Psychologist Wilhelm Hofmann found that 20 percent of a person’s day is spent resisting the urge to do the wrong thing. Every day people encounter a number of opportunities to procrastinate at work, eat unhealthy food, or alienate their colleagues. Giving in to these poor choices can derail a person’s career or life.
Success is not just about intelligence or socioeconomic advantage. Research shows that the single most important trait in determining one’s quality of life is willpower. In his classic 1960s “marshmallow test,” Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel gave 500 small children a choice: they were left alone in a room with a single marshmallow, and if they could resist the urge to gobble up the candy, they would later be rewarded with two marshmallows. When Dr. Mischel followed up with his subjects decades later, he found that the willpower they demonstrated as children consistently predicted what their lives were like as adults. The children with more self-control did better in school, earned higher salaries, had better self-esteem, and were less likely to be overweight or abuse drugs. Over the years, these stunning findings have been replicated in numerous research projects.
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