Willpower, time investment and the importance of doing nothing
Three stories/books that I found interesting in the last two weeks:
Just finished reading The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal. It’s an old book first published in 2012 and was recommended to me by my good friend Rajat Shah. And what a book this has turned out to be! So far it has become the most underlined book in my library. I first picked up the book with the intent to understand the science behind building new habits. However, the book goes much deeper into the science of why we are not able to resist temptations at times. While all the chapters make for an interesting read, the ones that stood out for me were the ones where the role of dopamine was described. Dopamine molecule is normally associated with happiness (or at least I had thought so), but essentially it’s a molecule that nudges us to act and see rewards. In one study, quoted in the book, rats whose dopamine secretion was artificially stopped, refused to move to get food lying only a few metres away. They were willing to die instead of taking an action. For obvious reasons the study was never replicated in humans. Dopamine is therefore an evolutionary feature deeply rooted in us and critical for survival. There’s another deep dive into the correlation between Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and willpower, which I found particularly useful. Essentially, Kelly writes that higher HRV is an indicator of greater willpower. These are only a few of the takeaways from the book and I highly recommend this book if you are interested in the science of building habits and improving your willpower.
Seth Godin is a master in capturing deep perspectives in few lines. And he does it again in his latest blog on how much time investment is worth for a task. According to Godin, if you spend the same amount of time as everyone else in completing a task, you will get the same amount of benefits. This should be fine for most cases where we are happy with the status quo. However, challenging the status quo is worth when you are aiming for extraordinary results, in which case you may want to spend extraordinarily more time than the set to deliver extraordinary outcomes. Alternatively, and depending on the situation, one can play smart and spend time on improving processes that everyone else can benefit from. The key is to be aware of where the situation demands compliance with the status quo and where stepping back and taking an alternative approach is worth.
The Wall Street Journal came out with this story on how doing absolutely nothing at times helps in improving productivity. According to the article ’your brain uses those free periods for important cleanup work, neuroscience research indicates’ and that, ‘even brief timeouts help the brain reinforce long-term learning and productivity’. So what could constitute these ‘doing nothing’ activities? It could be as simple as taking a long shower, taking a long solo walk, cooking without distraction, or simply sitting down and taking deep breaths. Certainly some areas that I need to improve on.
A quote that I recently read:
Reading 20 pages per day is 30 books per year. Saving €10 per day is €3,650 per year. Running 1 mile per day is 365 miles per year. Becoming 1% better per day is 37% better per year. Small habits are underestimated.
— James Clear and Alfred Lin
