CHAPTER 8: GET YOUR LIFE TOGETHER
(THE WILLPOWER TRAIT)
Excellence is a habit, not an act.
—Aristotle
Willpower is the drive, resilience, and perseverance to pursue your long-term goals and honor your core values despite short-term temptations, distractions, and emotional impulses. That’s it. Willpower matters because it helps you get shit done. Men with willpower do what they say they’re going to do. They show up. They follow through despite setbacks and challenges. They don’t give up.
Men with willpower are effective—effective at organizing their lives to realize their ambitions about what kind of men they want to become and what kind of lives they want to lead. That is the essence of willpower. And as we’ve told you before over and over, being effective is very, very attractive to women.
While intelligence is fairly fixed (at least, fixed close to the genetic set point), you can change your willpower quite easily, yet it’s neglected by most young men. You can practice willpower in all kinds of ways, small and large, from maintaining good posture to writing term papers a week before they’re due. You can preserve your limited stockpile of willpower by developing better habits that require fewer willpower-based decisions each day, like throwing out all the junk food in your home so you’re never tempted.
Most importantly, you can change how you exercise self-control by changing from a self-punishing mindset to a self-compassionate mindset. In fact, one of the easiest but most effective ways to boost your willpower is to simply practice feeling more empathy toward your own future self: “What would I do today if I really cared about the self that I’ll be a year from now?” Would you drink a thirty-pack of Natty Ice, eat a Taco Bell Party Pack, and play video games until 4 a.m.? Or would you do just about anything else besides that?
If you understand how willpower really works and how to develop it and deploy it effectively, it’s like having a self-improvement superpower. Things gets much easier. It’s the main tool you need to fix everything else in your life, and it’s also immediately apparent—and attractive—to women from the first time they see you.
WHY WOMEN CARE ABOUT WILLPOWER
Anyone can cut out carbs for a week. Anyone can repress the urge to lash out in anger for a little while. Anyone can be an active listener for a night or two. From a woman’s perspective, what separates the good men from the bad is the conscientious determination to do the right things for a long time, until they become part of who you are.
Women value conscientiousness (the science word for willpower) so highly—far more than men do—that in an ideal world they would want a guy who’s even more conscientious than they are. Conscientiousness also has a positive genetic correlation with happiness, meaning that some of the same genes that influence one also influence the other. That’s surprising if you buy into the cultural stereotype that reliable, orderly people lead boring, miserable lives while all the impulsive, immature people are out being joyful, getting drunk, skinny-dipping, and throwing pizza at cops. But then think about how much fun it is to wake up naked, in a jail cell, with a hangover, facing a misdemeanor assault charge… again. Tucker has been there, and he doesn’t recommend it.
In all cultures studied so far, the women show higher average conscientiousness than the men. This means that, to most women, most men seem pretty immature, unreliable, dirty, lazy, and unambitious. That said, women also know that among men, the more conscientious ones are less likely to flirt with other attractive women and less likely to cheat in the first year of marriage. They are more reliable, thoughtful, honest, dependable, and committed in relationships. They are more comfortable with intimacy and more loving. They are also more tuned in to perceiving and caring about the emotions of other people, including their girlfriends.
In fact, across forty-six nations, higher conscientiousness predicts a stronger tendency to form long-term relationships and less interest in short-term mating. So women can use conscientiousness as a signal of your ability to make a romantic commitment. Women also correctly understand that men’s conscientiousness predicts their fidelity and that the hard-working, conscientious guys who bring net benefits rather than net costs to their lives are relatively rare and precious. Thus, selecting for conscientiousness leads women to be more satisfied with their relationships and less likely to get divorced.
Women feel physically safer with more conscientious guys as well, and safe is sexy. They drive more safely, drink less when driving, and get in fewer car wrecks (a major cause of death among young women). Conscientious guys are less likely to commit violent crimes and get sent to jail and less likely to commit rash actions and take stupid risks when they’re excited. Dangerous psychopaths do not just lack conscience (empathy); they also lack conscientiousness.
IMPROVE YOUR WILLPOWER—ADOPT A SELF-COMPASSION MINDSET
The most powerful way to exercise better willpower in your life is simply to change the way you talk to yourself.
