17 ms·

Self-control signals and affords power

199 points by namanyayg 3y ago

danjoredd 3y ago
Seek freedom and become captive of your desires, seek discipline and find your liberty. - Frank Herbert
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Wonder if companies setting "Stretch" goals, and having people fail, is actually a form of control. Get results, but also keeps employees down. People may be less inclined to ask for raise if they miss goals, even if the results were 'good'.
- throwaway74432 3y ago
  That becomes clear when management says that hitting all of your goals actually means you weren't ambitious enough.
- annoyingnoob 3y ago
  My mother was a Manager at an insurance company for a very long time. She still firmly believes that one cannot get a 5 out 5 on a review because no one is perfect. Business likes to set unobtainable goals like that. In my experience, that kind of corporate behavior drives high performers away. High performers know what they have done and if you refuse to acknowledge it over time they leave.
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    The folly is the same as the rock star amplifier that “goes to 11” or how gig economy reviews are 5 star = acceptable or better, anything else means dreadful.’It is just a linear transform people have to do in their heads.
- throwway120385 3y ago
  It's also a tool for HR to say they have a process that they follow but then still allow all of the decisions about pay increases and performance to be entirely subjective. You miss your stretch goals, and so depending on how your manager feels at the time that's either totally acceptable and you're doing a great job, or if they need justification to shaft you then it's totally unacceptable and you didn't do the work well enough to deserve that. Same situation but totally different outcome.
- petsfed 3y ago
  There's a coaching philosophy that says to never praise unconditionally; rather every piece of praise should be followed with a criticism. I suppose this is theoretically a good practice, but only if you're already operating in a high-trust environment. If you're not, it starts to feel like you're never good enough, because absolutely every victory, no matter how big or small, is followed up with "but it could be better...". Which is, again technically accurate, but part of the finesse of being a good people-manager is understanding that humans are not robots who can simply process and accept criticism without any emotional hangups.
dekhn 3y ago
"Researchers confirm their own biases using poor quality study"
disqard 3y ago
"Across all experiments, individuals with high self-control were seen as more powerful, and as better suited for powerful roles, than individuals with low self-control." Part of me sees this research as "doing everything by the book" and consequently failing to capture important insights. For instance, every economic model of humans assumes that we're "rational agents", yet we know that people with poor impulse control (like ElMo, Trump, etc.) are perceived as powerful by a wide swath of the public. Maybe their "turns down dessert" thought experiments are just that -- thought experiments -- and do not reflect what humans actually do, IRL.
- KuriousCat 3y ago
  I think people like ElMo and Trump do have a lot of self control. In addition to getting what they want they are also masters of influence. It is also not poor impulse control if they are good enough to muster enough resources to afford their impulses in the first place.
  - katmannthree 3y ago
    How is this different from “it’s not poor impulse control if you’re a _functional_ alcoholic who can muster enough resources to afford a handle every morning”?
    - KuriousCat 3y ago
      It depends on the motive, if the person is highly motivated to indulge in hedonistic pleasure and alcohol gives him that, well he is achieving his objective. Where as person wants to experience some love/friendship and can't get it and he is using alcohol as a mask you know where to put him.
- annoyingnoob 3y ago
  Ambition, persistence, and confidence play a role too. Some people do not take No for an answer and keep trying.
  - 3y ago
gexla 3y ago
"Some set an ambitious goal of reading 200 pages each week, while others set a more moderate goal of reading 50 pages per week. All of these individuals read the same amount – 100 pages – but those who didn’t meet their goal were seen as less powerful by study participants." Under-promise, over-deliver.
- largbae 3y ago
  Elon Musk appears to be a counter-example...
  - notnaut 3y ago
    Over promising is better when you’re interested in money/power and have plenty of your own to start with, rather than any underlying pointless nonsense like working toward an achievable goal or trying to be a decent human.
    - nebula8804 3y ago
      We now know based on his numerous biographies and documentaries made about him that he overpromised because else his companies would not get the badly needed funds/support/customers. Is this fraud? Probably but he got away with it because he delivered enough tangible results to get people to back off. Otherwise he'd probably be in jail now. Why does he still overpromise when he does not need to? Well the latest biography sorta explained it: He can't help himself, he needs the thrill of an ever more difficult problem to solve. (ie. he's psycho)
  - DinaCoder99 3y ago
    Musk has lost a massive amount of credibility because of failing to deliver on most of the self-proclaimed potential of his businesses—basically, all of them outside of the potential of SpaceX, and even there he should be grateful the perceived value of the company isn't tied to going to mars.
    - time-less-ness 3y ago
c4wrd 3y ago
