Willpower is like a mental muscle, you have to train it.
If you see other people working like crazy, having insane self-discipline and getting stuff done while you’re procrastinating, it’s because these people have consistently trained their willpower.
Nobody is born with willpower or productivity, it’s something you have to earn by consistently training that willpower muscle every day.
About 5 years ago I barely had any willpower.
Building my willpower to the point it’s now was a long and difficult process of failure, re-committing and giving it one more try. At first, I couldn’t even work productively for a full hour. I literally had to force myself to sit down and work for an hour without any distractions.
I took my phone and set the alarm clock to 50 minutes and then I worked on a single business task until the alarm finally went off.
Nowadays I have no problem working 12-14 hours a day if I have to.
I haven’t taken a day off in over 340 days, including my birthday and Christmas. But a few years ago this would have been unimaginable.
Building willpower is like going to the gym: At first you can’t even do a single pull-up and you might only be able to lift very light weights. If you try to jump ahead and benchpress hundreds of pounds, you’ll fail because your muscles aren’t able to bear that type of heavy weight.
However, if you consistently hit the gym and lift small weights your strength increases and after a while you can lift heavier weights.
So what’s the equivalent to small weights to build willpower?
I suggest setting 7-day challenges at first.
Set a an action oriented goal and do something every day for seven days. For example, shoot a video for seven days, write a blog post or work on your business for one hour a day for one week straight.
Then increase the “weight” and start doing 30-day challenges. After that move on to 60-day challenges, 90-day challenges and finally do 365 day challenges. At that point your willpower and self-discipline will be so rock-solid that you can literally control your own life.
But don’t try to leap forward too fast. You can’t jump from working one hour per day to working 14 hours per day or you’ll simply burn out.
Acknowledge where you’re at right now and then practice.
Slowly increase the “weights” so your willpower muscle grows.
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