Most people think of willpower issues as an inner battle between good and evil. Instead, it’s about resisting the desire to do something that feels good but is actually bad for you: ordering another drink, supersizing the fries with that burger, texting that woman just one more time. Or it’s the struggle between doing something you want to do (go drinking with friends) versus something you have to do (write a term paper). “Show some willpower!” you tell yourself. And you’re half-right. The discipline to resist temptation is part of willpower, but it’s only the negative facet—the part about what not to do.
If you’re still young, the voice in your head shouting those things (the superego) sounds a lot like your parents at their bossiest and most disapproving. Immediately, the struggle turns into a generation-gap issue of mature responsibility versus the youthful rebellion of your id. The result is like a dialogue inside the head of someone with multiple personality disorder, like Gollum in Lord of the Rings: “Respect kind Master Frodo!” (good Smeagol) versus “Kill nasty hobbitses and steal back my Precious!” (bad Gollum).
That kind of inner argument is exactly the wrong way to succeed with willpower. By moralizing the issue into good versus evil, it loads way too much ethical baggage onto one little decision. It also means that half of you always loses.
Even if you succeed in making the “right” decision, it will feel like the wrong decision to the part of you that wants to do the “wrong” thing, and that outcome creates resentment, frustration, and a self-punishment mindset. Your inner Gollum will end up looking for other ways to steal his Precious back when your superego/inner dad/Smeagol isn’t watching as carefully. You might write the term paper tonight, but you’ll be tempted to make up for this act of magnificent valor by going to Coachella and getting e-tarded on Molly all weekend so that you fail your chemistry final on Monday.
Instead of thinking of willpower as a battle between good and evil that requires suppressing and punishing part of yourself, take a self-compassionate mindset. Think of willpower as the way to cultivate more positive outcomes, habits, and traits. It is dedication to your life goals based on realistic but challenging ambitions.
It’s not about turning down that fourth whiskey because you’re being hard on yourself. Rather, you’re turning it down because you have more important shit to do that your future self will be very grateful for. You’re pursuing more important positive goals, like getting fit and healthy or staying safe to drive or keeping your sexual self-control so a woman wants to see you again. You are turning down that fourth whiskey because you like your future self and want to help him.
With the self-compassionate mindset, you need to think things through intelligently before you make a decision. The positive side of willpower is the power to do and to frame all of your I won’ts as being in the service of those higher I wills. Once you do that, you’re no longer using your willpower to oppress and disappoint half of yourself. You’re using it to create the future self that you really care about. Thus, willpower is really just being as kind as you can to the man you want to become.
By doing that, you’ll turn into him without feeling the inner conflict that’s handicapped your willpower up to this point.
BUILD THE RIGHT FOUNDATION
Willpower depends on the executive control parts of your brain, so the healthier your body, the better those brain parts will work.
Sleep: Again with the sleep? Yes, because it’s that important.
Many studies show that sleep deprivation kills your willpower. Think about the last week you crammed for exams, pulling all-nighters. Did you eat healthy foods? Did you keep up your grooming regime? Or did you fall into a downward spiral of fatigue, impulsivity, bad habits, self-loathing, anxiety, and sleeplessness? Guess what—the sleep deprivation was the active ingredient in that disaster.
Nutrition: To preserve willpower, you need to eat in a way that delivers sustained, long-term energy to your body and brain. The standard American diet, with its sugar surges and crashes, does the exact opposite of that. If you eat the way we suggest in Chapter 5: Get in Shape (The Physical Health Trait), not only will your physical and mental health improve, but you’ll also feel like you have more willpower.
Plus, you’ll need less willpower to control what you eat. As you wean yourself off sugars and grains, your whole physiology and your gut microbiome will adapt in a few weeks, so you just won’t be as interested in donuts and milkshakes. Things that used to taste bland (like roasted vegetables) will start to taste amazingly delicious, and things that used to taste sweet (like Cinnabon) will start to taste repulsive.
Exercise: Just doing regular exercise improves your willpower reserves, even before the effects are apparent in your body. Think of your exercise regime as partly training your muscles and partly training your willpower. Doing as many push-ups as you can every morning before you shower might not build your pecs as effectively as doing a serious “chest day” at the gym, but it will build your conscientiousness more effectively.
SET GOALS, AND ACCOMPLISH THEM
Willpower is like a muscle: the more you use it, the stronger it gets. One of the best ways to exercise your willpower is to set goals and work to accomplish them.
Bonus: This isn’t just the best way to improve willpower; it’s also the best way to turn yourself into the person you want to be—a man who is very attractive to women.
