Prop Up Your Willpower

Individuals’ success may be more a matter of strategy than the traditional notion of strength. We can and do offload the burden of willpower to the environment to scaffold our success. The key to success, it seems, is in being strategic with this careful scaffolding known as the extended will. The gist of the notion of extended will is that human rationality is heavily scaffolded. That is, our environment works to support our actions or to hinder them. As Heath and Anderson write in their chapter, “People are able to get on because they ‘offload’ an enormous amount of practical reasoning onto their environment”.