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"Willpower is a terrible strategy. Build systems that make it easy to do what you want and hard to do what you don’t."

Ramit Sethi

In every pursuit to try to become better, we experience failure.

If we diagnose each failure correctly, it helps us learn and sets us up for success the next time around.

If we don’t, we continue making the same mistakes over and over again until we lose the will to keep trying and give up.

Failure is inevitable when pursuing something worthwhile. That's why properly diagnosing our failures is crucial.

Understanding the root cause and being able to overcome it gives us the longevity needed to make meaningful progress toward our goals.

When we diagnose our failure we tend to blame it on a lack of willpower or discipline.

In most situations, we know what we need to do and how to do it, but for some reason, we don’t. In some cases, the culprit is willpower, but more often than not we’re misdiagnosing the problem.

Take overeating at night as an example. It seems like it’s simply a matter of willpower to stay out of the pantry after dinner, but there is a lot more going on than it seems.

If we ask ourselves why we overindulged we can peel back to layers to find the real reason.

We ate too much because we were still hungry after dinner. We were still hungry after dinner because we skipped lunch. We skipped lunch because we didn’t have time to make it in the morning. We didn’t have time to make it because we woke up late and we woke up late because we stayed up late to watch TV.

What we thought was a lack of discipline with our diet is actually the result of staying up too late.

More often than not we set ourselves up for failure by creating circumstances that make it difficult to do what’s right instead of what’s easy.

When we stop to look at the bigger picture it becomes clear that we frequently put ourselves into difficult situations.

It’s like choosing to drive down a road that’s covered in ice when there is a perfectly safe road one block over and then getting mad at our car for not performing well on the ice. If we diagnose our failure as sliding on the ice then we’ll spend our energy buying tire chains or a new four-wheel drive car when we should be focused on driving down a clear road.

Before we blame discipline or willpower we should make sure we’ve done everything we can to set ourselves up for success.

Overcoming our biology is a lot harder than adjusting our systems to create better circumstances.

We don’t get any bonus points for doing something the hard way or dealing with unnecessary adversity.

If we want to become better we should make it as easy as we can to choose the behavior that will help us improve.

We will always fail when we’re trying to do something worthwhile but focusing on diagnosing the root cause will help us make things easier instead of constantly fighting an uphill battle.

1. Where in your life do you need to consistently overcome difficult circumstances to accomplish a desired behavior?

2. How can you change your circumstances to make your desired behavior easier?

3. When you fail to do something important what is the first thing you blame?

• The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

  • Harnessing an understanding of habits to change our lives for the better.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.

Kevin

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