In fact, that’s the entire point of this book. Let’s be clear (and honest) here, though: if you rely only on willpower to improve, you will fail. Gritting your teeth and “just doing it” is a destructive fantasy that cripples many guys on their quest to better themselves. Instead, the best approach is to set goals and then build processes into your life that are easy and automatic and that put you on a path to accomplishing those goals. Those processes are called habits.
That’s the irony of improving willpower by setting goals and accomplishing them using good habits: the better the habits are that you build, the more willpower you develop, and the less you actually have to use willpower!
There has been a ton of fantastic research over the past twenty years that has clearly explained how to create real change in your life without having to rely solely on willpower (which is impossible). We are going to teach you the general way to set and accomplish goals. You can apply this simple process to every area in your life that you want to improve, including every trait and proof we cover in this book.
Here are the steps:
1. Start with a single goal that is realistic and specific.
2. Make a specific plan of action, with a deadline.
3. Make your plan into an easy habit with very few decisions.
4. Make yourself accountable to others.
5. Have fun, and celebrate wins.
6. If you mess up, forgive yourself, readjust, and continue.
1. Start with a single goal that is realistic and specific.
Don’t go crazy with huge goals like “Be the most attractive man on earth,” or “This month, implement everything I learned in Mate.” Those goals are too hard; they are either unrealistic or not specific enough to even know if you’ve accomplished them. The best willpower-based goals to start with have these characteristics:
• They are singular: Don’t do everything at once. Start with the easiest thing that can help you the most. For most guys, this is one of the keystone habits—sleep, nutrition, or exercise. Your assignment is to pick just one of these three for now and focus on it! From there, go on to all the other things you want to improve.
• They are realistic: By starting small and being realistic, you’re more likely to succeed and build confidence about managing your life—which helps you accomplish other goals in turn. A goal like “Get ripped” is far harder than something like “Lose some weight.” It’s not that you can’t get ripped, but you must crawl before you can walk, and you must bust out some squats to do that.
• They are specific: Precisely quantify your goal so you can tell if you succeed. “Lose some weight” is not as good as “Lose five pounds.”
2. Make a specific plan of action, with a deadline.
You cannot achieve any goals through sheer willpower and random effort. You must plan specific actions that you can use your willpower to execute. This is an absolutely critical step that most guys skip.
A specific plan is actionable and structured as a habitual, repeatable process that allows you to go on autopilot as you execute.
This is where you need to do your research, seek expert advice, use your intelligence, and think about alternatives. For example, bad plans look like this:
• “Lose five pounds.” By when? How? No deadline and no plan of action is worthless; this is just a hope.
• “Lose five pounds within thirty days by eating less.” This is too vague.
• “Lose five pounds within thirty days by fasting for thirty days.” This is impossibly self-punishing.
• “Lose five pounds within thirty days by moving more and exercising.” What does this mean? What exercise are you even talking about?
• “Lose five pounds within thirty days by doing two hours of cardio every day.” This is inefficient and unrealistic.
Given what you’ve already learned in the physical health chapter, a much better plan would be this:
• “Lose five pounds within thirty days by eliminating all processed sugars and refined grains.”
This plan has the benefit of being crystal clear about how you have to use your willpower, and it leaves no wiggle room for fooling yourself. You know precisely what your goal is (lose five pounds), by when you will achieve it (thirty days), how you are going to do it (cutting out sugars and grains for thirty days), and how to measure the results (after thirty days you will either have lost the weight or you won’t).
3. Make your plan into an easy habit, with very few decisions.
The more you have to think about it, the harder a plan is to execute. And the more you have to use willpower, the harder the plan will be to follow. The easiest way to “just do it” is to make it a no-brainer to do—a habit you can follow with very few decisions and little extra effort.
For example, if your plan is to lose five pounds in thirty days by not consuming any sugar or grains and you leave all the Cap’n Crunch and mac & cheese in the cupboard, there’s constant temptation that requires daily willpower to resist. That’s setting yourself up for failure.
The better approach is to take ten minutes to throw out all that shit so you never have to worry about the temptation. Then replace it with foods that serve your goals. Now when you get hungry, you don’t have to use willpower; there are only good foods to eat, not bad ones. By minimizing your day-to-day decision making, you’re setting yourself up for success. You won’t need willpower all the time; you’ll only need it for half an hour once a week while grocery shopping.
