You Don't Have A Willpower Problem

Racing depends on training. Training depends on the life underneath it.

I moved across the country for my freshman year at Stanford in the fall of 2015, arriving three weeks before my first official class for a cross-country pre-season camp. This felt like an intense and professionalized version of many running camps I’d attended. Besides being 3,000 miles away from home for the first time, nothing registered as a change.

The seismic shift came during freshman orientation.

At that time, I moved into a dorm nestled among 500 other freshmen, all experiencing college for the first time. It was controlled chaos. Within days, I was overbooked. There was a different social function to attend every evening, a list of seminars to attend daily, and a social calendar I had inherited on behalf of my new dorm friends.

My half of a 200-square-foot dorm room was not a sanctuary. It was a social hub that certainly didn’t support performance. My drawers were filled with candy instead of any type of fuel that would support training 20 hours per week.

I was still doing the training, two practices some days, but I was bringing leftover energy to all of it, showing up exhausted before the first rep, spent by the pursuit of doing all of the things available to me.

After a few weeks of school, a senior on the team sent a short piece to our group email titled “Winning Isn’t Normal.” Reading those words forced me to have a moment of reckoning.

“You cannot talk like everyone else. You cannot think like everyone else. You cannot be willing to join the crowd to do what is expected, to act in a socially accepted manner, to do what is “in.” You need to be willing to stand out in the crowd and consistently take exceptional action. If you want to win, you need to accept the risks and perhaps the loneliness, because winning isn’t normal.”

I taped it to my headboard and read it every morning. I still wanted to soak up my college experience, but I was going to have to redefine what that looked like. I had priorities in the classroom and on the track, and it dawned on me that my lifestyle could not look “normal.”

My parents, my brothers, and the quiet house I grew up in had been doing invisible work on my behalf for 18 years. Now the scaffolding was gone, and nothing in the new environment was going to replace it for me. I had to design it myself.

Your surroundings are not the backdrop to your performance. They are the root cause of it, but very few runners see this connection.

Every habit is attached to a context

In 1971, two congressmen visiting American troops in Vietnam returned home with alarming information. They reported that about 20% of the soldiers there were addicted to heroin. Washington panicked. President Nixon declared drug abuse “public enemy number one.”

At the time, the prevailing view was that heroin addiction was permanent and irreversible. This led to a frenzy of activity to support the troops on their return. Resources were immediately mobilized to help the addicted veterans about to return to American soil.

When the soldiers came home, something strange happened. Only 5% became re-addicted within a year.

The scientific underpinning of this remarkable event hinges on what is called the “cue structure” of a behavior. In Vietnam, heroin was cheap and everywhere. The soldiers were under extreme stress. Their daily routines, their peers, and their cues were all bound up with drug use. When the environment changed, every one of those triggers disappeared with it.

Every habit is attached to a context, whether it’s visible or not.

When the Good Samaritan is late

We tend to believe that behavior comes from internal traits: willpower, conviction, and persistence rooted in a belief system. It mostly does not. Situational factors are the stronger predictor, and a person’s surroundings can overpower their stated beliefs with very little effort.

A fascinating demonstration of this was run on seminary students at Princeton. The students, all training for ministry, were asked to prepare a sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan. Researchers held them on one side of campus to write, then sent them across campus to deliver it.

On the way, each student passed a man slumped on the ground, visibly ill and in distress. The man was not actually sick, but was acting as part of the study. The researchers had added one more variable: time pressure. As each student was sent off, one group was told they were early. Another was told they were right on time. The last was told they were already late.

You would expect that people who had spent the previous hour constructing a sermon about the obligation to stop and help a stranger in need would do so when directly confronted with that scenario in real life. However, their willingness to stop was completely determined by their schedule.

• 63% of the students who were early stopped

• 45% of those on time stopped

• 10% of those running late stopped

Character is a weak predictor of behavior, especially under pressure. A few minutes of schedule stress was enough to override deeply held moral values.

