How to Make Better Decisions and Develop Your Self-control
By: Pauli Raivio
Tags: Health, Motivation, Decision Making, Self Improvement, Willpower

Willpower

How to Make Better Decisions and Develop Your Self-control

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Who wouldn’t want to control their actions and choices even a tiny bit better?

It’s so easy to sell ourselves short and yield to temptations even when you have already promised yourself to start the hard thing. We are all trying to manage our super busy and involved lifestyles and try to squeeze in something more and be a little better versions of ourselves.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but how we approach the issue is usually way too complicated or overpromising. In this story, I focus on the basic stuff but yet manage to make it way too long. Feel free to skip to the parts you feel interesting or go straight to the takeaways in the end.

Willpower — The Ability to resist impulses and make hard choices

Psychologist Kelly McGonigal has spent a lot of time researching aspects of willpower and have been doing a great job by popularizing the subject. She describes the concept in her book The Willpower Instinct as an ability to do something that you want to achieve while part of you resists doing it.

Our self-control struggles are mostly about our long-term goals and our skills to delay instant gratification for our bigger goals and dreams. McGonigal summarizes the point in three different categories of willpower choices:

I will — The ability to do something you must do

“I have to get this report ready for tomorrow. Another sleepless night coming up. Oh well.”

I won’t — The ability to resist temptations

“I won’t order that burger again even though I want it. I ate one yesterday, and now it’s a salad-day.”

I want — The ability to see the bigger picture and your goals

“My motivation is lost, and I keep losing all the competitions. I feel like quitting, but I choose to continue training hard. This probably is just a long bad streak”.

As humans, we use our prefrontal cortex to plan future scenarios. This is one of the unique skills distinguishing us from our mammalian cousins. Tigers won’t use their leisure time by honing better hunting tactics, and no one ever saw a chimp doing pull-ups to pump its climbing muscles to a new level.

In short, we have a few willpower tricks to give us an edge over the lesser beings. Some people are naturally more skilled in using their “rational” or “thinking” mind, but it’s ultimately a skill you can practice.

Some people insist that you have no control over your actions whatsoever, and everything is guided by emotions alone. In other words, there is no free will in making choices. I understand this argumentation, but I still firmly believe we have a lot to say regarding our free actions versus pure emotion-controlled choices.

You might envy some people around you as you see them getting a lot done and achieving things time and again. Maybe you even pity yourself a bit and hope that your sorry ass had even half of the willpower granted to your peers.

Worry not! You probably have much more willpower than you think. You just haven’t learned to use it optimally, and you might have created a story of yourself as a lot weaker than you are. It’s always easier to play the victim’s part, but whoever said life should be easy?

The ways to enhance your willpower listed here are relatively easy to digest and maybe even sound a tad obvious. However, most of the right choices in life are. McGonigal recommends these tactics in her book mentioned above. So do I, according to my own experiences.

Remember that just acknowledging new things won’t make you a decision robot that can always choose right. You still have to contemplate if they fit your unique life situation or agree with them at all. Never buy anything just because somebody is insisting it works.

Test it out yourself and challenge your previous thought patterns.

1. Understand what willpower is and what it’s not

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It has helped me understand that willpower is not some unique attribute or feature in your brain. It’s merely a description of a complex choice-process we face in every moment.

Many of our daily choices and activities are automatic or nearly automatic, but we still have some control over our actions. The amount of willpower we have equals the level of that control. Some of us manage to control our actions a lot better than the others.

In most of our automatic choices, our rational mind provides a commentary on the overall quality. It might feel that you are currently in control of your actions as the thinking mind is so active, but in reality, the choice has already been made automatically, and you are just justifying it to yourself.

“I can as well buy this chocolate bar. I truly have earned it as it was an awful day at work. I also did my jogging last week.”

Sound familiar? Your calorie-craving and sugar-loving impulses already chose for you, but you just managed to make it sound a tiny bit more deliberate act.

Strong willpower provides tools to catch yourself doing this kind of self-justification. You might avoid buying the sugar-covered sweet as you can explain that it doesn’t contribute to your overall happiness but instead provides a short boost ending up in a crash.

You might have heard of an analogy of willpower as a muscle that tires with use. Roy Baumeister first suggested this way of thinking with his colleagues as they studied people’s mental fatigue levels as the subjects resisted certain temptations and solved puzzles afterward.