Make your plan so easy and simple you’ll feel stupid if you don’t do it.
4. Make yourself accountable to others.
Friends are one of our biggest influences and can be potent allies in change. The research on this is not just clear, it is overwhelming. The best way to follow through on your plans and accomplish your goals is to pursue them with other people who will support you and to make yourself accountable to them.
Your social groups exert enormous influence on you and can help you maintain your willpower when it is lagging. In fact, research suggests this is why support groups like AA are effective. It’s not the belief in a higher power; it’s the social accountability from just showing up to the meetings.
Even just telling your friends you are doing something new works well. Numerous studies of people trying to lose weight have shown that those people get much better results when they tell their family and friends from the start about what they are trying to do and what their specific goals are. Social pressure is real and it works.
5. Have fun, and celebrate wins.
The number one reason people give up on good habits is that they just aren’t enjoyable. It’s obvious when you think about it: who wants to keep doing something they don’t like? This is why most diets fail—because they suck to live on.
The research in this area is extensive and fascinating; people will do all sorts of awful, onerous tasks if they think they are fun. For example, most of us grew up hating doing math problems, but we will pay money to do them if someone puts them in a grid, throws them in a book, and calls it Sudoku. Yet it’s incredibly hard to get people to do those same things if they don’t think they are fun, even if you provide large monetary rewards.
You may be asking, “How do I make habits fun?” Well, besides picking activities you actually like doing, make them easy and simple.
If you’re trying to lose five pounds but you loathe gyms and would rather die than pick up an iron bar, there are an infinite number of simpler ways to get exercise. Play ultimate Frisbee. Train for MMA. Row crew. Staple hundred-dollar bills to your clothes, and run from muggers. We never said you had to lift weights. The point is, anything that moves you toward your goal and that you enjoy can become a process that turns into a good habit.
The other way to make a habit fun is to celebrate your accomplishments. You should already be keeping track of your progress (this is part of being specific). Now just acknowledge the wins along the way.
Don’t be an asshole to yourself here: any win, even a small one, is worth recognizing. A small win can be any concrete, implemented outcome, even if it’s only of moderate importance. What matters is that you recognize it and celebrate it, even just with yourself.
If your goal is to lose five pounds, losing two pounds should be cause for a small celebration (preferably something healthy and delicious, like bacon).
Just as we talked about with the disproportionate power of small things to build happiness in the mental health chapter (Chapter 6) and the power of momentum in the self-confidence chapter (Chapter 1), a lot of small accomplishments are more motivating and rewarding than one big accomplishment, so identify and celebrate your small wins.
If you make your habits fun and exciting on their own and then reward yourself for doing them, you will keep doing them.
6. If you mess up, forgive yourself, readjust, and continue.
This is literally the same thing as what we said in the first part of this section: adopt a self-compassionate mindset. We put it here to make sure you pay attention and internalize that lesson because way too many guys will make mistakes, get down on themselves, and then quit.
Don’t do that. We all mess up all the time. It’s OK. Forgive yourself, and get back on the horse. Focus on the right habits, and work the process so you can accomplish your goals. That is willpower in a nutshell.
DISPLAY YOUR WILLPOWER
The beauty of willpower is that women can evaluate it through so many of your behaviors in so many domains of life. Thus, if willpower is the self-improvement superpower, then everything you improve in your life can testify to your willpower.
Health: Your physical health is a strong indicator of willpower. Are you strong or weak, slim or fat?
Women equate being thin with having strong self-control. This is one reason high school girls can get caught up in runaway thinness competitions with their rivals that can lead to anorexia. They’ll apply the same logic, with a little less cattiness, in evaluating your body.
They’ll also see your muscle mass as an indicator of your willpower. It’s not that women actually need you to lift a fridge that often, but they interpret physical strength achieved through regular exercise as a cue that you’ve got plentiful willpower to deploy in all kinds of other useful ways—like making money, taking care of kids, and staying faithful to them.
Grooming: Take showers, wash your hands, and make sure you don’t smell bad. So many guys don’t pay attention to this basic step because they think it doesn’t affect anybody else. Guess what, Pigpen, ten minutes with you on a cramped campus shuttle on a hot day leaves a lot of victims.
