You have to pay attention to your goals if you ever want to achieve them. But while you pay for this attention with your time, there is something else you sacrifice when you decide to attend to something: everything else you could be attending to. When we sit down and write, we are also deciding…
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Ulysses is said to have tied himself to the flagpole of his ship, so that as he sailed past the sirens and heard their beautiful voices, he wouldn’t be able to steer the ship into the rocks trying to find them. When it comes to self-control, tactics of this variety seem to be the most…
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To make a better tomorrow, sometimes we have to put up with a not-so-nice today. Long-term goals mean rejecting many of the things that tempt us in the moment. We don’t want to be a slave to impulses and influences, so we fight against them, to varying levels of success. As Walter Mischel writes in the…
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When it comes to dieting we often choose to rely on our self-control–a notoriously fragile construct. It’s not easy walking past processed foods in the supermarket without picking up a snack. It’s not easy mustering the strength to cook a proper meal after a long day at the office. It’s not easy to order a…
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“The ant in Aesop’s fable instinctively knows what it has to do to prepare for the future, and when summer comes it drags off the food it will need for the winter. But we don’t have the ant’s instincts, and evolution has not yet adapted our brain for dealing concretely with the distant future.” — Walter…
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