Racing is the last consideration

Heroin addiction and seminary students have almost nothing in common with elite runners. But they demonstrate the influence of surroundings and how little environmental influence it takes to override strongly held beliefs.

Good racing comes from good training. Everyone intuitively knows that. What not everyone considers is that good training has to be supported by a good lifestyle. These three variables need to be built sequentially from the ground up.

Everyone wants to race well, and everyone is willing to connect their training to their competition. Far fewer are willing to scrutinize their life choices and ask how their surroundings are shaping the training. For most of my freshman fall, I wasn’t making that connection either.

Nothing happens in isolation. You don’t get to choose when it matters and when to bring forward your best self. The brain and body you bring to your life are the same ones you bring to training and competition.

You are willing to compete on the roads and on the track. Are you willing to compete on lifestyle design too? That’s where a large part of the race is decided, and few people are looking there.

Your peers are a training variable

If you want to take lifestyle design seriously, start with the people around you.

In my experience, successful runners often believe they are immune to social influence.

This is not true. Your peers pull at you constantly, and most of their pull is imperceptible. The research is not subtle about this.

A Harvard Medical School study tracked more than 12,000 people over 32 years. When a participant became obese, the odds that a close mutual friend became obese roughly tripled.

The pattern shows up in other ways too. College men who were randomly assigned a roommate who drank frequently the year before saw their GPA drop by about a quarter point on average.

When you join a team, a training group, or take a job, look hard at the people already in it. The odds are you will become more like them. Not the other way around. This is why it’s so crucial to surround A-players with A-players.

The most effective way to build a hard habit is to join a group where that habit is already the normal behavior. In the right group, the hard things stop feeling like effort and start feeling like belonging.

The four defaults I changed at Stanford

We feel like active participants in our own lives. But beneath the surface, we are hardwired for energy conservation. Given two similar options, we do the one requiring less work, and we do it below the level of conscious thought. Whatever is closest, easiest, and most visible wins.

This means your defaults are never neutral. People don’t merely make decisions. They inherit the decisions their environment has already made for them. If you leave your choices up to inertia, it will push you to be average.

That was the realization I had my freshman year. To become the athlete I wanted to be, I had to question my default options, notice who was in my life by chance rather than by choice, and rebuild my environment around performance instead of inertia.

Here are four changes that I made, none of which required much willpower after the initial investment of effort:

Put the right fuel within reach. When the year started, I stuffed my drawers full of snacks and candy. None of it was particularly nourishing or performance-oriented. Although I still kept some sweets, I decided to be more deliberate. I made sure to have Greek yogurt, fruit, and overnight oats in the fridge. The end result: whatever I was reaching for at 8:30pm was probably going to be a better option for my performance.

Make the quiet Friday the default. There’s always something happening on a Friday night on a college campus. Our long run was always scheduled for Saturday. I decided once in advance that “staying in” was my default within competitive seasons. This meant I never had to decide it again. Negotiating with yourself about when to leave a party you’re already at is infinitely harder than deciding not to go.

Script the week before it starts. My assistant coach John Oliver sat down with me freshman year, and we mapped out, day by day, what a week that supported performance actually looked like. Classes and practice were fixed, but we also had blocks of time scheduled for snacks, a wind-down routine, and office hours. Most people spend the week reacting to whatever surprise arrives next. It sounds elementary, but proactive scheduling nudges you towards better decisions rather than 40 small decisions a day whenever there is empty space.

Listen to the people closest to your goals, not closest to you. A lot of the friends I made in my dorm were great people and seriously bright. Their definition of performance just looked nothing like mine. Most of them had landed in my circle by chance rather than by choice. Over time, I invested more in the people who wanted to achieve the same goals that I wanted.

Resist the pull of mediocrity

Some will read these lifestyle modifications as deprivation. In some ways it was. I understood my college experience was not going to look normal, but that was still an easy sacrifice for me to make.

If you don’t define your priorities, the universe will do it for you, and it will settle on average. To be great, you have to resist the pull of mediocrity. And that doesn’t come down to wanting it more on race day. Much of that hinges on how you design your average day.