Willpower:
My profession provided me with ample opportunity to be surrounded by young people seeking to use their potential to be successful. Of course what is success to one may be considered failure to another. I couldn't possibly count the number of young people who are bright, personable, likable, reasonable, trustworthy, etc. and yet going nowhere fast. With all they have going for them it would seem but a small and simple task to send them on their way to success at something. Yet nothing could be further from the truth for some of them. Nothing, absolutely nothing, can seem to generate any real willpower on their part to set realistic goals, draw up a game plan, and make the game plan work. The world is full of many people who say the right things, have legitimate goals, understand so much and yet, in the last analysis, never will find the willpower to achieve much of anything.
On the happiness scale, it is not clear where they stand in relation to those who have a game plan and the willpower to succeed. Thus, I suppose, the picture gets a bit muddled if contentedness is the final measure of success. The only fact here is that we are all dead in the long run---both achievers and non achievers. I won't even attempt to define an achiever. For a start you can't really achieve what you don't really have any intense desire to achieve.
The world, as I see it, has more daydreamers than achievers; more people living lives of quiet desperation than contented with accomplished goals; more losers than winners; more nothingburgers than fille Mignonburgers. What does it all mean? How can any sane intelligent person possibly make accurate judgments about others? Heredity, environment, luck, and health all are in the mix.
Nothing has frustrated me more in life, mostly because of my profession, than my inability to help certain good people become successful and economically independent. In these cases there is always the verbal desire to be somebody, to become financially comfortable, to have things others have, and yet it ends up being mostly parroted babble. When push comes to shove there is nothing there but tepid attempts for short periods of time to better themselves, and these tepid attempts usually are in response to others shoving or demanding them to do even that. In certain respects, maybe they are the lucky ones in life. Their lives are uncomplicated, their value systems weak, and everything in their life seems stuck in neutral. But to be fair, it is hard to reason why they have to have the same value system myself, or anyone else, wants them to have. I can understand the kids of overly protective parents being deficient in self driven energies----mom and pop, after all is said and done, prop them up from dangers and financial insecurity. The best thing my dad ever did for me was to tell me early on, and often, that after graduating from high school I was on my own. And he meant it. Yet, having said that, what worked for me might have been a disaster to a teenager of a different mold and nature. Very little, if anything, in life is ever perfectly clear. "You are your own master" sounds good but we all know, upon reflection, how dumb that really is. The reality is, for most people, a lot of genetics, a 'village' and luck.
"You are what your deep, driving desire is.
As your deep, driving desire is, so is your will.
As your will is, so is your deed.
As your deed is, so is your destiny."
- Upanishads
Even the above, so poetic and inspirational is mostly bullshit. The best it can mean is that sometimes, for some people, it will work out that way. Of course if that person didn't have the driving desire with the resulting good deeds, the chosen destiny would not have been reached.
Were there real justice in the world all young people would have a level playing field to the maximum extent possible. This is stymied at all levels by family values---which really means your own kids come first, always come first, and fairness comes second, always comes second. There is not a major religion in the world which has any scriptural family values such as the family values defined by the religious right in this country. Every religion in the world, on paper, insists that any wealth past the basics, must be shared with those in greater need. To the extent this is true, religions fail badly. It isn't even close. 100 million people will starve to death in the next few years, and all of us affluent will continue to wallow in materialism like pigs at a feeding trough. We do everything but oink. If I am different at all it is only in admittance and degree---even then, this might simply be an illusion. Never mind God save the Queen---God save us all.
"It's not that some people have willpower and some don't.
It's that some people are ready to change and others are not."
- James Gordon
It seems Mr. Gordon is just defining willpower above, not really shedding any illumination on the term.
"Construct your determination with Sustained Effort, Controlled Attention, and
Concentrated Energy. Opportunities never come to those who wait... they are
captured by those who dare to attack."
- Paul J. Meyer
This seems to come closer to defining willpower---sustained effort, controlled attention, and concentrated energy. Daring to attack---ah, this is certainly an aspect of willpower. Maybe this is where willpower begins.
"What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple.
Whether you are willing to do it, that's another matter."
- Peter F. Drucker
The above also attempts to define willpower but there is nothing incredibly simple about it. Good game plans don't come incredibly easy.
"Men who are resolved to find a way for themselves will always find opportunities
enough; and if they do not find them, they will make them."
- Samuel Smiles
This sheds a bit more light on willpower---an ability to create opportunities. If one just watches the world go by---it will. Creating your own opportunity is a core part of will power. A person can want all they want, but no one is likely to pay it much attention----and those whose wants are met by the efforts of parents or others of any ilk, are likely to fail because gains unearned often escape for the lack of the inherent inability to sustain the gain. What anyone earns themselves is always more satisfying than anything unearned. Despite any good front, the recipients of unearned anything have a shallow level of personal contentment. Welfare---government or inherited---- cannot be transformed into pride of achievement. It simply can't and for the most part, no one is fooled.
"The intelligent want self-control; children want candy."
- Mevlana Rumi
The above smart ass remark is probably more insightful than at first glance. Willpower requires a high degree of self control. Maybe a lot of willpower is just how each person is wired. Perhaps some people are wired to feel, but not to do; or wired to understand but not to do; or so wired to feel the pain of failure that they avoid trying.
"The longer I live, the more I am certain that the great difference between the great
and the insignificant, is energy -- invincible determination -- a purpose once fixed,
and then death or victory."
- Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton
"Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal: my strength
lies solely in my tenacity."
- Louis Pasteur
"Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we
must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There
is no other route to success."
- Stephan A. Brennan
Combining all three of the above probably comes closest to defining willpower. In the end, willpower can be defined but not easily programmed. Why some people have a lot of willpower and others little willpower is buried deep in our genetic psyche. What is, is. And many a parent has been driven nuts by what is, is. Still, it seems evident that the success of any level of willpower is at least partly driven by circumstances, luck, and our 'village'. Growing up in a Palestinian refugee camp, the hills of Afghanistan, or the bowels of our urban or rural ghettoes does not exactly provide the kind of fertile soil for willpower to succeed. Support and encouragement from others are almost always in the mix here somewhere. Terrell Owens may have earned the right to be in the Football Hall of Fame, but his real mark of distinction, the basis for any other achievement, is his exceptional willpower---a willpower derived almost entirely from an internal wiring that is amazingly self generated and sustained---an island of pure willpower little influenced by any' village', luck, circumstance or natural physical endowment. An inability to let others participate and be a part of your achievement is to be DIFFERENT and generates hostility, which in Terrell's case sometimes translates into irrational anger toward him. We may all say we respect those who pull themselves up by their own boot straps, but when it comes in a such a pure form it is seen as pure selfishness, and is then seen as a success which needs to be put in it's place and disrespected for it's independent isolationism. To me, this kind of willpower, to such a degree, is so rare as to be amazing. And so do some others, which is why the whole phenomenon called Terrell Owens is a raging storm of diverse feelings. "Who the hell does he think he is?", scream his detractors. Of course he knows what he is because he, outside of his grandmother, created exactly who he is and what he can do. Others, less numerous, see Terrell as the ultimate 'little engine that could'---the 'Yes I can, yes I can" skinny kid who got picked on, little blessed with any abundance of naturally born talent, and yet got to the top by pure focused willpower.
So much for pure willpower. Willpower, in isolation---played out according to the rules of ethics---generates success with a cost. It really shouldn't, but it does.
