Oscar Wilde Quotes

We want to design interventions to teach people how to harness their considerable willpower.

You make New Year's resolutions. And you make them into the teeth of old resolutions which were different. Then you don't keep your new resolutions and you tell yourself you are weak-willed. You aren't weak-willed, you are simply obeying yourself as of yesterday.

The problem with resolutions is they're only as solid as the person making them.

Oh, I have very limited will power. I wish I could change that. I am working on it, though. I am too easygoing.

Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.

Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.

Many people have trouble sticking to their resolutions, and there is a simple scientific explanation for this. In 1987, a team of psychologists conducted a study in which they monitored the New Year's resolutions of 275 people. After one week the psychologists found that 92 percent of the people were keeping their resolutions; after two weeks we have no idea what happened because the psychologists had quit monitoring.

A bad habit never disappears miraculously, it's an undo-it-yourself project.

Any day we wish we can discipline ourselves to change it all. Any day we wish; we can open the book that will open our mind to new knowledge. Any day we wish; we can start a new activity. Any day we wish; we can start the process of life change. We can do it immediately, or next week, or next month, or next year.

It is easier to prevent bad habits than to break them.

I wish I were more disciplined.

Resolutions are a wonderful thing if we can keep them, but many resolutions go by the wayside because we have not done anything different with our mindset.

Sometimes we know the best thing to do, but fail to do it. New year's resolutions are often like that. We make resolutions because we know it would be better for us to lose weight, or get fit, or spend more time with our children. The problem is that a resolution is generally easier to break than it is to keep.

Many men and women in the world demonstrate great willpower and self-discipline in overcoming bad habits and the weaknesses of the flesh.

Correct one fault at a time. Concentrate on the one fault you want to overcome.

We may think there is willpower involved, but more likely... change is due to want power. Wanting the new addiction more than the old one. Wanting the new me in preference to the person I am now.

January is always a good month for behavioral economics: Few things illustrate self-control as vividly as New Year's resolutions. February is even better, though, because it lets us study why so many of those resolutions are broken.

Success is achieved by developing our strengths, not by eliminating our weaknesses.

Never allow yourself to dwell upon your weaknesses, deficiencies, or failures. Holding firmly the ideal and struggling vigorously to attain it will help you to realize it.

We can use decision-making to choose the habits we want to form, use willpower to get the habit started, then - and this is the best part - we can allow the extraordinary power of habit to take over. At that point, we're free from the need to decide and the need to use willpower.

Now I have to motivate myself much more than I had previously.

It's like a muscle - if you stop going to the gym or stop running, you get weak. The military teaches you these great values, but we don't keep up the discipline on our own, and we lose it. So wherever you go, keep that discipline up.

Twenty-eight days is what is takes to break a habit and to implement a new set of habits.

I'll work on my weaknesses and build on my strengths.