I’ve just finished reading Walter Mischel’s book, The Marshmallow Test: Why Self-Control Is the Engine of Success
The experiment might never have become known outside the specialized world of psychology, except for one thing. The kids tested were classmates of Mischel’s daughters, and several years later he decided to see whether there was a correlation between self-control exhibited on the test and life results. He found a clear and strong correlation that was beyond what he expected; for example, those in the top third of self-control averaged 210 SAT points higher than those in the bottom third. These differences, and others, such as obesity rates and income, persisted over time as he continued to monitor results through the years.
By themselves, these results can be very disturbing. Does this mean that our success in life is so dependent on a single trait—self-control—that you’re born with and is easily measurable by the time you’re four years old? If you fail the marshmallow test at age four, are you doomed to a life of failure? Or is there something you can do about it?
Actually, there is a lot you can do about it, and low self-control does not have to be destiny.
Mischel’s key point is that self-control is not a fixed, unitary trait. It’s not fixed in the sense of being totally determined by our genes; it’s a product of our genes, our environment, and our learning. Most importantly, it’s a skill that can be learned, practiced, and strengthened. It’s also not unitary, which means that we don’t apply the same amount of self-control in every situation. We all have our own unique combination of hot and cool buttons. Bill Clinton is the poster child example for this. He obviously had enormous self-control that got him from a small town in Arkansas to the presidency, but not enough to prevent a sexual scandal once he got there.
The most surprising and potentially useful finding to me was about the relation between mindset and self-control. Researchers such as Roy Baumeister have told us that willpower and self-control are a finite resource, which means that exercising self-control in one task depletes your ability to exercise it as strongly in a subsequent task. This “strength model of self-control” has become an enormously influential and insidious idea. It’s insidious because it tells you that you can only do so much, and even that it’s OK to limit your aspirations for self-improvement. It tells you that it’s not your fault when you fail—it’s biology.
I’ve had my doubts about the strength theory for two reasons. Looking at the big picture, history contains so many examples of people who have accomplished great things without seeming to be affected by willpower limits, who have persevered in many situations despite hunger, fatigue and deep discouragement. Closer to home, I have been working for the past month on a deep work project, which has made me spend much longer blocks of time and attention working on tasks that require a lot of self-control. So far I’ve found that I can work much longer and get much more done than I previously thought possible, and the best part is that I now finish the day with more energy than before.
Yet despite those doubts about the theory, the idea that self-control is finite has lingered in the back of my mind and imposed limits on my work habits. For example, writing can take a lot of willpower, so after about a half hour of writing I start telling myself that it’s time to take a break; sometimes I give in and sometimes I make a conscious effort to try to power through my “limits”.
But Mischel tells us that those limits may be self-imposed. If we think our willpower is limited, we’ll be right. Fortunately, if we think it’s not limited, we’ll also be right. According to Mischel, our mindset about self-control also influences whether we suffer depletion. If we believe in the strength model, we do get depleted from difficult tasks; if we don’t believe in it, we can escape the effects and even gain more stamina and strength from tasks that require self-control. Even more promising, we can learn the new mindset and gain the same benefits.
Carol Dweck and fellow researchers ran studies that found that the amount of willpower fatigue that participants exhibited was affected by their prior beliefs about whether willpower was a limited resource. They also found that just teaching college students the new mindset carried over beyond the lab and led to less procrastination and reducing excess spending.
I learned first-hand about the power of mindset many years ago. When I was still in my 20s, I began having a lot of stomach issues, and went to several doctors to try to discover the cause. I remember one final test, after which the doctor told me they could find nothing physically wrong, so they assumed it was stress related. Literally from that moment on, my symptoms disappeared and have never returned. I figured since it was only in my mind, that I could change my mind.
I guess it shouldn’t be that surprising that our self-control can be affected by our mindset. Dweck has already shown us that our beliefs about whether intelligence is fixed or malleable can have a significant impact on what we attempt and achieve, and in effect can become self-fulfilling prophecies. I learned that even our mindset about stress can affect whether it helps or harms us.
Now it’s gratifying and enormously empowering to find that the same idea applies to self-control. If you know you can self-control your self-control, the sky is the limit!
Is your clock running?
This question is prompted by a speech that John W. Gardner, a noted educator, delivered to McKinsey and Co. in 1990. His audience was composed of highly successful people in the prime of their lives, (people just like those who read these posts), yet he felt compelled to deliver an urgent message about avoiding complacency and staleness.