This theory of ego depletion suggests that our self-control ability diminishes when we use our thinking mind to make hard decisions such as resisting temptations or doing something mentally tough. We can also train this “willpower-muscle” with exercises such as consciously maintaining a good posture and catching ourselves as we fail to do that.

The ego-depletion theory is easy to understand, and it speaks straight to our intuition:

“I do get tired along the day, and it’s always harder to make good decisions!”.

Common sense dictates that the more our brains fatigue, the harder it is to use them properly and make quality decisions. Also, I’m sure that everyone agrees that no good long term-decisions are made during nighttime.

However, it seems that the case is not that simple, as it usually isn’t. It is still unclear if we can truly speak of ego-depletion as a psychological fact or proven concept in the light of replication-studies and meta-analyses on the subject.

Also, there is no direct way to measure mental fatigue, and laboratory tests hardly resemble real-life situations. Simply put, there are still just too many alternate explanations that we could simplify as large a subject as human decision-making to a single model of thinking.

We don’t need to go deep into a scientific discussion here, and I wouldn’t even be qualified to contribute to the debate meaningfully.

However, for our purpose, I think the biggest issue of the ego-depletion theory is its effects on the larger-scale reader pool who stumble upon it in the more popularized forms of scientific thinking (such as this story).

The way of thinking affects the collective beliefs of our capabilities and the level of our mental strength. The imaginary bar of depletion may be much lower than where our true potential lays. In other words, it is okay to give in to temptation as there is now a story to back up the way we might feel.

We can always find new hard things that we have already done today and give ourselves a free pass as we just are too depleted to perform.

Do you believe that you always give everything you got and your potential to make quality decisions has vanished for a time? Or are you perhaps giving too much head start in the eternal battle of instant gratification vs. self-development?

When it comes to willpower, the legendary performers are equipped with pretty much the same brain that you. They just aren’t restricting themselves with beliefs about their capabilities but instead just get the job done.

I’m sure you have personal experiences of this. You might have read an inspiring autobiography or self-help book and been able to perform and live on a different level of performance just by the newfound motivation. It would be strange to think that you somehow acquired new levels of willpower that then slowly fade away. Instead, you were for a little while living closer to your true potential.

For me, this happens all the time. For example, when I discovered Medium and its logic, I was swallowed by this massive amount of energy to write content and growing my audience. The lazy nights turned to long sessions of focused writing.

Of course, the newfound energy faded after the initial excitement, but it indeed reminded me once more of the vast amounts of energy reserves that are left continuously untouched.

Ultrarunners also know that hidden reserves are waiting for you, even in the darkest of moments.

Remember: Don’t restrict yourself with the belief that your willpower has a limit. It probably has, but it’s much higher than you could ever think of.

2. Sleep enough with a regular schedule

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Sleeping is a strange paradox. It’s the one thing that everybody has to dedicate a significant part of their life, and still, most of us cannot sleep well or enough, even though our bodies and brain give us daily feedback on the quality of the rest.

Sleep itself shouldn’t be too complicated as you already knew how to do it properly before you were born. The problem seems to arise from the modern-day 24/7 -lifestyle and its implications for our ability to rest when we should.

The connection between willpower and adequate sleep is undeniable. When we are sleep-deprived, our prefrontal cortex’s ability to control impulses and emotions decreases significantly, which in its turn leads to us giving in to temptations.

Similarly, our sleep-deprived brains cannot function at full power, which naturally causes us to seek fast stimulants such as caffeine and sugar, which create spikes and cycles that exacerbate the situation.

You perhaps are familiar with the intense craving of that juicy donut combined with a hot-black coffee as you have barely managed to keep your eyes open during the first office hours. That is your brain desperately trying to fuel itself when it’s not functioning at its peak level.

You may think that you are part of the lucky 1% of the population that survives with less sleep because of their genes. The truth is, you probably have just forgotten what it feels like to be fully rested after several nights of quality sleep. It’s hard to realize how handicapped you are when sleep-deprived, but oh boys, the feeling of starting your day when you indeed have slept soundly.

I frequently fall into this trap myself, and each time I barely survive my daily existence after a sleepless night, I promise myself that I’m going to take this seriously from now on. Yet, I soon catch myself still doing something futile on the computer well after my allocated bedtime.

Sometimes it’s ironic to see people wrestling with their problems and trying to solve them with small life hacks, forgetting to put the significant cornerstones in order. Sleep is probably the biggest of these.

