Jay Shaw argues willpower is a myth. What actually drives behavior is identity: the mental images, feelings, and self-concept that make actions feel automatic. To change habits, you swap your identity card from "I am a smoker" to "I am a boxer," not through force but through the visceral cues that make the new behavior inevitable.
You know why you don't want to lick a— you know why you don't need willpower to not lick a toilet seat? Because of the images that come to your mind when you think about licking a toilet seat. Because of the feelings that happen in your body when you think about licking a— you don't got to try to ball your face up at the thought of licking a toilet seat. The toilet is why I got to make you feel that way about cigarettes. It's not about like— you got to stop trying to control behavior. You don't control behavior. Behavior doesn't show up out of thin air. Something happens before the behavior. We don't work on the behavior. We work on what happens before the behavior. And this card that you carrying around, this card that you carrying around, if that's the card that you carrying around, you don't got to change your behavior. You got to put that card down and pick this card up. Identity. Look at, look at the word identity. I-D entity. Look at it. What is your identification entity? This is why I get on here and talk about identity every— I don't care about your behavior. When I was carrying around the card of boxer, when I saw myself as a boxer, when I felt like a boxer, when my friends were boxers, when the men that I looked up to were my boxing coach, I didn't have to use willpower to go to the gym. I was accidentally spending 5 or 6 hours a day in the gym.
