Leo Babuta at Zen Habits posted an article on parenting yesterday that’s well worth reading. It’s interesting, because he doesn’t have a lot of hard evidence to back up what he’s saying, yet his points resonate strongly with what I’ve learned by trial and error (and there has been a lot of error, I can tell you) in parenting.

Several of his points about parenting, interestingly enough, touch on important elements of motivation. Several of his points have to do with surrendering immediate inclinations (like being angry or saying no or insisting on your own point of view) in order to improve your relationship with your kid and get a better outcome, and these are excellent examples of the impressive powers of surrender that I talk about in this post.

He also talks indirectly about a point I’ll get to in future posts, which is the value of investing in the important relationships in our lives. Positivity, following natural inclinations, and using happiness as a sign post also come up. I’m curious what non-parents might think of the article, and whether you find much in it that you can use elsewhere in your life.

Blogger and marketer Christina Quick put up an interesting and pithy post recently, “How to Be a Master at Anything,” building on information from Geoff Colvin’s great book Talent is Overrated, and on other sources. It echoes some of the things I wrote about in my post “Do You Have Enough Talent to Be Great at It?” but has more to say as well, and expresses its points originally enough that it’s worth reading even if you know something about the subject already. It also includes a nice real-life example.

In case you don’t have time to read the whole thing, the short version is: Practice Your Butt Off And You Can Get Really Good at Almost Anything.

Thanks to Leo Babuta of Zen Habits for his tweet about the post.

I noticed that the business rating resource site Angie’s List was having a “King or Queen of Clutter” contest, and I was toying with the idea of nominating a friend (who, I realized after thinking about it honestly, really doesn’t deserve the title). On the Angie’s List post about the contest, I came across a link to the Unclutterer site. I haven’t gone into detail about self-motivation tools for cleaning up and getting rid of clutter yet, but I have posts planned for those subjects, and for anyone interested in digging out, Unclutterer looks to be a terrific complementary resource, with specific ideas and tactics for getting rid of clutter.

An idea to get you started: decluttering and cleaning aren’t about finding a massive amount of time to do a massive cleaning. After all, everything just gets messy and dirty again if that’s all you do. Instead, consider the old saying that’s the motto of the Unclutterer site: “A place for everything, and everything in its place.” To keep an area clean or uncluttered, the key is for everything to have a place to go and for us to get in the habit of putting things in their places; for cleaning, this means cleaning up on a small scale as we go rather than letting things pile up and trying to make a single Herculean cleaning. These habits distribute cleaning and decluttering in tiny moments throughout the day rather than requiring huge efforts that are rapidly eclipsed by life marching on.

In recent weeks I’ve taken to watching the Web (through a convenient Google Alert) for blog posts, pages, and articles on willpower, self-motivation, and self-control, and usually I find at least a couple of new ones (other than my own) to look at every day. Occasionally I’ll see a piece that does a very good job of talking about one or two pieces of the puzzle, and once or twice I’ve read ones that have plenty of good advice (I try to remember to link to those, when possible). Often, though, the person posting seems to have seized on one piece of information and drawn some conclusions that are … well, I’m going to have to say “ridiculous.”

A New York Times blog post suggested trying to strengthen willpower by brushing your teeth on the wrong side, because that takes extra effort and the thinking was that anything that takes extra effort is a good way to build willpower. A Psychology Today blog post proposed eating plenty of chocolate to help quit smoking. A recent article from Reuters suggested making lots of “bad” foods available in your house to improve your eating habits, on the idea that having more chances to resist those foods will always increase willpower.

And the ideas in these articles are usually not coming from journalists gone wild: they’re usually coming from scientists who get very involved with one aspect of willpower and make unscientific assumptions about how those aspects should be applied.

Building willpower is not difficult if you’re willing and you understand all the pieces, but it is complicated, and focusing on one piece of a complex problem to the exclusion of others is a dangerous approach. It’s like setting a house on fire to warm it more efficiently. Willpower, like any complex thing, is a balance.

In the above examples, the confusion seems to stem from not balancing the building of willpower with constructive habits and making good use of the willpower we already have. Yes, the more we use willpower, the stronger it gets. However, it’s also true that we have a limited capacity to exercise willpower, and the more struggles we put ourselves into, the sooner we’re likely to cave and start making bad choices. Fortunately, making good choices not only strengthens our willpower over time, it also gets us in habits that tend to make exercising willpower less of a struggle. Brushing our teeth on the wrong side or strategically placing bags of potato chips around the house does not aid us in making good choices: it’s just an artificial approach that can be used to demonstrate things in laboratories. And making bad food choices in order to make better smoking choices is a dangerous strategy because it is doing as much to erode our willpower and good habits, in a general sense, as it is to promote them.

