Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength
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Last annotated on April 20, 2017
Growth (with Christopher Buckley) To our children, Athena and Luke IntroductionRead more at location 40
Note: intelligenza+selfcontrol=>successo aumentare i.: impossibile x ora aumentare sc.: possibile la temperanza virtù sottovalutata: è alla base di tutti i probemi viviamo nel secolo delle tentazioni una riabilitazione del filisteo vittoriano: nn crede ma comprende che la disciplina imposta dalla chiesa abbia un ruolo la vittoria a distanza dei vittoriani su wilde... affermazione del self help Edit
However you define success—a happy family, good friends, a satisfying career, robust health, financial security, the freedom to pursue your passions—it tends to be accompanied by a couple of qualities.Read more at location 40
So far researchers still haven’t learned how to permanently increase intelligence. But they have discovered, or at least rediscovered, how to improve self-control.Read more at location 43
As Charles Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, “The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.” The Victorian notion of willpower would later fall out of favor,Read more at location 45
Baumeister himself started out as something of a skeptic. But then he observed willpower in the laboratory: how it gives people the strength to persevere, how they lose self-control as their willpower is depleted, how this mental energy is fueled by the glucose in the body’s bloodstream.Read more at location 48
willpower, like a muscle, becomes fatigued from overuse but can also be strengthened over the long term through exercise.Read more at location 50
most major problems, personal and social, center on failure of self-control: compulsive spending and borrowing, impulsive violence, underachievement in school, procrastination at work, alcohol and drug abuse, unhealthy diet, lack of exercise, chronic anxiety, explosive anger.Read more at location 54
Ask people to name their greatest personal strengths, and they’ll often credit themselves with honesty, kindness, humor, creativity, bravery, and other virtues—even modesty. But not self-control.Read more at location 59
The most commonly resisted desire in the beeper study was the urge to eat, followed by the urge to sleep, and then by the urge for leisure, like taking a break from work by doing a puzzle or game instead of writing a memo. Sexual urges were next on the list of most-resisted desires, a little ahead of urges for other kinds of interactions, like checking e-mail and social-networking sites, surfing the Web, listening to music, or watching television.Read more at location 76
During the Middle Ages, most people were peasants who put in long, dull days in the fields, frequently accompanied by prodigious amounts of ale. They weren’t angling for promotions at work or trying to climb the social ladder, so there wasn’t a premium on diligence (or a great need for sobriety).Read more at location 85
In the medieval Catholic Church, salvation depended more on being part of the group and keeping up with the standard rituals than on heroic acts of willpower.Read more at location 88
Enlightenment had weakened faith in any kind of dogma. Victorians saw themselves as living in a time of transitionRead more at location 91
Many Victorians came to doubt religious principles on theoretical grounds, but they kept pretending to be faithful believers because they considered it their public duty to preserve morality.Read more at location 93
As Victorians fretted over moral decay and the social pathologies concentrated in cities, they looked for something more tangible than divine grace, some internal strength that could protect even an atheist. They began using the term willpowerRead more at location 98
People sought to increase their store of it by following the exhortations of the Englishman Samuel Smiles in Self-Help, one of the most popular booksRead more at location 101
explaining the success of everyone from Isaac Newton to Stonewall Jackson as the result of “self-denial” and “untiring perseverance.”Read more at location 103
The Decline of the WillRead more at location 110
Note: motivi del declino: 1 eccessi vittoriani 2 guerra e mitizzazione del senso del dovere... naxi: il trionfo della volontà nell era della pubblicità la volontà viene rimpiazzata dal glamour e dai sorrisi declino del superego: se ti piace fallo chi sbaglia viene giustificato da eventi esterni... la volontà passa in secondo piano skinner e freud: contro volontà e coscienza l autostima rimpiazza la volontà con esiti deludenti... math studenti usa e stud coreani la riabilitazione del s.c. avviene da parte dell empiria e n dei teorici Edit
The fascination with willpower ebbed in the twentieth century partly in reaction to the Victorians’ excesses,Read more at location 112
The prolonged bloodshed of World War I seemed a consequence of too many stubborn gentlemen following their “duty” to senseless deaths.Read more at location 113
That theme would be embraced by the Nazis, whose rally in 1934 was featured in Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous propaganda film, The Triumph of the Will.Read more at location 116
The decline of will didn’t seem like such a bad thing, and after the war there were other forces weakening it. As technology made goods cheaper and suburbanites richer, stimulating consumer demand became vital to the economy, and a sophisticated new advertising industry urged everyone to buy now.Read more at location 119
The new bestsellers were cheery works like Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking. Carnegie spent eight pages instructing readers how to smile.Read more at location 123
“The basic factor in psychology is the realizable wish,” Peale wrote. “The man who assumes success tends already to have success.” Napoleon Hill sold millions of copies of Think and Grow Rich by telling readers to decide how much money they wanted,Read more at location 126
Wheelis used Freudian terms in discussing the decline of the superego in Western society, but he was essentially talking about a weakening of willpower—and all this was before the baby boomers came of age in the 1960s with a countercultural mantra of “If it feels good, do it.”Read more at location 138
Most social scientists look for causes of misbehavior outside the individual: poverty, relative deprivation, oppression, or other failures of the environment or the economic and political systems. Searching for external factors is often more comfortable for everyone, particularly for the many academics who worry that they risk the politically incorrect sin of “blaming the victim”Read more at location 142
The very notion that people can consciously control themselves has traditionally been viewed suspiciously by psychologists. Freudians claimed that much of adult human behavior was the result of unconscious forces and processes.Read more at location 146
