Willpower Feels Unreliable

Willpower is not a fixed character trait, and leaning on it rarely feels steady. For most people it works like a fading signal: hard decisions and acts of self-control feel cheap in the morning and costly by night.

The fix is not gritting your teeth harder. It is making fewer decisions in the first place. Steve Jobs leaned on the same black turtleneck for years. Obama kept his suits to two colors, in his own words, to "pare down decisions" — saving his focus for the calls that actually shaped a country.