Imagine you are preparing for a marathon. You are well prepared: there are plenty of energy gels packed, the new extra cushioned sneakers feel good on your feet, the GPS-watch is fully-loaded, and you have already uploaded several motivational Instagram-feeds.

The only issue is that you have entirely forgotten to practice running!

You probably are going to have a bad experience. The same goes for sleeping. You can try to hack your way up with all kinds of habits and wonder-diets, but the real secret to performance lies in quality rest.

How much sleep is enough then? 7–8 hours of regular sleep with recurrent patterns and good sleep hygiene should be fine enough for most adults. If your schedule allows, a daytime nap is an excellent addition too. Try to go to bed every night at the same time and try to wake up at a specific time.

Improving sleep hygiene refers to measures that will improve your sleep quality and make it easier for you to fall asleep. These include:

No heavy meals before the bedtime

No hard exercise before the bedtime

No alcohol or other substances that harm the quality of sleep before the bedtime

Avoid blue-light screens such as mobile devices before the bedtime

Try to calm yourself and your thoughts before the bedtime

Sleep at a cool temperature

Be sure to invest in a quality mattress that fits your body

Remember: Sleep enough and regularly. The quality of your life will improve dramatically, and so will your ability to self-control.

3. Meditate and learn to breathe

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Whatever kind of self-help literature you are reading these days, you will come across one consensus that everyone agrees on: learn to meditate and make it a habit.

There are many different kinds of practices, but probably the most recommended one is about consciously observing and accepting thoughts and feelings as they come. For example, you direct your full attention to an external or internal object, such as breathing. Sound familiar?

It might also be that you have heard of mindfulness, which refers to the practice of fully immersing ourselves in reality around us by observing and feeling without judgment or contemplation.

The benefits of meditation and mindfulness practices have been studied so much that recommending them is firmly based on solid facts.

Regular meditation specifically develops the functioning of the prefrontal cortex of the brain and the ability to detect impulses produced by the deeper layers of the brain and the reactions they cause in us.

So, by meditating, we learn how to catch ourselves when we are doing something automatic or unconscious, driven by our impulses. You can also learn to spot your automatic thought patterns, which were already manipulating you to order the fattiest and unhealthiest burger for lunch.

I have been meditating for over four years every day, and on this basis, I can recommend it basically for everyone. However, do not expect too much from meditation in the beginning. Suddenly, or even due to long training, you do not become a super-human who fully manages his emotions and lives a harmonious and full life moment by moment.

I have a couple of occasions questioned the benefits of the whole thing until I think of the bigger picture. Before I started the practice, my emotional scale and the reactions they caused were much more unpredictable, and I made a lot more decisions on the spur of the moment. I was also continually questioning my choices and lifestyle, even if I had done the “right” things.

Nowadays, I experience emotions as before, but I can identify and name them better and make better decisions. It is also much easier to see when feelings are worth listening to and when the inner voice speaks merely to get me to choose the path of least resistance.

That is why meditation is one of the best weapons when exercising our willpower. Similarly, deep breathing can even be an emergency aid when you’re falling into temptation or are about to skip the thing you really should do. Focusing on breathing, especially exhaling, activates the parasympathetic nervous system, helping you to calm down and gain control of your thoughts when stress reactions and rapid thought patterns threaten to take over.

Just a minute’s breathing and reflecting on your long-term goals can significantly help you find the willpower you need to make the right decision.

You can start meditation on your own, but your smartphone is packed with good instructions and applications that can get you on your way. I used Headspace for three years and was satisfied with the content. Nowadays, I feel more comfortable doing my routine on my own.

Here is a basic instruction that most gurus recommend for beginners if you feel like starting right now. Why not?

Sit down comfortably, either on the floor or on a chair. The lotus position is optional. Breathe deeply, but naturally. Keep your eyes open. After inhaling a few times and feeling relaxed, close your eyes. Alternatively, you can keep your eyes locked on an external object. Pay attention to your body. How do you feel overall at the moment? What about each body part separately? Just detection is enough. You don’t have to change anything. Shift your attention to your breathing. You can count your breaths if it helps you stay focused. If you find your thoughts have escaped, gently return to breathing. Don’t be too harsh on yourself if you find yourself thinking something else because this is precisely the point of the practice. After about 5–10 minutes, slowly return your attention to the current moment and open your eyes. Of course, you can meditate longer if you feel like it.

Remember: Learn to recognize and name your emotions and impulses. Listen to your inner voice, calmly, and approvingly.