Personal care products and habits are not just ways to look your best. They’re also conscientiousness signals to women. A well-shaven guy has removed the most distinctive sexual ornament on the male human face—the beard. So how could he be attractive to women? Because it takes more willpower to be clean shaven every day than to grow a beard. Hairstyles that take some effort to maintain are common conscientiousness signals across human cultures as well. Armies require haircuts like the “high and tight” because they demand frequent trims and so build willpower; no basic training anywhere encourages low-maintenance dreadlocks.
If you keep your mountain man beard, make sure your haircut on top is extra precise and up to date. (This is how hipsters combine conscientiousness and manliness.) Conversely, if your haircut is called the “Bed Head,” you’d better be clean shaven.
General cleanliness: Keeping your things clean is a strong signal of conscientiousness. Your car, your apartment, your furniture—if they are dirty, clean them. Even if you don’t care, other people do, and they notice. Especially women.
Here’s a good rule of thumb for cleanliness: if it is a place where she might put things in her mouth (e.g., your kitchen) or sit her naked ass down (e.g., your bathroom)—KEEP IT CLEAN. If you do that, you can earn enough willpower brownie points to compensate for other areas where you still have some work to do, like your physical fitness or your grooming.
Still, for some guys, being sufficiently clean is easier said than done because their perspective on what dirty actually means is so out of whack. It’s not uncommon to meet guys who think that if there aren’t ants and there isn’t mold then it isn’t dirty. These are usually the same guys who wash their towels once a month with the full moon, like a fucking werewolf.
If you’re one of these guys who’s not sure whether your place is clean, then before you do anything else go take ten photos of your bathroom and kitchen as they are right now—every corner and detail. Then post them to Instagram and Facebook with no filter, ask people if the rooms look clean or dirty, and wait for the comments to roll in. If that idea scares you because you’re worried about what people will say, then deep down you already know your house is probably closer to outhouse than penthouse.
And those comments you’re worried about are precisely what any woman visiting your home would say—or at least think—about how your cleanliness relates to your conscientiousness.
No addictions: If you are addicted to anything—junk food, porn, alcohol, drugs, work, video games, toys—it shows a fundamental lack of willpower that also reads as poor mental health. Both are woman-repellants.
Practice moderating your habits. Find that Buddhist Middle Way between overindulgence and total abstinence. If you overindulge, your willpower is weak. But if you insist on total abstinence (like AA does with drinking), you’re also signaling weak willpower—as if even one beer might send you into a nine-day blackout that ends with your car planted inside a church van.
Women want men who can have all kinds of fun—and who know when to stop. This even applies to work. While being a slacker is unattractive, so is being a workaholic. From a woman’s perspective, that’s just another annoying addiction that steals away your time and attention from her. It might bring in more money and status than playing Madden NFL all day, but it leaves her equally lonely and yearning for a boyfriend who’d rather look at her face than his Excel spreadsheets.
Sexual restraint: If a woman doesn’t want to sleep with you or wants to take things slow, don’t get upset. Just keep calm and respect her decision—not just because it’s the right thing to do, but also because it signals your willpower. If you can show sexual restraint—especially when your tipsy brain is battling your blue balls and raging hard-on—this is hugely reassuring to women. In her mind, you’ve positioned yourself firmly in the “good guy” rather than the “date rapist” category.
Too often, young guys act as if tonight might be the last time they’ll ever have the possibility of sex, so they get desperate and pushy. That sends a huge array of attraction-killing cues to the woman: low willpower, low social and emotional intelligence, low status, immaturity, possible virginity. Showing sexual restraint also builds your willpower when you realize that you aren’t going to die if you don’t get to root around on top of this woman for three minutes of sweaty glory.
Takeaways
• Willpower is the drive, resilience, and perseverance to pursue your long-term goals and honor your core values despite short-term temptations, distractions, and emotional impulses.
• Your being conscientious and reliable makes women feel safe, and for women safe feels sexy.
• The most powerful way to exercise better willpower in your life is simply to change the way you talk to yourself. Most people think of willpower issues as an inner battle between good and evil; instead, think about it as self-compassion versus self-punishment.
• The best way to build willpower is to develop good habits. It’s a six-step process:
1. Start with a single goal that is realistic and specific.
2. Make a specific plan of action, with a deadline.
3. Make your plan into an easy habit with very few decisions.
4. Make yourself accountable to others.
5. Have fun, and celebrate wins.
6. If you mess up, forgive yourself, readjust. and continue.