This is something I've noticed in myself and I'm glad there's research to back this, although this is an open secret to those who do master self-control. I've spent the last three to four years working on self-control and discipline after I hit rock bottom in my life and realized I had no self-agency. For me, having greater self-control led me to ensure I can focus on providing value where it matters in my life, and not getting caught up by the shiny object syndrome I was distracted by a lot when I was younger. Not every thought needs to be acted on, especially if the thoughts come from external sources. In regards to why it leads to power, as you make your way up the managerial chain, when you have greater self-control you are less prone to get "bullied" by other managers into doing work for them and you can stand up more for your team and you will be able to provide more value. For perspective, I would personally trust others who have self-control more than those who don't for time-sensitive and critical tasks because I can rely on them to regulate their emotions and give honest answers, as well as hold themselves accountable. For someone, like me a few years ago, who is undisciplined and has not spent time cultivating self-control this is hard to hear. If you find yourself making excuses when you read this article for why the power hierarchy is against you, or that there is bias in the results of this study (as some of the comments here allude to), then you should consider reevaluating why you are making excuses. It's a sign that this post triggered you and your response was to make an excuse rather than accept a correlation that speaks to an underlying hard truth. Once you start digging into "why did I make an excuse" and chase that feeling over and over whenever you find yourself making excuses, you will start to realize that you can't think of a reason why you made an excuse, it's just what you've done and reinforced in the past. If you've read this comment this far and you have a spark of curiosity and relate to not knowing why you are making excuses, I suggest you take this moment to chase it down and gain agency over your own life. Some would say this is your red pill moment. 'The Daily Stoic' woke me up, I highly recommend it. Discipline equals freedom, my friend, and we sorely need you.
- coop_solution 3y ago
  Is there any way to disagree with this comment without being disregarded as resentful? Good work is the key to good fortune / Winners take that praise / Losers seldom take that blame
abeppu 3y ago
All of this is in a context where it's assumed that participants _know_ the goals of the person under consideration, can straight-forwardly evaluate whether actions are in line with those, and where the _participant's_ goals are framed to not be a part of the discussion. In real life, how often are these true for power that matters? - as an IC, I generally don't have the information an exec has, and cannot easily judge which choices are aligned with stated goals - as a voter, I'm regularly unsure which goals that a politician says publicly are their real goals - and for any situation where I'm close enough to judge the actual suitability of actions, and the intents of the participants, I probably have enough of a stake that my view of who should be in control is swayed by what outcome I want
seydor 3y ago
This doesn't pass my sniff test. The results are based on what people say about who "looks powerful" but didn't put people in a position where they actually give power to them . "Look what people do rather than what they say" is very relevant here. Reject and resubmit
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  > ...you gotta have the self-control first. Then when you get the self-control, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women. — not AM
zubairq 3y ago
Interesting. Maybe I should try to get more done by having more self control
xeckr 3y ago
>In one experiment, working adults imagined a scenario where a colleague with the goal of being fit either ate a large dessert or abstained from dessert altogether. Researchers found that the colleague was seen as being better suited for high-power roles when they abstained from indulging, an indication of self-control. The result of the study seems obvious even if the design is a bit primitive.
pilgrim0 3y ago
IMO simply striving to gain power or money is easier than to achieve greatness and mastery, in general. Mainly because one can lie their way into power and money, countless examples of that both at a local level and global level. Now, mastery requires the opposite of lying and pursuing easy to achieve goals. It’s the hardest path because frustration is constant, and it requires one to keep stretching the limits of their own capabilities, and it never gets easier. Self control in that scenario is not necessarily about getting things “done”, but rather to not give up, and keep trying restlessly. The lack of nuance in the summary of that paper makes me think it’s not worth reading it. For me, I have greater admiration and respect for someone who has failed majestically at being great, than for someone who deals purely with median or below median expectations. The former will have amazing stories to tell, the latter usually don’t. The summary given by this blog, and likely the paper, too, is heavily tainted with the idea of “being for others”, rather than the idea of “being for self”. Again, being for others is super easy because it’s simply a matter of controlling the information you give, people do that all the time in social media. This doesn’t work for “being for self” because one can’t fool oneself indefinitely. Like the summary hints at, striving for greatness indeed involves fulfilling many achievements in the process of pursuing the greater achievement. This usually doesn’t count for observers, though, because the crowd has no taste or time for the story, but only for conclusions. Again illustrating how “being for self” is harder, as you’re set to be perceived as less than what you’re really trying to become. A functional remedy for that is simply to not be so public about your desires, which has the upside of protecting you from all sorts of exploitation.
- kingkawn 3y ago
  The thing obstructing all progress is the wanton deployment of generalizations that hold no obligation other than to reflect the reality of their distributor
- jack_pp 3y ago
  > IMO simply striving to gain power or money is easier than to achieve greatness and mastery While my ego would want to agree the truth is staying in power and making money exponentially isn't easy either, and you can't lie your way to lifelong power and fuck you money because eventually people figure you out, your reputation plummets and then you have less power and less opportunity to make money. That said you choose what game you want to play, if you care more about your craft focus on perfecting it even though that's not gonna make you as much money as pursuing money for its own sake.
boringuser2 3y ago