4. Only feel stressed when it’s necessary and help your body relieve stress right

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Your willpower is severely allergic to stress. The more stressed you are, the worse decisions you make. Why? External stressors activate your body’s sympathetic nervous system, which in turn activates the body’s response to these potential threats.

The body’s response is called the fight-or-flight response, and the name is quite descriptive. The body loses all unnecessary activity, and the blood is diverted to the large muscles and parts of the brain where quick decision-making and sensory perception are made. The precious energy is not wasted on slow and analytical thinking.

When in stress, rational thinking and the ability to contemplate one’s choices and goals fly out the window. Likewise, many secondary activities, such as digestion or immune defenses, remain in the background as the body optimizes defense responses.

The benefits of stress reactions are most evident when the jungle laws dominate, and all kinds of beasts are plotting to eat you.

However, they have their place also in the modern-day environment. Stress reactions get you to notice a suspicious group in the alley early enough to change the side of the road. Likewise, stress as the deadline approaches helps you focus your resources on the task at hand (though impaired thinking may eat the benefits of enhanced operational capacity).

So, a little stress and constant external stimuli are necessary for our performance, and every one of us sometimes feels stressed for more extended periods. However, it is an entirely different matter to fall into a rhythm of life where you are chronically more stressed than in a calm, balanced state.

The adverse side effects of stress begin to accumulate, and you need more and more artificial boosts, such as sugar or alcohol, to help you feel balanced. Similarly, staring at the television and immersing yourself in the eternal flow of social media feed make you feel better for a while and sometimes may even seem to help with the stress.

In reality, they are merely numbing you but not helping to balance your mental state. At the same time, your power to make meaningful and the right choices for you will be further weakened.

What can we do then? First, you should learn to be aware of the body’s different reactions to external stimuli and name them. Meditation practice helps a lot in this job. In time you will learn to observe, name, and control your body’s feelings through internal dialogue.

You can even go as far as say in your mind or even out loud:

“I feel stressed!”

Identifying the body’s reaction is enough at this point. You have already taken the most significant step and may already feel relaxed.

The point of learning to listen to your responses and inner dialogue is to find the inner voice that can guide you to the things that genuinely make you relax and reactivate your body’s parasympathetic nervous system, the restoring and relaxing state. These things are unique, but the universal thing about them is that they have no adverse side effects like the aforementioned TV- and beer-frenzies.

Typical restorative activities include:

Spending time with friends and family

Walking in nature

Exercising

Reading

Listening to music

Playing an instrument

Any activity you enjoy and want to immerse yourself in.

I know, sometimes getting started feels overwhelming, but the restorative power of active doing is marvelous over passive and numbing methods.

Remember: Stress is a necessary and beneficial part of life, but too much of it is dangerous and weakens our ability to control our impulses. Seek out genuine stress-relieving activities.

5. Exercise and then exercise some more

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At this point, you might already feel a little cheated. All instructions so far have been no-brainers: Sleep enough and avoid stress. More clichés are on the way as we now cover exercise, and you guessed right, the next one will be eating right.

It just happens that your self-control is built on these fundamental pillars of living, and by getting them right, you have already done most of the work. Another question, then, is how to get enough self-control to take over these chunks. Let’s not worry about that just yet.

We all know that we should exercise more, and most have already made the initial investments. I’m sure you manage to find some kind of running shoes in your wardrobe, and perhaps you already have a membership to a local gym.

The problem is, it’s hard to get yourself started, especially if you don’t have much experience in sports. It’s hard to be motivated about something you have no idea of, and the modern exercise-business isn’t helping that much. It’s either just selling you images or byproducts or then starts to resemble religion in some weird manner.

Natural and straightforward exercise forms have been forgotten, mainly because it is difficult to commercialize.

Why should you exercise at all?

The list of health benefits and the benefits of life quality is endless, and we will not go into it further in this story. Regarding self-control, exercise has stimulating effects. Although it is difficult to start a training session and the energy levels seem to be at their lowest, after completing the exercise-session, the feeling is often much more energetic or at least more positive than when starting.

Of course, our body has used energy for exercise, but at the same time, it has caused your blood to circulate, oxygen to flow more efficiently to your brain, and has triggered a flow of several useful neurotransmitters. The most notable of these is endorphin, which produces feelings of pleasure and satisfaction. Why would we experience such a peak if physical exercise would not bring significant benefits to the body?

