How can I achieve my goals? This summary of Benjamin Hardy’s “Willpower Doesn’t Work” explains how changing your environment leads to success.
Introduction
Willpower is often considered an essential resource for habit formation. In reality, willpower is only required when:
- you do not know what you want,
- your desire (your why) is not strong enough,
- you are not invested in your aspirations, or
- your environment opposes your goal.
When these four principles align with your commitment, there is no internal debate. There is no need for willpower to live up to them. Hence, making committed decisions requires:
- upfront investments,
- making it public,
- setting a timeline,
- setting up feedback and accountability structures, and
- removing or changing the elements in your environment that oppose your commitments.
True commitment means creating the conditions that make achieving your goals inevitable.
Change your environment—change yourself
Evolution dictates that we adapt to our environment. You are who you are because of your environment. If you strategically change your environment, you choose the direction in which you’ll evolve.
While we have internal, interpersonal, and external environments, this book focusses on the latter alone. It includes the people around you, the information you look at, the food you consume… This external environment shapes your internal invironment, your worldview, values, and beliefs.
By shaping your environment, you shape your thoughts and behaviours. You do not shape your thoughts and behaviours; they emerge simply from circumstance.
Chapter 1: how great people are made
Will Durant spent four decades studying the history of the world. He concluded that necessity was the most important determinant for greatness, not the people to which this label was assigned.
This contrasts with our individualistic society, which values the (characteristics of the) individual. In reality, superheroes are the consequence of a situation that demands them. Your (superhero) potential is shaped by what and who surrounds you.
Rather than complete free will or determinism, each person has a contextual agency. Each person can choose their actions, but the options from which they can choose is contextually constrained.
Your environment affects your psychological state, and your psychological state affects your behaviour. By changing your psychological state through your environment (a process called precognition), you change how you behave.
To radically change your environment, you need a ‘coming-of-age’ moment. You need to be completely honest with reality and take control of it. You need to accept that new environments are necessary, and that adapting to them will be difficult and uncomfortable.
Chapter 2: willpower rarely helps you grow
Historically, scientists believed that you change a person’s behaviour by changing their mindsets. It turned out, however, that this was only effective for a small subset of behaviours, mostly ones you rarely perform.
Willpower is deemed essential to success. However, we should understand it as a means of last resort, not as the primary source of personal growth. When you’re told something is impossible, you need a lot of willpower to make it work. When you know it can be done, it’s already so much easier to do it.
Cells stemming from the same stem cell are all genetically identical. However, when you place them in a different environment, they can become bone, muscle, fat… This (epigenetics) shows that who a person becomes depends more on which genes are expressed. Not necessarily on which genes are present.
You and your environments extend each other. Who you are and what you can do in one environment is very different in another. Not every environment enables you to be the person you want to be.
You are, depending on your context, playing a particular role. By identifying with that role, letting that role define you, you put yourself in a box. You make something that is subjective and fluid into something objective and unalterable.
The roles you play aren’t your fixed and unchanging identity. Rather, you are acting a particular way based on the rules of the environment you are in. Your role is relative to what surrounds you.
This became apparent in Carol Dweck’s research on (fixed and growth) mindsets. People who believe they can grow are more likely to do so. The belief that you can change leads you to take responsibility for your life.
You can change your roles by altering your environment, not by learning about how you should behave. Instead of trying to prequalify to be someone, create the environment that will qualify you to become that person now.
Chapter 3: growth requires high stress ánd recovery environments
Humans evolved needing two types of (enriched) environments; high stress and high recovery. In the former, we are completely on, whereas in the latter, we are entirely off.
The first enriched environment is highly stressful. Here, we push ourselves to our limits, but not beyond them—this would cause distress. Positive stress makes us stronger, but only when we allow ourselves to recover from it. This is what happens in the second enriched environment of rest and rejuvenation.
In a way, our growth depends on the quality of our recovery. When we don’t recover from exercise, we become physically weak. In the mental domain, 84% of creative and mental breakthroughs happen while not at work.
