Name: 2 Things You Need to Understand to Stop Being Lazy – Willpower by Roy Baumeister
Uploaded: 2025-07-12T05:26:00.000Z
Duration: 5 min 10 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

In the 70s, there was an experiment where they took a look at students, and the assumption was that there would be a positive correlation between the students turning in their assignments on time and wearing clean socks.

But the results were absolutely the opposite, indeed, the psychologist jokingly said, apparently the students could either get their homework done or change their socks every day, but not both.

There was another experiment that took place in Baumeister's lab, where hungry students walked in and some of them were allowed to eat freshly baked cookies, but others were only given radishes.

And of course these students had to exercise a lot of self-control not to eat the cookies, especially as the researchers left the lab and observed the participants through a hidden window.

So after successfully torturing them, the researchers brought in these two sets of students and gave them an impossible puzzle to solve.

The group who'd been allowed to eat the cookies, along with a control group of hungry students who weren't given any kind of food, went on to work on the puzzle for 20 minutes.

While the group who'd been assigned to eat the radishes, and had already exercised their willpower earlier, went on to work on the puzzles for only 8 minutes.

And these sorts of experiments have been replicated over and over again, turns out, if you walk into a mall and give people simple math problems to solve, the ones who've been shopping for much longer will give up on the problems much faster.

So you might be sitting there thinking, ok cool, these experiments are fascinating, or maybe you're bored out of your mind, but understanding the implications of these experiments can make you a lot more productive and completely change how you plan out your day just like it did for me.

Well one, you have to understand that you have a finite amount of willpower and it gets And two, you use the same stock of willpower for all tasks.

A lot of people say things like, well, I have enough willpower to do my work, but I never have enough willpower for exercising when I come home.

Well it's not that you have a different stock of willpower for work and exercising, it's more likely that you've completely depleted your willpower at work and now you don't have enough to go exercise.

It's the same thing if we look back at the sock experiment.

If you go to the laundry room for two hours and do your laundry, it's a lot harder for you to now get working on your assignment as opposed to a student who went straight to the homework.

It's the same thing if you wake up on a Saturday and instead of doing your creative work first, you go grocery shopping.

You have to make a decision for every little thing you buy and you're probably familiar with the exhaustion that comes from shopping for a long time.

Another person will wake up and start doing the creative work first and he's going to get a lot more accomplished.

So it's extremely important to understand how willpower works.

The people who understand this are much more effective in life than the ones who don't.

The author Neil Strauss, for example, has his meals automatically delivered to him.

Now a person who doesn't understand how willpower works might say, well what a waste of money, you know what, that's stupid, I'm going to cook my own meals and save the ten dollars or whatever it is, except he'll deplete his willpower and won't be able to dedicate his to writing as much, so in turn he'll lose out on mastering writing and even if you were to look at it purely financially, lose thousands and thousands of dollars in the end.

So my hope with creating this video is that next time you wake up and your intentions for that day are to get things done, you won't start your day off with opening up Facebook the first thing in the morning and wasting willpower on whether you want to click on Britney's pictures first or the blog that's going to lie to you.

You won't open up your email first thing in the morning and reply to every little thing before you make time for your creative work.

You won't wake up and spend 30 minutes thinking about what you want to have for breakfast that day.

In fact, you'll automate as much as you can even if it has to be food being delivered to you like Neil Strauss so you can focus on what is actually important, because you realize that every unimportant thing you do depletes your willpower that you could have dedicated to the one important thing you most want in your life.

Again, most people do not understand how willpower works, are completely wasteful with it, and are always unable to get things done.

Now all you need to do is take a look at your day and see if you're honoring the science of willpower.

Are you starting your day off by wasting time and willpower deciding what you're going to eat every morning?

Well maybe it's time you go back to the board and do some planning.

Are you saving your creative work for sometime later in the day?

Well maybe it's time that you realize that it has to come first.

Are you focusing on accomplishing 20 different things?

Well maybe it's time that you realize that that's realistically never going to happen and it's time to pick the one important thing and do it well.