A controversial take from this is that, aside from the health benefits, you will also accrue personal and professional benefits from not being fat. I remember interviewing when I was chubbier post-COVID thinking that the only evidence the interviewer has of my self-control and drive is that I have none. Best case scenario, you are interviewing a temporarily embarrassed skinny person. Noble prize winner James Watson, famous bluntly tell it like it is-er, said he didn't hire fat people for this reason. (This has since been rectified by reinstating strength training and dietary controls, which I recommend.)
- CharlesW 3y ago
  > …you will also accrue personal and professional benefits from not being fat. As an overweight person, I don't think it's controversial. You'll also accrue personal and professional benefits from being a tall man and/or good-looking. However, "fat people have no self-control" is still fatphobia and ignores the interplay of genetic, metabolic, physiological, cultural, socio-economic, and environmental factors that contribute to obesity. There are countless fat people who are incredibly smart and hard-working, and have exquisite discipline in most areas of their life.
  - boringuser2 3y ago
    >fatphobia First of all, I really find this term to be gross. You should be afraid of being unhealthy. Second of all, are you posting that you have individual metabolic differences that substantially alter your caloric expenditure? FYI most studies show very little innate caloric expenditure differences between human beings outside of what can be predicted based on their body mass. Ironically, heavier people burn more calories, not less, innately. This makes sense because metabolic machinery is complex and so fundamental to life that it would obviously be very tightly tuned genetically.
    - CharlesW 3y ago
      > First of all, I really find this term to be gross. Lodge a complaint with dictionaries, I guess? https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/fatphobia https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/fatph... You can't agree with "you will accrue personal and professional benefits from not being fat" and then pretend fat-scrimination (is that better?) doesn't exist.
silent_cal 3y ago
“Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.” - St Augustine
rgbrgb 3y ago
Correlates with the relatively high number of executives I know who do not drink alcohol.
- runamuck 3y ago
  Unexpected comment! Can you provide details? I have not noticed a correlation, and about a half of the successful executives I see drink heavily and frequently, and nearly all drink a little (except me).
- __turbobrew__ 3y ago
  You will also see it correlates with people who exercise.
pphysch 3y ago
This conclusion is a bit tautological: another way to frame "self-control" is "power over yourself" or "ability to influence your own actions". Of course people who have power over N=1 people are more likely to be perceived as "powerful" than people who have no self-control i.e. N=0, because they are. In other words, self-control doesn't just "lead to" power, it is power.
ranprieur 3y ago
This article mentions a study that found almost no correlation between people who self-report having high self-control, and people who actually do well on tests measuring self-control: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/1/15/16863374/willpower-overrated-self-control-psychology https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/1/15/16863374/wi... The most likely explanation is that people who report high self-control are really experiencing less temptation.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  It's the same "illusory superiority" cognitive bias as the Dunning-Kruger effect. The least competent will overestimate their self-control, and the most competent will underestimate it.
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    while it could be, that doesn't ring true to me. I'd go for more of a Freudian "people who are somewhat obsessed with self control (therefore mindful of it) are people who struggle with it," coupled with salience bias. People who don't struggle with self control never think about it.
- anon291 3y ago
  How in the world does a test of 'does this colored text match its name' test 'self-control'. 'Self-control' as used in the article means things like 'can you stick to a diet', or 'can you keep your word', not can you control your thought processes enough to quickly name a color. You can be highly self disciplined and bad at this task, or highly undisciplined and good at it. In fact, I'd imagine undisciplined people might be inspired by the entertainment value of this 'game', and spend useless time practicing it rather than doing what actually matters. This study is complete garbage.
  - pas 3y ago
    It's classic 'executive function' measurement. You have to stay on task (say the color not the word) and this requires a bit of working memory (what was the task?) and requires inhibition of the 'fast system' (system 1, which would just blurt out something), all associated with the PFC (prefrontal cortex). Obviously it's not perfect, but at least very simple, quantitative, cheap, etc.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
abalaji 3y ago
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
akomtu 3y ago
It's a tautology. Self-control is about controlling your self, which is made of thoughts and desires. Either you control them, or they control you.
RajT88 3y ago
I for one can attest to this. I saw great gains in power, and the power people perceived in me once I prioritized and stuck to a strict exercise regime. Once I started doing 100 pushups, 100 situps, 100 air squats, and a 10-km run every day, I found greater strength and focus in my life. I felt I could easily take on just about any task with ease and immediately conquer it! Eventually, I got into training which used higher-than-normal gravity to maximize resistance and further build strength. After a while I measured my power, and it was well over 9000!
fsckboy 3y ago
having self-control could be a result of having higher IQ: being better able to figure out the future results of current behavior. And "higher IQ leads to power" (on average, population statistic) is not counterintuitive.
- faeriechangling 3y ago
  You would think so, but IQ and conscientiousness have essentially zero correlation. Smart but lazy is an actual thing.