In today’s techno-dominant world, it’s hard to create such a deep recovery environment. Fear of missing out prevents us from putting in effort to do so.
Most environments are optimised for distraction, neither for performance nor for recovery. You need willpower to act in desired ways, be it relaxing or performing.
Chapter 4: peak experiences and states
‘Peak experiences’ are moments of perceiving reality in exquisite ways. It’s during these experiences that we have ground-breaking ideas. It’s in these moments that we can perceive with clarity our lives and make major decisions about it.
Peak experiences occur in environments of intense rest and recovery, such as a retreat. Most of us rarely have these experiences because we rarely find ourselves in such environments. We live in an addictive and reactive state, triggered by a negative routine and environment.
In such a setting, we go wherever life takes us. It becomes a random and unconscious evolution, like a ship without a sail. So how can we enter our ‘peak state?’
To have clarity about your life and goals, you need to give yourself a reset, regularly. That means scheduling time to unplug (completely!), recharge, and rest. You could begin to schedule ‘disconnected days,’ where you do just that. To make the process easier, it can help to leave your regular environment.
These days are there for thinking, relaxing, learning, and writing down whatever meaningful occurs to you. The reason you should get out of your environment is simple. To be able to see your life you need to step away from it for a moment.
To get into peak state, you can start by journaling about:
- appreciating everything happening in your life,
- reflecting on all life and relationship details,
- the people who matter to you,
- how far you’ve come, and what happened since your last recovery session.
Recording your history provides context to your ideas, goals, and plans.
In a peak state, you commit to making specific changes. What changes do you need to make to live up to your aspirations? What frustrations have prevented you from having done so in the past?
Strive to have such a journaling session once a week. The following prompts may inspire you to reflect and strategies:
Review the Past Week
- Reflect on what went well (“wins”)—tasks you accomplished, progress made, or personal highlights.
- Acknowledge what didn’t go well—missed opportunities, setbacks, or areas where you fell short.
- Note any significant events—memorable moments with friends or family, breakthroughs, or challenges.
Extract Key Lessons
- Identify the most valuable insights from the past week.
- Consider how you can apply these lessons to improve in the future.
Plan for the Coming Week
- Define your focus areas for the week ahead—what needs your attention and energy most.
- List specific to-dos for the week, covering key aspects like work, learning, relationships, fitness, and personal routines.
Align with Your Goals:
- Revisit your bigger-picture goals (your “why” and end vision) to stay motivated.
- Highlight your proximal goals—objectives you’re actively working toward over the next 1–6 months.
Set Intentions for Growth:
- Decide how you’ll use what you learned to improve—whether it’s adjusting your approach, creating new habits, or tackling specific challenges.
Chapter 5: the importance of morning routines
Working toward your aspirations requires an environment where you regularly check your course. To check your course, you must be in the peak state described before. The best way to do this is to have a dedicated morning routine. By putting yourself in peak state first thing in the morning, you can operate from that state during the rest of the day.
You built an environment around you to keep the things as they are. You have a mental model that matches your current life. If not, life would be different. If you decide you want life to be different, you need to re-create the experience that spawned that decision. This state, in which you decide you want to change, needs to become your new normal. Only then will you be able to do it—to change.
If you don’t get into this state first thing in the morning, you’ll immediately slip into your old routine—your old life.
The most essential aspect of the morning routine entails writing in your journal. Writing in your journal is more powerful than simple meditation like writing down your goals is more powerful than leaving them in your head. So, every day, take about 10–15 minutes to journal about your goals and how you will act in line with them during the day.
Journaling amplifies the effect of other activities, such as exercise or mediation. Anything that puts you in a reactive state, such as checking the news or messages on your phone, is detrimental, and should be avoided at all costs.
Create a ‘sacred spot’ for your morning ritual, full of inspiration and free of distractions.
