100 Ways To Motivate Yourself, Third Edition

29. Embrace your willpower

I can’t tell you how many people have told me that they have no willpower. Do you think the same thing? If you think you have no willpower, you are undermining your own success. Everyone has willpower. To be reading this sentence, you must have willpower.

The first step in developing your willpower, therefore, is to accept its existence. You have willpower just as surely as you have life. If someone put a heavy barbell on the floor in front of you and asked you to lift it and you knew you could not, you would not say “I have no strength.” You’d say, “I’m not strong enough.” “Not strong enough” is more truthful language, because it implies that you could be strong enough if you worked at it. It also implies that you ...