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“Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power.”
Lao Tzu
I played chess until 2am, long after I’d normally be asleep.
That week my heel hurt, so I took a break from running. That break led to the late-night chess.
On a run, my body urges me to stop and I keep going.
At night, the urge to play one more game of chess tells me to keep going when I need to stop.
Both are the same fight, between what I decided and what I want right now. On runs I win it.
That night, the chess won.
Psychologists call the skill of winning it executive control.
We call it discipline.
My runs are where I practice it. When I ran less than the weekly minimum I set for myself, I got worse at quitting chess at night.
A few weeks ago I wrote that each kind of courage stays separate. Alex Hormozi pointed out that you can run a marathon and still dodge a hard talk with your wife.
I agreed. The marathon takes physical courage and the talk takes social courage.
Now I’m going to make a case that executive control works differently.
The courage changes between a marathon and a hard talk, but saying no to an urge is the same act in both.
Megan Oaten is a psychologist at Macquarie University in Sydney. She and her colleague Ken Cheng tracked people who rarely exercised.
For 2 months the group changed nothing. For the next 2 months they followed a gym program.
Each month they took a lab test of self-control.
Their self-control scores went up during the gym months. They also:
- ate better
- smoked less
- studied more
- did more chores
- watched their spending
- drank less alcohol and coffee
The gym program asked for none of that.
Oaten’s group smoked and drank less. Charlie Engle needed to stop altogether.
Engle ran marathons in his twenties while he was addicted to crack cocaine and alcohol. One summer night in 1992 a binge in Wichita ended with someone shooting at his car.
He quit that day and kept running. Years later he ran across the Sahara.
He’s stayed sober since that night in Wichita.
In his memoir Running Man he tells how running carried him through recovery.
Before you skip a run, count the other urges it helps you refuse: the cigarette, the extra drink, one more game at 2am.
🏃
What habit could train you to say no to urges?
