The Power of Will

A couple years ago i have a new year resolution, that i promise to my self to start practice writing, exercise, programing, and do design for at least 2 hours every single day.

I did really well, so i start feeling motivated, but 2 weeks later i start procrastinating, were after i do design part for about 7 hours i feel really tired, and can’t do another activities that i promise to accomplish each day, then i realize that i have limited energy to doing something and all those activity that i want to do will be distributed into one element which is called willpower.

The study showed that self control is really important because it help the students show up more reliably for class, starting their homework earlier and spend more time working and less time watching television.

Whenever you encounter a choice or desire it’s your willpower that remind, resist and pushed you to do hard and boring task that pay off in the future years. Learning how willpower work is essential for your productivity, health and your professional relationship.

There are 2 the most important category of willpower:


Impulse Control


is the ability to resist temptation such as Smoking, Junk food, porn or overuse social media. You can’t control this temptation because it trigger automatically for example if you are smoker is really hard to stop smoking when you see a cigarette, how ever what you can control is your reaction for this temptation and set a rule in advance when you see a cigarette you will chewing a gum for example.


Performance Control


Is decide were you invest your focus, time and effort. For example : I have a lot of movie and video game in my PC, and what i used to do after i wake-up is starting watching those movie and play video game for couple of hours. and then when it come to do my creative work i completely exhausted. and this is because willpower like a muscle and they will get tired.

The point for this category is to do the most important task first as possible, before your willpower get depleted.


Just as a phone need battery to work, we have finite of willpower and it will get depleted overtime we use, so how we can Recharge, Maintenance & Strengthened our willpower?



The most important factor to recharge willpower is to get enough sleep, when you don’t get enough sleep you will be stress and get a bad effect in your brain. To improve the quality of sleep i usually turn of the lamp and make sure to sleep and wake up in specific time everyday.



To maintenance willpower we can do meditation for 10 minutes a day or more. In meditation basically we learn to focusing our attention on the breath, eliminate thought completely and replace it with a general awareness of the present moment.



The more you use willpower the stronger it gets, so the best way to strengthened our willpower is being in the Flow state, to get into flow state we have to keep challenge our self in many different situation, and you don’t want what you are doing to be too challenging otherwise you will get anxiety or to easy either or you will get bored. so if you can make the right Combination of Skills and challenge then you will feel energized to do what you are doing for a long period of time.


Now what we need to do is looking back in your day, are you actually use willpower effectively.

Do you start the day with watching movie, play video game or doing unimportant thing, maybe it’s time for you to do the most important task done as possible in the beginning of the day, because the first hours after you wake up are truly precious.

or do you want to accomplish 10 different thing, maybe it’s time to realize that not going to happen, instead it’s time to pick 1 or 2 the most important thing and doing it well.

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