpower” your way through success in life, chances are you are setting yourself up for failure because if you had enough willpower to do this before you wouldn’t be reading this in the first place, right?

It is your quest to succeed that is pushing you into learning the magic that is willpower and how to use it to your ought most advantage. Living Lectures can be part of the solution. Stick with us.