Your phone isn’t winning your environment is

The meaning of willpower quite literally demonstrates why it is not an effective methodology for creating lasting change.

The concept of willpower is the capacity to exert influence or control over a desire or to restrain an impulse that arises.

Meaning… a desire or impulse in the moment

It’s not really something that can be disputed, by definition this means it is not a tool for long-term behavioral change.

What I have seen work and what I have had work in my own life is looking at behavior change from a holistic approach…

Which is really just a fancy way of saying:

When you are solving a specific problem, looking at the whole of your life as it pertains to the problem, and not just the problem itself.

One pretty simple and practical example of this is designing the environment that you live in.

If a bodybuilder lived on an island that only had donuts and margaritas and no weight room, he probably wouldn’t be able to cut his weight.

It’s not a personal failure, it’s just an incorrect environment.

So for doomscrolling on your electronics, being unable to focus, constantly distracted by shiny new bullshit… it’s all the same

This may seem a bit intense or over the top but I quite literally left my apartment in San Francisco and decided to spend extended periods of time this year in remote places that have less distractions so that it is easier to focus on my priorities at hand.

Right now I am 100 meters away from an incredible wave I surf every day, a weight room, a grocery store, and I have fiber wifi.

Sure, I’m in a new country, practicing my Spanish and making some new friends, learning a bit of bachata, etc.

But really?

I just put myself in a perfect environment for working long hours and spending my free time in the ocean.

That’s it.

Now of course, you don’t have to make extreme changes to your environment like this to be productive…

But it’s worth questioning if your environment (which includes the people around you) is supporting your personal mission or actually making you expend more energy to pursue it.