Gardner said,
“We can’t write off the danger of complacency, growing rigidity, imprisonment by our own comfortable habits and opinions. Look around you. How many people whom you know well — people even younger than yourselves –are already trapped in fixed attitudes and habits? A famous French writer said “There are people whose clocks stop at a certain point in their lives.”
We all know people like this, people who have stopped learning and growing, who haven’t had an original thought since maybe their twenties, who are counting the diminishing number of years until they can retire and really stagnate. Some have checked out because they’re satisfied with where they are, or because they have learned their jobs so well they can basically do them in their sleep. Some less fortunate ones have simply learned to accept their dissatisfaction, defeated by apathy, bureaucracy or boredom. My Dad worked in the private sector all his life, and in retirement went to work for a county agency. After a week on the job his coworkers pulled him aside and told him to stop working so hard, because it made them look bad. He went with the flow at work, but his clock kept running and he kept his zeal for learning. The week he died, at 86, he had just attended a class to learn how to use yoga to improve his golf game.
The good news is that your clock does not have to stop, and even if it has, you can rewind it and start it again. As Gardner explains, life is not a mountain that has a summit, or a game with a final score.
“Life is an endless unfolding, and if we wish it to be, an endless process of self-discovery, an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our own potentialities and the life situations in which we find ourselves. By potentialities I mean not just intellectual gifts but the full range of one’s capacities for learning, sensing, wondering, understanding, loving and aspiring.”
The important thing is not to lose your zest for learning and growing. No matter how old or how young you are, it is never too late.
Although it’s an extreme example, a story that I read recently in the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel illustrates this well. As described in the article, Tom Galjour has Stage 4 metastatic small cell lung cancer. Two and a half years ago, he was told he had at most a few weeks to live. Soon thereafter, he was rushed to the hospital, where the doctors prescribed hospice and morphine. His friend Ted Owens called Galjour’s ex-wife and said, “You better come, too—it’s time”, at which point Tom said, “Time? Time for what? This is bull___!” as he ripped off the wires connecting him to monitors. He refused hospice and left to die at home. After suffering in bed for two weeks, he told Ted, “Hand me my guitar. Screw this, I’m not ready to go today.”
Tom managed to get out of bed and restart his life. He decided to supplement his medical care with his own approach, which included buying a $4,000 sniper rifle (hey, everybody has their own way of enjoying life) and lifting weights. At 64, weighing 150 pounds and hooked to an oxygen machine, he recently benched 240 pounds, and now is aiming for 260.
As the article says, medical research hasn’t found a correlation between “fighting spirit” and survival rates. Maybe Galjour would have survived this long even without this attitude – but would that life have contained the same level of zest and richness? He is one man who has refused to let his clock stop…
I’ve written before about one of my favorite books, Mindset by Carol Dweck. Dweck’s research has found that children grow up either with a fixed mindset and believe that intelligence and ability are innate and unchangeable, or a growth mindset which holds that we can improve and grow through effort. Her studies have shown that children with a fixed mindset, even those who are very bright, tend to protect their status as “smart” and are less likely to risk their self-image by trying difficult things; they also give up faster. In some small way, even at an early age they are at risk of letting their clocks run down.
Fortunately, a growth mindset can be taught to children at an early age; maybe it’s important to teach and reteach that lesson to adults as well. For starters, we can dispel the myth that entrepreneurship is for the young. Research has shown that there are twice as many entrepreneurs over 50 as there are under 25. In fact, adults who have a ton of life experiences under their belts may be better positioned to make wise choices about how and where to spend their energies.
I’m not referring to working harder; if you’ve gotten to the point where you can still be effective with less work, you’ve earned it. But you will do yourself a favor if you channel that extra time and energy into keeping your clock running, either through maintaining curiosity or increasing commitment to something that is important and is bigger than just you. A good example is John Spence, who recently wrote about his own effort, now that he has turned 50, to devote a part of his time over the next decade to learn how to paint.
Regardless of how successful you are, you have far more capacity in you than you have yet realized. I’ll let Gardner have the last word on this:
The thing you have to understand is that the capacities you actually develop to the full come out as the result of an interplay between you and life’s challenges –and the challenges keep changing. Life pulls things out of you.
Keep the clock running: stay challenged, curious and committed.