omgJustTest 3y ago
Welcome to 101 in people do not like failure.
begueradj 3y ago
Winston Churchill said: “A man is about as big as the things that make him angry”. > But Steve Jobs could also be a tyrant. He was obsessively controlling, and given to fits of rage, throwing tantrums and yelling at employees and board members. (quoted). >Read the internal Tesla employee survey from 2018, where employees called Elon Musk an 'unapproachable tyrant' who fires people 'because of his ego' (Quoted) ... The list is long ...
bitwize 3y ago
Darth Vader is just so much cooler and more menacing than Kylo Ren, and a lot of it is to do with that the latter loses his shit when he encounters an obstacle.
BenFranklin100 3y ago
The second half of the study (setting but not meeting ambitious goalposts) seems to conflate self-control with realism. Setting impossible goals is not a trait one wants in a leader. This result may have little to do with perceptions of self-control.
davidhay 3y ago
It would be interesting to map how powerful a person is to their perceived power via this study.
barrystaes 3y ago
Nice article. It is good to bear in mind the perception of selfcontrol by observers does not actually correlate with the actual selfcontrol that a person exercises.
maverickedouard 3y ago
[dead]
tboyd47 3y ago
Makes you wonder why the stereotype of the "Playboy"-type billionaire who is slave to his desires has been pushed and accepted for long, when it's plainly false.
- 48864w6ui 3y ago
  Is it plainly false in your circles? In mine, only one acquired (economic) power; all the rest inherited, and they do tend more to the playboy stereotypes. (But this dichotomy may largely be due to the fact that only the former is a nerd?)
  - tboyd47 3y ago
    Wait 10-20 years and re-evaluate which of them is successful and which isn't.
thecosas 3y ago
Enjoyed this tidbit from the bottom of the article: “To motivate their employees, organizations often want employees to set stretch goals – goals that are challenging and hard-to-reach. However, we found that setting a stretch goal and not meeting it makes someone look less powerful than setting an easy goal and surpassing it,” said Rady School PhD student Shuang Wu, the first author of the paper.
- FredPret 3y ago
  Let me tell you - I did a five-star job of opening my laptop this morning. Just super - knocked it out of the park.
  - m463 3y ago
    don't break the hinge achieving your stretch goal. :)
- jyunwai 3y ago
  I hadn't considered the aspect of 'looking powerful/competent' before, but I have found setting limited goals useful for thinking strategically. The practical benefits of a limited versus highly ambitious short-term goal from the outset include an avoidance of 'feature creep' where you're tempted to add more nice-to-have features partway through, more self-confidence that you can achieve the goal with a little effort, and a clearly-identified decision point upon achieving the goal, where you can decide whether to continue on with the project for more ambitious goals, or satisfyingly call the project complete. In educational psychology, this is known as the "zone of proximal development" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_proximal_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_proximal_development), which I've also heard as called "i+1 planning."
advael 3y ago
This has a kind of silly sleight of hand I've unfortunately come to expect in psych research. This seems to try to study power while controlling for... power? It can definitely be interesting to see how the personality one projects can influence the social dynamics of a peer group (with the usual caveats that studying people in laboratory conditions for something iterated and evolving like social relationships is famously fraught in the first place), but this notion of power as something that's given to people by social perception on a moment-to-moment basis seems ill-suited to describe the real world, where in many contexts the relevant power is official and considerably less up for social negotiation
- JellyBeanThief 3y ago
  The word "official" is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting there.
  - advael 3y ago
    It's here used as shorthand for "not merely a social illusion constructed by the person it is acting upon" Some power derives from charisma, force of personality, or social fluency. But lots of power, from the perspective of the people it is acting on, derives from or relies on nothing of the sort, and merely requires that consequences can be enacted for failure to cooperate with the power dynamic at play This narrative is not insignificant. A lot of powerful people love to tell a story where power is just a personal competency, and consequently, that anyone's lack of power in any circumstance is, as the gamers say, a skill issue
    - JellyBeanThief 3y ago
      A single person, by definition, can't construct a social illusion. "Social" requires a society, which means at the very least two people. "A social illusion constructed by the person it is acting upon" is nonsense. We could call a language a social illusion. There's nothing red about the word red. And the distinction we draw between "earth" and "sky" is not one that the universe appears to use in its operation. Language does, however, require us to negotiate symbols, their meanings, and the consequences stemming from them. Like in how I rejected your definition of "official" with a rationale which you may attempt to overcome, accommodate... or just walk away from. And like in how we have structured our interactions so far as a contest of truths with bold and uncompromising assertions, when the option remains available to switch to a search for truth with tentative and attackable statements. It's exactly with the same with governments and other organizations, all based on language as they are. We make them up. We make up rules for making them up. Occasionally someone hits someone else with a big stick. But although the stick is real, the reasons why we do things, and the reasons why we believe we can do things with these consequences or those, are things we all work together or in opposition to establish. "Official" included.
hackerlight 3y ago
Ozempic side effects: may cause unwanted power
- glp1guide 3y ago
  Also, possibly curing cancer: https://glp1.guide/content/glp1-vs-cancer https://glp1.guide/content/glp1-vs-cancer