B. F. Skinner had little respect for the value of consciousness and other mental processes, except as needed to process reinforcement contingencies.Read more at location 148
Some neuroscientists claim to have disproved its existence. Many philosophers refuse to use the term.Read more at location 152
Recently, some scholars have even begun to argue that the legal system must be revamped to eliminate outdated notions of free will and responsibility.Read more at location 155
Baumeister shared the general skepticism toward willpower when he started his career as a social psychologist in the 1970s at Princeton. His colleagues were then focusing not on self-control but on self-esteem,Read more at location 156
people with more confidence in their ability and their self-worth tended to be happier and more successful. So why not help everyone else succeed by finding ways to boost their confidence?Read more at location 158
While international surveys showed that U.S. eighth-grade math students had exceptionally high confidence in their own abilities, on tests they scored far below Koreans, Japanese, and other students with less self-esteem.Read more at location 161
The resurrection of self-control wasn’t led by theorists, who were still convinced that willpower was a quaint Victorian myth. But when other psychologists went into the laboratory or the field, they kept happening on something that looked an awful lot like it.Read more at location 164
The Comeback of the WillRead more at location 166
Note: il lavoro dello scienziato: non studiare nuove teorie ma studiare come testare le teorie (da qui l ingenuo "lo sapeva anche mia nonna" il mshmalow dei bambini freud in disgrazia: salvi gravi traumi l infanzia incide poco sull adulto il marshmalow sembra un eccezione: volontà e nurture sono legate sr conta + dell intelligenza elenco dei vantaggi di sr al netto di razza classe e intelligenza Edit
Progress generally comes not from theories but from someone finding a clever way to test a theory, as Walter Mischel did.Read more at location 169
The ones who succeeded tended to do so by distracting themselves, which seemed an interesting enough finding at the time of the experiments, in the 1960s.Read more at location 176
He noticed that the children who had failed to wait for the extra marshmallow seemed to get in more troubleRead more at location 179
They found that the ones who had shown the most willpower at age four went on to get better grades and test scores.Read more at location 181
These were stunning results, because it’s quite rare for anything measured in early childhood to predict anything in adulthood at a statistically significant level. Indeed, this disconnect was one of the death blows against the Freudian psychoanalytic approach to psychology, which emphasized early childhood experiences as the foundation of adult personality.Read more at location 185
“Self-regulation failure is the major social pathology of our time,” they concluded, pointing to the accumulating evidence of its contribution to high divorce rates, domestic violence, crime, and a host of other problems.Read more at location 195
Self-control also proved to be a better predictor of college grades than the student’s IQ or SAT score. Although raw intelligence was obviously an advantage, the study showed that self-control was more important because it helped the students show up more reliably for classes, start their homework earlier, and spend more time working and less time watching television.Read more at location 199
In workplaces, managers scoring high in self-control were rated more favorably by their subordinates as well as by their peers.Read more at location 201
Evolution and EtiquetteRead more at location 227
Note: come si è evoluti il sc? società allargata=> + sc => cervello + grande sc nasce come funzione sociale più che come personal betterment: aspettare in fila il cibo dal maschio dominante... educazoone a tavola le scimmie + intelligenti progettano x 20 minuti... il tempo x consentire al dominante di nutrirsi una fetta di torta non ingrassa ma noi non la mangiamo xchè sappiamo generalizzare cosa preclusa agli animali... qui entra in gioco la coscienza e la volontà l equivoco dell inconscio: tipico di chi si concentra sulla reazione immediata nel brevissimo xiodo la coscienza è ciò che connette tutti i mictointervalli Edit
The human brain is distinguished by large and elaborate frontal lobes, giving us what was long assumed to be the crucial evolutionary advantage: the intelligence to solve problems in the environment.Read more at location 228
But big brains also require lots of energy. The adult human brain makes up 2 percent of the body but consumes more than 20 percent of its energy.Read more at location 230
One early explanation for the large brain involved bananas and other calorie-rich fruits. Animals that graze on grass don’t need to do a lot of thinking about where to find their next meal.Read more at location 233
A banana eater needs a bigger brain to remember where the ripe stuff is, and the brain could be powered by all the calories in the bananas, so the “fruit-seeking brain theory”Read more at location 235
Humans are the primates who have the largest frontal lobes because we have the largest social groups, and that’s apparently why we have the most need for self-control.Read more at location 240
We tend to think of willpower as a force for personal betterment—adhering to a diet, getting work done on time, going out to jog, quitting smoking—but that’s probably not the primary reason it evolved so fully in our ancestors.Read more at location 241
For animals to survive in such a group without getting beaten up, they must restrain their urge to eat immediately.Read more at location 245
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.Read more at location 248
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,Read more at location 262
Why Will Yourself to Read This?Read more at location 265
Note: scopo primo del libro: xchè la volontà serve scopo secondo: cos è la volontà x 2 occorre una teoria della mente... la dominante: mente come pc (esclusa ogni componente rnrgetica) Edit
We hope to combine the best of modern social science with some of the practical wisdom of the Victorians.Read more at location 266
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.Read more at location 267
mind as if it were a little computer. These information models of the human mind generally ignored concepts like power or energy,Read more at location 275
Note: LA CONCEZIONE DELLA MENTE TRADIZIONALE : UN PC CHE PROCESSA INFO. DOVE PRENDE L ENERGIA POCO CONTA Edit
Acquiring self-control isn’t as magically simple as the techniques in modern self-help books, but neither does it have to be as grim as the Victorians made it out to be. Ultimately, self-control lets you relax because it removes stress and enables you to conserve willpower for the important challenges.Read more at location 280
Note: NÈ FACILE COME I SELF HELP NÈ DISUMANO COME CERTO VICTORIAN