In some studies, regular aerobic exercise has been considered to be an even more effective treatment for depression than medication. Similarly, regular exercise positively correlates with school achievement, learning, general intelligence, and many cognitive functions. In other words, it develops precisely the part of our brain that we also use for self-control.

It’s no coincidence that once you get your workout routine going on and the exercise becomes a regular and essential part of your life, it’s always more comfortable and easier to start and perform well.

An essential but underestimated willpower benefit in exercise is that it is perfectly okay to reward yourself for a good workout. A cold beer after a long jog is always more pleasurable than just settling for that frosty alone. The secret ingredient is that you have deserved the beer.

People who can’t indulge in these small rewards have forgotten that life is not about perfection at every decision you make. Besides, they have secret vices that are much more dissolute than the cold beverage.

How much exercise should you do then?

Research suggests that daily long-lasting and aerobic exercise is most beneficial for cognitive processes, but of course, we also want other benefits from training.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to look muscular and slim as long as you do this by natural and simple means. You should practice every day but vary the nature of the activities. Exercise should include at least endurance training, muscle training, and supportive exercises such as stretching and core training.

You can already get to excellent shape just by walking and running, doing push-ups, and basic ab-exercises. In the evenings, you stretch for 20 minutes and add some massaging now and then. Forget about expensive courses or personal trainers. You can get so far by just cheap and straightforward measures.

Remember: Exercise develops your cognitive abilities and provides extra energy for the day. Exercise every day, even a little.

6. Eat healthily

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In addition to sleeping, eating is one thing we do from the cradle to the grave, yet it seems challenging to many. If you’re into social media, you can’t avoid the impression that there are as many right ways to eat as there are self-made nutrition experts.

In a way, diets and beliefs about food have replaced religious life in this golden age of secularization and homespun gurus.

In the end, nutrition comes down to the fact that cells in your body need specific nutritional components to regenerate and fulfill their functions. Malnutrition causes particular symptoms, and your body begins to compensate for the deficiency with some substitute function.

It’s almost macabre to think that people who have potentially unlimited opportunities to eat whatever they choose to decide to cause themselves deficiencies by eating unilaterally or eating nutrition-poor food. At the same time, hundreds of millions of people lack constant satisfactory nutritional levels for not getting enough to eat.

It is no conspiracy invented by any expert, food industry lobbyist, health authority, or even Netflix document that a person needs the following components from their diet for a healthy and balanced living:

Carbohydrates

Fibers

Proteins

Essential fatty acids

Certain minerals

Vitamins

Water

Your cells need all of these, and the list is easy to find on Wikipedia or high-school biology materials. It is also reasonably easy to stumble into the knowledge that carbohydrates in sweets are more harmful to the body than those found in whole-grain bread or that bacon fat doesn’t have the same health benefits as the fat in nuts.

Most of us instinctively understand what is right for our body, but the amount of choice and the constant lobbying of the food industry have messed up our heads. Most of the time, we choose the path of the least resistance by choosing the most-processed and instantly gratifying delicacies.

Our biological tendency to gorge on calories when they are available does not help in the battle either. We also need justifications for our choices, and in this, the aggressively marketed super diets help a lot. There are so many diets out there today that everyone can choose the one that suits their bad habits and then proclaim a great feeling and newfound levels of overall energy. Simultaneously, the precise rules of the diet clarify the chaos of endless choices.

Unfortunately, the advice given in most wonder-diets these days result in some imbalance in your body’s nutritional intake leading to a wide variety of negative symptoms. These might not show up immediately as your body is excellent at adapting to almost anything you put into it, but there is a limit to it. Are you genuinely willing to let a single self-taught “expert” make all the essential dietary choices for you?

Who then to trust in the matter?

No, don’t listen to yourself or even me. We both are unqualified to judge these self-proclaimed gurus (Given that you don’t happen to be a nutrition researcher). Instead, rely on information produced and scientifically pruned by numerous demographic studies. This information is far from complete and evolves as our knowledge grows, as is the case in sound science.

The same way Wikipedia’s texts become ever more reliable and comprehensive, nutrition research will find ever more robust evidence of the big picture of optimal nutrition for long and healthy living. This information is easily accessible by consulting the official dietary recommendations of any developed nation. Sure, you can state them as manipulative fake-news, but strangely they have a lot in common regardless of the place. For example:

Eat lots of vegetables, fruits, and greens

Try to consume a lot of fibers and complex carbohydrates such as those in whole grain products

Eat fish regularly

Avoid sugar and saturated fats

Avoid highly processed foods

Watch your sodium intake

Eat at regular intervals

Avoid eating red meat

Remember: Eating should not resemble a religion with strict rules and beliefs, but still, you should take the matter seriously. Seek up-to-date information from the health-authorities’ recommendations or independent sources. It’s also okay to treat yourself to something unhealthy every now and then.