199 points by namanyayg 3y ago

Seek freedom and become captive of your desires, seek discipline and find your liberty. - Frank Herbert

Wonder if companies setting "Stretch" goals, and having people fail, is actually a form of control. Get results, but also keeps employees down. People may be less inclined to ask for raise if they miss goals, even if the results were 'good'.

throwaway74432 3y ago
That becomes clear when management says that hitting all of your goals actually means you weren't ambitious enough.
annoyingnoob 3y ago
My mother was a Manager at an insurance company for a very long time. She still firmly believes that one cannot get a 5 out 5 on a review because no one is perfect. Business likes to set unobtainable goals like that. In my experience, that kind of corporate behavior drives high performers away. High performers know what they have done and if you refuse to acknowledge it over time they leave.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  The folly is the same as the rock star amplifier that “goes to 11” or how gig economy reviews are 5 star = acceptable or better, anything else means dreadful.’It is just a linear transform people have to do in their heads.
throwway120385 3y ago
It's also a tool for HR to say they have a process that they follow but then still allow all of the decisions about pay increases and performance to be entirely subjective. You miss your stretch goals, and so depending on how your manager feels at the time that's either totally acceptable and you're doing a great job, or if they need justification to shaft you then it's totally unacceptable and you didn't do the work well enough to deserve that. Same situation but totally different outcome.
petsfed 3y ago
There's a coaching philosophy that says to never praise unconditionally; rather every piece of praise should be followed with a criticism. I suppose this is theoretically a good practice, but only if you're already operating in a high-trust environment. If you're not, it starts to feel like you're never good enough, because absolutely every victory, no matter how big or small, is followed up with "but it could be better...". Which is, again technically accurate, but part of the finesse of being a good people-manager is understanding that humans are not robots who can simply process and accept criticism without any emotional hangups.