Chapter 6: lose things that hold you back
All you have in life is time and energy. Most of us spend a lot on these resources on mental and physical overhead. E.g., going through piles of clothes to find an outfit or deciding what to eat each day. We all carry emotions with us, and relationships that keep us in our current environment.
In line with Newton’s third law, we need a lot of energy to overpower all this force keeping us in place. Willpower can help us wiggle around a little bit but won’t propel us out of our current state.
When you remove all the excess energy demanded by your environment, you have a chance to get out. Doing so requires a bit of effort in the beginning, but through its savings will be very worthwhile. You’ll want to return to your present environment, as it has brought you comfort and an identity of sorts.
Eliminate stuff
Before you can have a clear mind, you need to have a clear environment. To start any change, you need to remove everything that you do not use on a regular basis. When you’re done, think of an upper limit: how many shirts do you want to own? How many emails can be in your mailbox at once? If you have a cluttered environment, you’ll have a messy mind. Everything is baggage that requires carrying. Two book recommendations in this domain:
- Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing
- Greg McKeown’s Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
Eliminate distractions
Every environment is optimized for something. Most people’s environment is laden with triggers for unconscious dopamine seeking. The more dopamine-triggers in your environment, the more your brain will depend on it.
The best place to start is (probably) your phone. Remove all the apps that do not help you become better at what you are trying to do. When you do not need it, put it away, in a place where you cannot feel or see it at all.
Eliminate options
Options lead to indecision, dissatisfaction with the choices you’ve made and lack of commitment. Eliminating choices from your life requires that you know what you want. Success means taking twenty steps in one direction, instead of one step in twenty directions. Once you commit to a goal, decisions become easier.
At first it may seem difficult to limit the choices in your life. We all want to experience everything and not miss out. You’ll find however, that limiting your choices makes your life feel richer and more meaningful. By discharging the ‘bit of everything else’ the things you do become more rewarding. You’ll be surprised how peaceful life becomes when you are in an environment aligned with your highest values and aspirations.
Eliminate people
Similar to our environment, we adapt our behaviour to the people with which we directly interact. By keeping certain relationships, we lock ourselves into our current state.
Surround yourself with people who remind you more of your future than your past.
Dan Sullivan
This doesn’t mean that you should banish people from your life. It is about establishing boundaries that prevent you from adapting negatively.
Eliminate working memory
Keeping things is your short-term memory is incredibly exhausting. Because you’re working to hold ideas and thoughts in your head, you can’t let your mind wander and get new insights.
This problem is easily solved. All you must do is record (written, digitally, voice memo) the things that come up that you (might) need later. You outsource your thinking to your environment.
Furthermore, if the thought involves an action, live by the following rule: if it takes two minutes or less, do it immediately. This is particularly beneficial for communicating things in relationships with other people.
Chapter 7: make better choices automatically
Changing the default option of choices is an easy way to change your behaviour. The default behaviour is often triggered by environmental queues. The more repeated the cycle, the more ingrained the cue becomes. Simple changes in your environment can give you the opportunity to rethink if you really want to do something.
The default for most people is to live in a reactive state—reacting to texts, emails, and other notifications. We are all addicted, dependent, and broken. The following principles allow you to break from this state.
Don’t be a slave to your environment
We spend a disproportionate time on modern technologies, such as smartphones. Just like you should unplug from work every night, you should unplug your body from food and your brain from technology once per week.
Take a weekly fast; a day without phone and internet for 24 hours. Instead, reconnect with yourself and your loved ones.
Be where you are
Our default is to always be available. But to be fully engaged and effective at work, you need to be able to psychologically detach from it. Being connected all the time, we remain in a state of continuous low-level stress. This stress is subconscious, but it ages the mind and body.
In the context of work, you need to set clear boundaries on when you are available and when you are not. After that, you need to set rituals where you psychologically detach yourself from work. For example, at the end of the day, write down what your top priorities are for the next day or week. Remember, when you write them down, they will not recirculate in your working memory. Send any final communications if you need to do so. Then turn off your PC and put your work phone on airplane mode. Leave the phone in your office or put it away in a bag.