7. Ditch unnecessary attention-thieves

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You may have kept your eyes open enough to realize that we are deeply addicted to technology and the fragmented reality it provides. We divide our attention and concentration among the countless sweeps and notifications.

It is not at all wrong to talk about an addiction that affects entire nations. For example, Americans check their phone 50 times a day and spend four hours a day on the device. And this is just the time spent on a cellphone. Let’s include TV and video games, and we get some disturbing numbers.

We would be terrified if someone offered illegal drugs to calm down our children, but no one seems to care that they become smartphone addicts from the early years. Stupid comparison?

Not at all.

In both, the mechanism, effects, and withdrawal symptoms are very similar, although chemistry is somewhat different. The side effects of excessive cell phone use are just beginning to dawn on us, but the list is long, ranging from sleep disorders to persistent concentration problems.

And yes, 4 hours a day is too much. Here we are particularly interested in the negative impact of cell phone addiction on our ability to make rational decisions and resist the endless temptations.

Continuously responding to your smartphone’s requirements is a sure way to consume your brain’s little resources for more involved decision-making. As we went through earlier, this rational and informed decision-making part of the brain can only control your automated actions to a certain point, and it really can’t handle very many similar things at once.

Every notification is fooling your brain into thinking that something important and worth the reaction is happening. A dopamine-rush in your brain drives you to action, and you get a momentary pleasure spike as you react to the stimuli.

As with other dopamine-based addictive substances, continued use of the smartphone increases the tolerance. You need more and more while the content itself feels emptier and emptier.

Of course, smartphones aren’t the only distractions in market-driven societies where marketers know exactly how to hook people to buy, use, or order their products and services. The tired and indifferent rational and thoughtful part of the brain is their best friend and at the same time, the worst enemy of your goals.

How to navigate in the midst of all this?

Simply by making your life more boring and using your time more just to be and observe the environment. You don’t need to react to everything or be part of everything. Leave the phone in your pocket in public transport and read an actual book instead. Go for a walk in the forest.

Just anything that makes you concentrate on a single thing without having to shift your attention to something new time and again. In the beginning, the FOMO-effect (fear of missing out) and the withdrawal symptoms get you running back to your phone in no time, but don’t give up!

Mindfulness and the ability to concentrate on simple stuff are the straightest paths to accomplish peace and harmony in all this reactivity.

If you are serious about owning your life more again by using your phone less, Catherine Price’s book How to Break Up With Your Phone is a great first step.

Remember: Live your life in actual reality instead of fragmenting it into smaller imaginary bits. Learn to enjoy the real beauty around you, such as living people and nature.

The takeaways (at last)

How does this story help you or make you a better version of yourself?

Probably not in any direct way. We tend to read something inspiring and immediately imagine that our lives have changed somehow or that we now have the tools to make lasting changes. However, we both know that just reading some obvious life statements does not mean that they are the new standard.

Also, a lot of the things listed here are already familiar to you. As a toddler, you already learned how essential it is to eat all the vegetables on the plate, and everyone knows that, on average, a person needs 7–8 hours of quality sleep.

However, I dare to hope that a story like this has two real reasons why it’s worth a small amount of your valuable time.

The first is the little spike in motivation you get when you read something you would like to be a part of your life, but you may have forgotten or just haven’t given it any real thought lately. This additional motivation can help you find direction if you are being led astray from the chosen path.

The other one is to remind you that meaningful life is not about hacking your life, forming all kinds of habits, manipulating or analyzing people, or any other superficial thing that is easy to sell. Merely concentrating on the basic stuff can do wonders.

Also, constantly trying to find meaning in everything and trying to solve your problems by always changing things will not lead far. The most significant part of personal development and willpower is about the core pillars of life. Get them right first, and see how easy it is to make better decisions after that. You will also notice that you don’t anymore have to second-guess every choice you make.

Remember not to buy any of this without chewing it a little. Maybe add some of it to your knowledge and challenge it as much as you can. You are fed stories continuously about how life and you should be, but in the end, it is your responsibility to form the complete picture that serves both you and your community.

Thank you for reading!