I’ll cut in for a moment here to say that I surely don’t know every single piece of the puzzle either. For instance, I haven’t yet researched hypnosis, which if you go by the stories one hears can have some impressive effects. And I have a lot to learn about meditation, which has been shown in numerous studies (and in my own experience) to be profoundly supportive of the states of mind needed to exercise willpower or achieve goals. So certainly take everything I say with a grain of salt, too. But my goal on this site is to bring together knowledge about self-motivation from as wide an array of good sources as I possibly can, and having found many of those sources already, I am lucky enough to sometimes see where good studies are spawning bad ideas when other studies shed more light on the situation.

Back to the question of evaluating advice about willpower: fortunately, it seems to come down to a certain amount of common sense. If the advice involves making good choices, improving state of mind, or learning how to handle situations better, it’s probably good. And if it sounds too nutty to be true, it probably is.

Photo by KristopherM

If we think about how our friends influence our willpower development, the common sense assumption would be that the more virtuous our friends were, the more we’d be inspired to follow their example, and the better off we’d be. And it’s certainly true that it can be very helpful to have a real-life example right in front of you, especially one who can talk to you about how they achieved what they did, and very especially one who developed the thing you admire during the time you’ve known them. But there are also some compelling benefits to having friends with flaws.

More specifically, a friend who has and would like to change some of the same flaws you have and would like to change can be an enormous help.

It's easier being a statue with no legs when you have a friend in the same boat

The reason for this is that someone who has the same flaw as you do really can’t judge you on that flaw. For instance, I often try to pack productive activity into every moment of my day, which sometimes mean that I try to do much and end up being late for something. I have a friend who also has issues with lateness. Whenever I’m meeting my friend, there’s a strange lack of anxiety about either of us being late. If this happens, neither of us feels judged by the other one, because after all, the role is often reversed.

What this means for us is that we can easily and comfortably discuss our issue with being late, including the situations that led up to it. We can throw around practical ideas for what’s going on and how to fix it. Sharing a problem with someone can, under the right circumstances, take a lot of the anxiety out of having the problem in the first place.

Another benefit of a friendship with someone who shares a problem with you is that you can see that problem from the outside, without it being connected to you. This can yield new insight and new resolve (commonly known as the “Dear god, I don’t do that–do I?” effect).

While it might be tempting because of this to try to encourage new shortcomings in your more perfect friends, people who consistently do well at something can be annoyingly set in their ways. So if you have an issue you’re working on and want to be able to talk about it with someone who is in no position to judge you but might have some really useful insights, it can often be constructive to go out and find new people who share that same issue, whether it’s through a group that meets in real life, cultivating a friendship, or joining a discussion group on the Web. The point isn’t so much to cultivate a new, lifelong friendship as to connect with someone who understands where you’re coming from.

And if you’re having trouble finding people who share your specific concerns, you can get some benefit from just looking at how other people work with their willpower and self-motivation issues. Virtually everyone has some bad habit or some goal they haven’t managed to motivate themselves toward as much as they’d like, and as we see from this site, the basic tools of self-motivation are very similar regardless of what that self-motivation is used for (while understanding that attaining a goal takes a bit of a different approach from changing a habit).

This is just one way in which you can draw support from other people to improve your life; we’ll look at other ways in future posts.

Photo by caffeinehit.

Here are couple of sites of interest, both brought to my attention through comments here on the Willpower Engine.

Fitness instructor Matt O’Brien runs PowerMotivate.com, a site with both motivational and informational resources for people working to get more fit. O’Brien also posts on Twitter.

Writer Amy Fries posts information about harnessing daydreams for visualization and creativity on her blog Daydreams at Work. She has a book of the same name out (I haven’t read it as of this writing, though it looks interesting and I may eventually get an opportunity to do so. Currently the Dalai Lama and Mihaly Csikszentmihaly are the masters of my reading list, along with some writing-related projects). She also tweets (sheesh, this is making me feel so 2008 by comparison!) at http://twitter.com/amyfries .