When you allow yourself to be unavailable, you will live a far more present life. You will experience a deep satisfaction actually being present with your loved ones. You will be more mindful and engaged. You will be a better person in your relationships.
Act on instinct and intuition, not impulse and dependence
If you’re going to use caffeine or technology, do it based on intuition and instinct, not based on impulse and addiction. This requires mindfulness of your body and environment. Your environments (including cultural values around work) are set up to trigger addiction and dependence.
Create deep human connection to overcome addiction
Addiction is the product of isolation and loneliness. It creates a downward spiral that reinforces the effect. When you do not have meaningful relationships, you seek to fill that void somewhere else.
When you are in an addictive state, it can be hard to establish these relationships with others. After all, who would want to connect to a person like that? You resort to willpower to solve your addiction, rather than changing the environment that is causing it. Vulnerability is essential. Connection is the key.
Rather than seeing addicts as bad people, it is important to see addiction for what it is: a solution. It is a solution for resolving pain.
You do not need to be brilliant to have healthy relationships. You simply need to be real and genuine. This requires keeping your cell phone of you for extended periods of time, but also honesty about your values, beliefs, and goals.
Chapter 8: prevent self-sabotage
Sometimes, you will be in situations where you are triggered to act against your desires and goals. Rather than relying on willpower, you will need an automated response. You will need to create a trigger for the trigger.
This is called implementation intentions: a well-researched idea in organisational and motivation psychology. Implementation intentions entail knowing head of time what you will do when you go off course. It is planning to fail so you can proactively respond.
Implementation intentions are “if-then” responses when you encounter tough conditions. And example: “If I open the fridge to get a beer, I will drink a big glass of water instead.”
These automated responses work because they divert your attention from your triggered temptation. Furthermore, by living in alignment with your goals, you will get a boost of confidence that is far more long-lasting than a shot of dopamine.
Planning for the worst sets you up for reality, and for success. Rarely are the conditions perfect. And if you have a plan for what you will do when things fall apart, you will not act in a reactive and unconscious manner.
Enhanced mental clarity, boosted motivation, and a heightened sense of control are a strong harness against negative triggers and temptations.
Your preplanned behaviour should be simple and easy. An effective implementation intention can be as simple as a mental reminder. Such as “a person who is a slave to his environment would give into this urge to do x.” This mental note can be enough to not engage in the undesirable behaviour.
By writing down your goal and the potential obstacles you encounter, you set yourself up for success. As such, you can follow along with this writing exercise. Write down…
- your top goal,
- a (short) timeline,
- potential obstacles you may encounter,
- an ‘if-then’ response to each of those obstacles, and
- the conditions under which you will absolutely quit.
Point five will help you to keep at your goal until this condition is met. Paradoxically, this sets you up to complete your goals, rather than abandon them.
Use visualisation to clearly imagine the obstacles, how you will respond, and how that will make you feel.
Specific if-then responses are far more effective than vague if-then responses. “If I walk into the kitchen and crave cookies, then…” is much more likely to trigger a response than “if I walk into the kitchen and crave junk food, then…”
Chapter 9: forcing functions for enriched environments
Enriched environments are circumstances that force you to perform at a high level. They evoke eustress that creates focus and growth. You can measure the richness of your environment by how often you are in a flow state.
Pessimists explain negative events as a permanent fixture of their identity. When something goes wrong for an optimist, they focus on situational factors. Then, plan how they can change those factors in the future.
You can optimize your environment by structuring it with forcing functions. Forcing functions are self-imposed constraints that force you to act the way you intend. You turn a behaviour you would like to do into something you have to do.
Forcing functions are another way of freeing up your working memory. You no longer have to think about or manage your behaviour. You can be more mindful of the present and have greater discernment in its needs.
