Forget Willpower

~ This article first appeared in The Leader-Vindicator newspaper. ~

I’m preparing my thoughts for a farm event at the end of March.  My performance will cover the ins and outs of a compost company I started two years ago.

My list of speaking notes was quite orderly: Step One, Step Two, Step Three, and, ta-daaaa!  Compost!  No sweat.  I am fully prepared.  Except for one glaring problem: Nobody really needs another “How-To” discussion.

Stand in a crowd of fifty people and ask aloud a question to yourself.  Within moments, fifty devices will pop out of fifty butt pockets and you’ll get fifty responses – complete with charts and graphs, if you’re willing to step over and look at the screen – that fully explain every detail, nuance, and implication associated with your question.  Then you’ll get fifty step-by-step programs – emailed or texted, whichever is more convenient – explaining how to solve your problem. 

Information regarding how to do everything is so readily available that peoples’ mental space is saturated.  We’re swimming in step-by-step guides and encouraged by well-meaning support groups to try anything we can dream.  This can be a deadly combination.

I’m not a great try-er.  Sure, I can put on a show, usually enough to yield one good result, but the willpower required to maintain my initial trajectory for success leaves me as a burned out shell at the conclusion.  I won’t have enough energy to do the whole thing again so the effort will crash, leaving me feeling like an inadequate failure who can’t even accomplish something so simple that it’s been made into a step-by-step guide.  Then, in my despair, I’ll start seeking a method explaining how to salvage my wreck.

Given the disparity between How To searches on the internet and tangible successful endeavors, I deduce I’m not the only one who experiences this doom loop.  It’s interesting that in an era of unlimited information most people are still trying to figure out how to do everything.  Shouldn’t the availability of information satisfy the need for more information? 

What we need is a little less How To and a little more Why.

How To is extremely rigid.  It doesn’t account for situational differences that exist in virtually every circumstance, no matter how routine.  Following someone else’s How To guide, you might make it to the top, but it will take a tremendous amount of willpower to do it.  Willpower is a finite resource in the human emotional spectrum. 

In other words, when you’re setting a goal, forget willpower:  It will fail.  And not only will it fail, but the strain of effort will eventually snap and lead to a severe reaction in the opposite direction of your initial intent.  People with strong convictions on a subject were often at one time committed to the opposite end of the spectrum.  Imagine the person who stops eating junk food for a month and then, when the willpower burns out, they eat six boxes of cookies.  Nobody wants that to be the story of their life.

So if I step up on the manure pile at the end of March and proclaim to the attentive attendees how they, too, can make compost in three easy steps, I’m afraid the only thing I’ll have accomplished at the end of the day is a really effective advertising campaign for store-bought chemical fertilizers.

I shredded my orderly speaking notes and replaced them with a story that sheds light on my drive to better compost.  It’s such a simple adjustment that will transform the success rate for participants in our program.

A good reason to want to make compost is food.  Food is absolutely unifying across the human spectrum, and few are the folks who don’t appreciate something delicious.  A good meal can spark curiosity into the origin of the ingredients, and curiosity is the Why powerful enough to pull someone through the unavoidable challenges that shape a composting endeavor (or any endeavor).  The thought process goes more like this: If compost can make cucumbers taste this good, then I want to learn to make compost.  Personal motivation isn’t directed at sticking to a guide, but instead is a carefully maneuvered thought process with a clear goal in sight: better cucumbers.  On this path we find stamina for the journey instead of willpower to achieve.  It’s a different approach altogether, but it works.

There are additional benefits to approaching a mission from the personal standpoint instead of the instructed standpoint.  Tell someone they need to protect the environment and they’ll fail.  Show someone they can eat better food and by default they’ll successfully adopt methods that make big ecological changes.  For example, composting grows better tasting food and in the process it filters and stores groundwater, which invigorates plant growth, which pulls carbon out of the atmosphere, which increases groundwater storage, which invigorates plant growth…

I’m excited for storytelling to kick off the growing season on our farm.  I know the group will be an interesting bunch, and I think our gathering will create an atmosphere that encourages shared stories of personal motivation.

I hope so, anyway, because if I encounter one more proposition that I’ll be successful if I just do this, I’m going to lose my mind.