Achieve Your New Year’s Goals — John Tierney and Roy Baumeister on Willpower (Video)

(From the Libertarian’s New Year’s Resolutions section in Volume 19, No. 27 of the Liberator Online. Subscribe here!)

If you’re serious about achieving success with your New Year’s resolutions, here is some hardcore information on how to do that, by two of the leading experts in the field (at least one of whom is a libertarian).

“Self-Control is the Key to Success: John Tierney and Roy Baumeister on Willpower” is a one-hour program produced by Reason TV earlier this year.

The two are authors of the bestseller Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.

“There are two qualities that correlate with success,” says New York Times journalist — and libertarian — John Tierney. “One of them is intelligence and the other is self-control. And so far researchers haven’t figured out what to do about intelligence, but they have rediscovered how to improve self-control.”

Tierney spoke at an event sponsored by the Reason Foundation on January 28, 2014 along with his co-author Roy Baumeister, the Francis Epps Eminent Scholar in psychology at Florida State University.

Baumeister and Tierney discuss the importance of willpower in determining our success in life and offer tips for improving our self-control.

Among the highlights in this video (and where they can be found): laboratory experiments that show how willpower can be depleted (6:20); the effect of glucose levels on self-control (10:15); how to make good on your New Year’s resolutions (16:30); why dieting undermines self-control (20:45); how to make an effective to do list (22:30); Tierney and Baumeister’s experience meeting David Allen, author of Getting Things Done (24:30); why it’s a good idea to weigh yourself every day if you’re trying to shed pounds (25:30); the role of genetics in determining a person’s willpower (31:00); why self-help literature rarely emphasizes willpower (33:00); the victim mentality and Alcoholics Anonymous (35:20); willpower and crime (38:50); procrastination as a tool for getting things done (47:20); and willpower and evolution (51:45).

Check it out — and make 2015  your best year yet!

About 1 hour and 2 minutes. Shot and edited by Jim Epstein of Reason TV.