There is an old saying: failure is the mother of success. Our lives are a long run of difficulties and tests. If we are timid and weak, we fail and fall. With willpower, we get through and reach what we set out for. So willpower is a companion that walks with a person through their whole life.
What role does it actually play, and how do you build it? That is what this post is about.
What willpower does for you
It is what produces success
Willpower is not something people are born with. It comes from and is forged in the hard parts of life. There is an old line that nobody stays rich for three generations and nobody stays poor for three either. When someone has been pushed around, been poor, been humiliated, their determination to escape that fate and improve their life multiplies.
For people lucky enough to be born into comfort, willpower tends to weaken and can disappear entirely if they never work at it. At some point, when they hit real failure and difficulty, they collapse quickly and give up early.
So if you want resolve, you build it, and you build it from the hard parts. Life does not take everything from anyone. Willpower is the largest and most valuable asset it hands to the people it took luck away from.
It creates courage and backbone
Someone with real resolve stands up to every difficulty. They dare to think, dare to act, dare to live.
There is the story of Nguyen Son Lam, a Vietnamese man under a metre tall who walks with crutches, speaks three languages, appeared on Vietnam Idol in 2010, and in 2011 climbed Fansipan, becoming the first Vietnamese person with a disability to reach that summit without anyone’s help.
So there is no point blaming yourself for being born with less luck than someone else. Whatever situation you are in, you push upward and turn the bad luck into the thing that gives you your backbone.
It gets you through the hard parts
Willpower is what carries us over difficulties and tests, builds our belief, and keeps pushing us forward with some confidence in the future.
There is a Western saying: turn towards the light and all shadows fall behind you. Nick Vujicic put it as: no goal is too big and no dream is too far away. And the Vietnamese doctor Dang Thuy Tram wrote that life has to pass through storms, but you never bow your head to the storm. All of them carry the same message.
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It makes you more confident
Bill Gates is a familiar example. He dropped out of school to start a software company, and like every beginning it went through failure first. Because of extraordinary persistence across all those stumbles, he never quit, and eventually became one of the wealthiest people alive.
Or Chung Ju-yung, the founder of Hyundai in South Korea, who started as a farmer and then a labourer. Getting from there to chairman of Hyundai was an entire process of grinding it out.
So rich or poor at the start matters much less than whether you genuinely believe you can get through the difficulty in front of you. Success does not appear on its own and it does not disappear on its own. It depends on the resolve you bring to it every day.
How to build willpower
To build resolve, you work on three dimensions: thinking, deciding and acting. To be genuinely called someone with resolve you have to reach a level of deep, original thinking; decisiveness; and sustained, self-directed action. These traits need to be balanced. Taken to an extreme, each of them undermines the resolve it was meant to build.
Plenty of things influence resolve. Broad knowledge helps you think things through carefully. Genuine feeling for what you are doing makes you more decisive and keeps you at it longer. And your social environment, including what people around you praise and criticise, feeds back into how hard you are willing to push.
In short, willpower is a measure of a person’s character. Build it. Do not live timidly or weakly. Start from where you are, with the things you actually want, and work at it.
