Quotes from Roy F. Baumeister

executive and nonexecutive, every day. Yet few people are even aware of it. When asked whether making decisions would deplete their willpower and make them vulnerable to temptation, most people say no. They don't realize that decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at their colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket, and can't resist the car dealer's offer to rustproof their new sedan.

Otherwise, his desk is immaculate. In accordance with the four Ds of his system, everything that has not been done, delegated, or dropped has been deferred to a half dozen two-drawer file cabinets, which contain his alphabetized plastic folders with labels printed by the little machine next to his computer. You might dismiss this all as evidence of dreary anal-retentiveness, but Allen could not be less dour or more relaxed.

Sometimes we are devils to ourselves When we will tempt the frailty of our powers, Presuming on their changeful potency. —Troilus, in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida

By practicing Moderation they violate another of Franklin's virtues, Justice. The result of conflicting goals is unhappiness instead of action, as the psychologists Robert Emmons and Laura King demonstrated in a series of studies.

If you remind yourself that it usually takes four good things to overcome one bad thing, you'll know not to trust your immediate responses to bad events.

Indeed, the main thing women have done in large groups is to protest and complain about the men and the men's activities. On this, women have been useful and successful in collective work. I refer here not only to the feminist movements from the suffragists onward, but also to various campaigns to protest men's drunkenness, to reduce vice such as by getting men to stop using prostitutes, and the like. Women's groups were also active in campaigning against slavery.

Psychologists have found that people who attend religious services for extrinsic reasons, like wanting to impress others or make social connections, don't have the same high level of self-control as the true believers. McCullough concludes that the believers' self-control comes not merely from a fear of God's wrath but from the system of values they've absorbed, which gives their personal goals an aura of sacredness.

Genius is patience,

When Boice followed up on the group some years later, he found that their paths had diverged sharply. The page-a-day folks had done well and generally gotten tenure. The so-called "binge writers" fared far less well, and many had had their careers cut short. The clear implication was that the best advice for young writers and aspiring professors is: Write every day. Use your self-control to form a daily habit, and you'll produce more with less effort in the long run.

Just to be sure, he counted the words. "I have found that the 250 words have been forthcoming as regularly as my watch went," he reported. At this rate he could produce 2,500 words by breakfast. He didn't expect to do so every single day—sometimes there were business obligations or fox hunts—but he made sure each week to meet a goal. For each of his novels, he would draw up a working schedule, typically planning for 10,000 words a week, and then keep a diary.

While other novelists were worrying about money and struggling to turn in chapters overdue at their publishers, Trollope was prospering and remaining ahead of schedule. While one of his novels was being serialized, he usually had at least one other completed novel, often two or three, awaiting publication.

Making yourself switch to your left hand is thus an exercise in self-control. You can resolve to use your left hand instead of your habitual right hand for brushing your teeth, using a computer mouse, opening doors, or lifting a cup to your lips.

Any of these techniques should improve your willpower and could be a good warm-up for tackling a bigger challenge, like quitting smoking or sticking to a budget.

I have learnt by actual stress of imminent danger, in the first place, that self-control is more indispensable than gunpowder, and, in the second place, that persistent self-control under the provocation of African travel is impossible without real, heartfelt sympathy for the natives with whom one has to deal.

and here was a truly pleasant surprise—they also got better at other things. The students who did the study-discipline program reported doing physical workouts a bit more often and cutting down on impulsive spending. Those in the fitness and money-management programs said they studied more diligently. Exercising self-control in one area seemed to improve all areas of life.

A woman is entitled to respect until and unless she does something to lose it. A man is not entitled to respect until and unless he does something to gain it…The man must repeatedly achieve: obtain, surpass, conquer….Insecurity is part of being a man, an essential part of the male role in society. Manhood is never secure: It must be claimed via public actions, risky things seen and validated by other people–and it can be lost.

ambulance. "At the end I started to think I was in purgatory. I genuinely believed that I was being judged, and that this was a place I was waiting to go to heaven or hell. Those last eight hours were the worst state I've ever been in. To go through something that horrific and not quit—that took something that was beyond me.

Getting your brain wired into little goals and achieving them, that helps you achieve the bigger things you shouldn't be able to do," he said. "It's not just practicing the specific thing. It's always making things more difficult than they should be, and never falling short, so that you have that extra reserve, that tank, so you know you can always go further than your goal. For me that's what discipline is. It's repetition and practice.

To help his clients eliminate distractions, Acheson started off by having them write down everything that had their attention, large and small, professional and personal, distal and proximal, fuzzy and fussy. They didn't have to analyze or organize or schedule anything, but in each case they did have to identify the specific next action to be taken.

In the tales he concocted about his adoptive family, Stanley claimed to be raised by parents who taught self-control. The dying words he ascribed to his fantasy mother were "Be a good boy.

That's more or less what researchers discovered after studying thousands of people inside and outside the laboratory. The experiments consistently demonstrated two lessons: 1. You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. 2. You use the same stock of willpower for all manner of tasks.

Self-awareness is a most peculiar trait among animals. Dogs will bark angrily at a mirror because they don't realize they're looking at themselves, and most other animals are similarly clueless when they're subjected to a formal procedure called the mirror test.

With this as the ideal, it's no wonder that so many people set impossible goals. When you detest what you see in the mirror, you need self-control not to start a crash diet. You need to remind yourself that diets typically work at first but fail miserably in the long run. To understand why, let's start with a strange phenomenon observed after the consumption of milkshakes in a laboratory.

If you had told me in 1968 that I'd end up being a personal productivity consultant," he says, "I would have told you that you're out of your mind." He drifted from job to job—he counted thirty-five by his thirty-fifth birthday