Forcing functions are about making one decision that makes all other decisions easier or irrelevant. For example, by removing social media apps, you do not have to think about whether to check your feed. Keeping your options open sets you up for failure.
The most important forcing functions of an enriched environment are:
- High investment fosters greater commitment and persistence.
- Social pressure creates a sense of accountability and motivation to meet perceived expectations. It reduces the likelihood of giving up.
- High poor performance consequences to ensure you won’t cut corners.
- High difficulty. Happiness does not come from the absence of a load. It is the presence of a load that gives us the traction to move forward. Do not give yourself the leeway to get around it.
- Novelty. When you do things you’ve never done before, you’re more focused and engaged. When you do the same things over and over and in the same environments, it is easy to zone out.
Chapter 10: the three ingredients to personal growth
To learn, you first need to believe that there is something you can learn—that something is learnable. This is the essence of having a growth mindset. When you have this mindset, you apply many learning styles, rather than one. Important ones include:
- Imagining: generating creative ideas and possibilities.
- Reflecting: exploring and gaining a deeper understanding of the ideas you have imagined.
- Analysing: organising the ideas you have learned. Developing strategic plans to act on these ideas.
- Deciding: choosing a single direction or approach to pursue a specific idea.
- Acting: taking tangible steps to bring your chosen idea to life.
- Experiencing: gaining insights through real-world interactions by collaborating, experimenting, creating, and failing.
Most of us have a growth mindset for the learning styles we are good at. However, for things we are not comfortable with, we adopt a fixed mindset. We believe we can get better at what we are good at, but we cannot get better at something we cannot yet do. When you do not believe you can learn something, you actually can’t. You will keep navigating toward environments that demand the learning style you are most comfortable with.
Committing fully and completely
When you commit to learning, you commit to changing. When you are committed 100%, hesitation and doubt vanish. It brings clarity, focus, and freedom from distractions.
To commit completely, you need to surpass a ‘point of no return.’ Beyond this point, it becomes easier to move toward your goals than away from them. You can create a point of no return by investing—having your skin in the game. You need to invest in your goal to the extent that you cannot afford not to achieve it.
Seek high exposure environments
The next step is to become completely comfortable with uncertain situations. This entails strategically developing a tolerance for one’s fears, i.e. systematic desensitization. You can do so by exposing yourself over and over to the thing you are fearful for.
You should not do this gradually, e.g. shifting your wake-up time half an hour over the course of a month. By doing so, you are delaying and compounding the pain. You are overly focusing on and extending it. When you jump right into the pool, you compress the shock and transition into a small amount of time. Yes, this approach is emotionally extreme. But you acclimate to your new environment extremely fast and instinctively.
The anticipation of an event is almost always more emotionally charged than the event itself. If you will just act, the pain will be far less severe and over before you know it.
Master your emotions and fears
With this radical approach, you need to be able to handle your fears and emotions.
The load, the challenge, and the opposition create true fulfillment and accomplishment. Delayed gratification, discomfort, frustration, dissatisfaction, pain, tragedy, awkwardness, embarrassment, uncertainty… The avoidance of these feelings is stopping you from your greatest life.
Developing a positive attitude toward difficult emotions is the key to a fulfilling life. The more difficult the emotion, the greater the treasure at the end of the path.
Chapter 11: five key enablers for achieving your goals
After setting a goal, you need enabling conditions for pressure.
Compete above your skill level—in public
When we compete, most of us like to do so with those of a similar or slightly lower skill level. This is a direct consequence of our ego, a desire to feel good about ourselves. However, it inhibits the depth of our progress. We can adapt quickly to a more challenging environment if we allow for the proportionate emotional response. We can grow faster if we are willing to take the hit. More so, when we compete in public, we can exacerbate the effect.
Context-based learning
Research has shown that we learn best by doing. This is how this type of (context-based) learning works:
- Learn a concept at a surface level.
- Practice and apply it in real-world scenarios to deepen understanding.
