Why Is It So Hard to Stick to Our Resolutions? | Ayelet Fishbach (Republish)

Most of us have heard the same advice about motivation. Set goals to stay motivated, aim high with bold ambitions, and rely on sheer willpower to achieve them. It sounds inspiring, right? If you just try hard enough, if you're strong enough, you can power through anything and crush your goals. Yeah, it's a powerful idea, and let's be honest, we've all embraced it to some extent.

After all, setting goals seems like a natural part of simply being human. But what if we've been looking at motivation all wrong? What if willpower isn't the secret to success? That was the old perception, okay, that motivation is about willpower. However, what predicts performance is often how much people were able to analyze that.

the dilemma that they are facing in in a certain way, how much they knew which strategies to employ, uh, being able to uh put certain things out of sight, okay, to monitor your progress in terms of what you have done, not what is left to do, to manage multiple goals. Many of these strategies, it's just a matter of knowledge, just a matter of knowing uh what to do. Okay. Let that sink in for a moment. Motivation isn't about being strong.

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