dekhn 3y ago

"Researchers confirm their own biases using poor quality study"

disqard 3y ago

"Across all experiments, individuals with high self-control were seen as more powerful, and as better suited for powerful roles, than individuals with low self-control." Part of me sees this research as "doing everything by the book" and consequently failing to capture important insights. For instance, every economic model of humans assumes that we're "rational agents", yet we know that people with poor impulse control (like ElMo, Trump, etc.) are perceived as powerful by a wide swath of the public. Maybe their "turns down dessert" thought experiments are just that -- thought experiments -- and do not reflect what humans actually do, IRL.

KuriousCat 3y ago
I think people like ElMo and Trump do have a lot of self control. In addition to getting what they want they are also masters of influence. It is also not poor impulse control if they are good enough to muster enough resources to afford their impulses in the first place.
- katmannthree 3y ago
  How is this different from “it’s not poor impulse control if you’re a _functional_ alcoholic who can muster enough resources to afford a handle every morning”?
  - KuriousCat 3y ago
    It depends on the motive, if the person is highly motivated to indulge in hedonistic pleasure and alcohol gives him that, well he is achieving his objective. Where as person wants to experience some love/friendship and can't get it and he is using alcohol as a mask you know where to put him.
annoyingnoob 3y ago
Ambition, persistence, and confidence play a role too. Some people do not take No for an answer and keep trying.
- 3y ago

gexla 3y ago

"Some set an ambitious goal of reading 200 pages each week, while others set a more moderate goal of reading 50 pages per week. All of these individuals read the same amount – 100 pages – but those who didn’t meet their goal were seen as less powerful by study participants." Under-promise, over-deliver.

largbae 3y ago
Elon Musk appears to be a counter-example...
- notnaut 3y ago
  Over promising is better when you’re interested in money/power and have plenty of your own to start with, rather than any underlying pointless nonsense like working toward an achievable goal or trying to be a decent human.
  - nebula8804 3y ago
    We now know based on his numerous biographies and documentaries made about him that he overpromised because else his companies would not get the badly needed funds/support/customers. Is this fraud? Probably but he got away with it because he delivered enough tangible results to get people to back off. Otherwise he'd probably be in jail now. Why does he still overpromise when he does not need to? Well the latest biography sorta explained it: He can't help himself, he needs the thrill of an ever more difficult problem to solve. (ie. he's psycho)
- DinaCoder99 3y ago
  Musk has lost a massive amount of credibility because of failing to deliver on most of the self-proclaimed potential of his businesses—basically, all of them outside of the potential of SpaceX, and even there he should be grateful the perceived value of the company isn't tied to going to mars.
  - time-less-ness 3y ago

c4wrd 3y ago

This is something I've noticed in myself and I'm glad there's research to back this, although this is an open secret to those who do master self-control. I've spent the last three to four years working on self-control and discipline after I hit rock bottom in my life and realized I had no self-agency. For me, having greater self-control led me to ensure I can focus on providing value where it matters in my life, and not getting caught up by the shiny object syndrome I was distracted by a lot when I was younger. Not every thought needs to be acted on, especially if the thoughts come from external sources. In regards to why it leads to power, as you make your way up the managerial chain, when you have greater self-control you are less prone to get "bullied" by other managers into doing work for them and you can stand up more for your team and you will be able to provide more value. For perspective, I would personally trust others who have self-control more than those who don't for time-sensitive and critical tasks because I can rely on them to regulate their emotions and give honest answers, as well as hold themselves accountable. For someone, like me a few years ago, who is undisciplined and has not spent time cultivating self-control this is hard to hear. If you find yourself making excuses when you read this article for why the power hierarchy is against you, or that there is bias in the results of this study (as some of the comments here allude to), then you should consider reevaluating why you are making excuses. It's a sign that this post triggered you and your response was to make an excuse rather than accept a correlation that speaks to an underlying hard truth. Once you start digging into "why did I make an excuse" and chase that feeling over and over whenever you find yourself making excuses, you will start to realize that you can't think of a reason why you made an excuse, it's just what you've done and reinforced in the past. If you've read this comment this far and you have a spark of curiosity and relate to not knowing why you are making excuses, I suggest you take this moment to chase it down and gain agency over your own life. Some would say this is your red pill moment. 'The Daily Stoic' woke me up, I highly recommend it. Discipline equals freedom, my friend, and we sorely need you.