- Receive immediate coaching and feedback to refine your skills.
- Repeat the process with increasing intensity and shorter timelines to achieve automaticity.
- Enhance your progress through coaching and feedback.
Do not ‘consume knowledge,’ it doesn’t work. Rather, seek to find creative ways that require you to apply the thing you are learning.
Invest in (a mentor for) yourself
Due to compound interest, every dollar invested in yourself will yield a hundred-or-more return. A great way to invest in yourself is contracting a mentor that can enhance the learning process of achieving your goals. Only through a mentor will you turn something that is ‘good’ into something that is excellent.
A mentor may make you dissatisfied with your work. But dissatisfaction is the product of heightening expectations and personal standards. Dissatisfaction with your own work can become a powerful driving force.
Track your progress
When you measure your performance, your performance improves. When you report on your performance, you can be held accountable for it. This is true for self-accountability. However, holding yourself accountable to others is much, much more powerful.
Embrace the unknown
The emotional need for clarity and fear of the unknown leads people to abandon their dreams. Instead, they pursue more straightforward ambitions in less demanding environments.
Goal clarity is essential to high motivation. This clarity is abundant in simple (1–3 step) goals. For ambitious dreams, involving many, many steps, this goal clarity is lacking—there are too many steps. In these cases, it’s clarity about the next 1–2 steps that you should find. Acquiring this clarity is the key to achieving your dreams.
We are kept from our goal not by obstacles but by [the presence of] a clear path to a lesser goal.
Robert Brault
Chapter 12: the importance of rotating environments
The room you are in should align with the goal you want to achieve there. The only things in your bedroom should be those in service of sleep. Everything non-sleep related requires willpower when you are trying to sleep.
Most of us do several types of work—reading, writing, sending emails—in the same workspace. To perform best on a task, we should have a different environment to work on each of them.
When you are working on a task, you focus your mind on the problem at hand. It is when you allow your mind to wander that you get the most creative ideas. Getting an idea and working it out require completely different environments.
You should synchronise your tasks and their appropriate environments with your energy levels. We are best equipped to perform high-focus (non-wandering) tasks three hours after waking. You can extend this window by alternating environments and prevent it from becoming mentally stale.
Journaling after ‘wandering phases’ allows you to capture breakthroughs you did not know you have had. By journaling first thing in the morning, you capture a night’s worth of mind wandering. This is useful, since your wandering thoughts relate to what you are working on. To enable this process, think about and visualize what you want your mind to focus on while you sleep.
Chapter 13: collaboration is a prerequisite to great ideas
Collaboration is the physical act of making new and novel connections. When people work together toward a shared goal, the output of their work is more than the sum of their inputs: new ideas are conceived.
Once new ideas become pervasive throughout an environment, that environment changes. The environment than shapes the people and the cycle is complete.
Without unique collaborations, your environment and results can only be average. Most people compete with others at a similar skill level, in the same niche and with a similar background. Worldviews are too similar to transcend the rules of existing norms.
This limit is imposed by the ‘self-authoring’ narrative of most personal development literature. Independent thinking goes beyond dependent thought. However, it is interdependent thinking that allows us to see beyond our mental filter. It is interdependent thinking from which greatness is born.
A single filter, no matter how refined, has its downsides. Especially in a fast-changing world.
Chapter 14: be grateful to what and who surrounds you
Those who know where they came from have greater resilience, and control over their lives. When you learn about your history and roots, you appreciate more the life you have now.
It is essential that your growth does not lead to egoism. After all, you are not the cause of your success, rather, it is the changing environment that made it so. You should be in a continual state of so they, too, can advance and elevate as you have done.
There are many people who played important roles in you having the life that you have today. Be sure to let them know how grateful you are.
No one has an absolute value. We all have a relative value based on what surrounds us. Anyone could be who you are if they had the surroundings that shaped you. Reshape your environment so they, too, can advance and elevate as you have done.
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