coop_solution 3y ago
Is there any way to disagree with this comment without being disregarded as resentful? Good work is the key to good fortune / Winners take that praise / Losers seldom take that blame

abeppu 3y ago

All of this is in a context where it's assumed that participants _know_ the goals of the person under consideration, can straight-forwardly evaluate whether actions are in line with those, and where the _participant's_ goals are framed to not be a part of the discussion. In real life, how often are these true for power that matters? - as an IC, I generally don't have the information an exec has, and cannot easily judge which choices are aligned with stated goals - as a voter, I'm regularly unsure which goals that a politician says publicly are their real goals - and for any situation where I'm close enough to judge the actual suitability of actions, and the intents of the participants, I probably have enough of a stake that my view of who should be in control is swayed by what outcome I want

seydor 3y ago

This doesn't pass my sniff test. The results are based on what people say about who "looks powerful" but didn't put people in a position where they actually give power to them . "Look what people do rather than what they say" is very relevant here. Reject and resubmit

082349872349872 3y ago
> ...you gotta have the self-control first. Then when you get the self-control, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women. — not AM

zubairq 3y ago

Interesting. Maybe I should try to get more done by having more self control

xeckr 3y ago

>In one experiment, working adults imagined a scenario where a colleague with the goal of being fit either ate a large dessert or abstained from dessert altogether. Researchers found that the colleague was seen as being better suited for high-power roles when they abstained from indulging, an indication of self-control. The result of the study seems obvious even if the design is a bit primitive.

pilgrim0 3y ago

IMO simply striving to gain power or money is easier than to achieve greatness and mastery, in general. Mainly because one can lie their way into power and money, countless examples of that both at a local level and global level. Now, mastery requires the opposite of lying and pursuing easy to achieve goals. It’s the hardest path because frustration is constant, and it requires one to keep stretching the limits of their own capabilities, and it never gets easier. Self control in that scenario is not necessarily about getting things “done”, but rather to not give up, and keep trying restlessly. The lack of nuance in the summary of that paper makes me think it’s not worth reading it. For me, I have greater admiration and respect for someone who has failed majestically at being great, than for someone who deals purely with median or below median expectations. The former will have amazing stories to tell, the latter usually don’t. The summary given by this blog, and likely the paper, too, is heavily tainted with the idea of “being for others”, rather than the idea of “being for self”. Again, being for others is super easy because it’s simply a matter of controlling the information you give, people do that all the time in social media. This doesn’t work for “being for self” because one can’t fool oneself indefinitely. Like the summary hints at, striving for greatness indeed involves fulfilling many achievements in the process of pursuing the greater achievement. This usually doesn’t count for observers, though, because the crowd has no taste or time for the story, but only for conclusions. Again illustrating how “being for self” is harder, as you’re set to be perceived as less than what you’re really trying to become. A functional remedy for that is simply to not be so public about your desires, which has the upside of protecting you from all sorts of exploitation.

kingkawn 3y ago
The thing obstructing all progress is the wanton deployment of generalizations that hold no obligation other than to reflect the reality of their distributor
jack_pp 3y ago
> IMO simply striving to gain power or money is easier than to achieve greatness and mastery While my ego would want to agree the truth is staying in power and making money exponentially isn't easy either, and you can't lie your way to lifelong power and fuck you money because eventually people figure you out, your reputation plummets and then you have less power and less opportunity to make money. That said you choose what game you want to play, if you care more about your craft focus on perfecting it even though that's not gonna make you as much money as pursuing money for its own sake.

boringuser2 3y ago

A controversial take from this is that, aside from the health benefits, you will also accrue personal and professional benefits from not being fat. I remember interviewing when I was chubbier post-COVID thinking that the only evidence the interviewer has of my self-control and drive is that I have none. Best case scenario, you are interviewing a temporarily embarrassed skinny person. Noble prize winner James Watson, famous bluntly tell it like it is-er, said he didn't hire fat people for this reason. (This has since been rectified by reinstating strength training and dietary controls, which I recommend.)

CharlesW 3y ago
> …you will also accrue personal and professional benefits from not being fat. As an overweight person, I don't think it's controversial. You'll also accrue personal and professional benefits from being a tall man and/or good-looking. However, "fat people have no self-control" is still fatphobia and ignores the interplay of genetic, metabolic, physiological, cultural, socio-economic, and environmental factors that contribute to obesity. There are countless fat people who are incredibly smart and hard-working, and have exquisite discipline in most areas of their life.
- boringuser2 3y ago
  >fatphobia First of all, I really find this term to be gross. You should be afraid of being unhealthy. Second of all, are you posting that you have individual metabolic differences that substantially alter your caloric expenditure? FYI most studies show very little innate caloric expenditure differences between human beings outside of what can be predicted based on their body mass. Ironically, heavier people burn more calories, not less, innately. This makes sense because metabolic machinery is complex and so fundamental to life that it would obviously be very tightly tuned genetically.
  - CharlesW 3y ago
    > First of all, I really find this term to be gross. Lodge a complaint with dictionaries, I guess? https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/fatphobia https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/fatph... You can't agree with "you will accrue personal and professional benefits from not being fat" and then pretend fat-scrimination (is that better?) doesn't exist.

silent_cal 3y ago

“Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.” - St Augustine

rgbrgb 3y ago

Correlates with the relatively high number of executives I know who do not drink alcohol.

runamuck 3y ago
Unexpected comment! Can you provide details? I have not noticed a correlation, and about a half of the successful executives I see drink heavily and frequently, and nearly all drink a little (except me).
__turbobrew__ 3y ago
You will also see it correlates with people who exercise.

pphysch 3y ago

This conclusion is a bit tautological: another way to frame "self-control" is "power over yourself" or "ability to influence your own actions". Of course people who have power over N=1 people are more likely to be perceived as "powerful" than people who have no self-control i.e. N=0, because they are. In other words, self-control doesn't just "lead to" power, it is power.

ranprieur 3y ago

This article mentions a study that found almost no correlation between people who self-report having high self-control, and people who actually do well on tests measuring self-control: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/1/15/16863374/willpower-overrated-self-control-psychology https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/1/15/16863374/wi... The most likely explanation is that people who report high self-control are really experiencing less temptation.

CharlesW 3y ago
It's the same "illusory superiority" cognitive bias as the Dunning-Kruger effect. The least competent will overestimate their self-control, and the most competent will underestimate it.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  while it could be, that doesn't ring true to me. I'd go for more of a Freudian "people who are somewhat obsessed with self control (therefore mindful of it) are people who struggle with it," coupled with salience bias. People who don't struggle with self control never think about it.
anon291 3y ago
How in the world does a test of 'does this colored text match its name' test 'self-control'. 'Self-control' as used in the article means things like 'can you stick to a diet', or 'can you keep your word', not can you control your thought processes enough to quickly name a color. You can be highly self disciplined and bad at this task, or highly undisciplined and good at it. In fact, I'd imagine undisciplined people might be inspired by the entertainment value of this 'game', and spend useless time practicing it rather than doing what actually matters. This study is complete garbage.
- pas 3y ago
  It's classic 'executive function' measurement. You have to stay on task (say the color not the word) and this requires a bit of working memory (what was the task?) and requires inhibition of the 'fast system' (system 1, which would just blurt out something), all associated with the PFC (prefrontal cortex). Obviously it's not perfect, but at least very simple, quantitative, cheap, etc.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

abalaji 3y ago

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

akomtu 3y ago

It's a tautology. Self-control is about controlling your self, which is made of thoughts and desires. Either you control them, or they control you.

RajT88 3y ago

I for one can attest to this. I saw great gains in power, and the power people perceived in me once I prioritized and stuck to a strict exercise regime. Once I started doing 100 pushups, 100 situps, 100 air squats, and a 10-km run every day, I found greater strength and focus in my life. I felt I could easily take on just about any task with ease and immediately conquer it! Eventually, I got into training which used higher-than-normal gravity to maximize resistance and further build strength. After a while I measured my power, and it was well over 9000!

fsckboy 3y ago

having self-control could be a result of having higher IQ: being better able to figure out the future results of current behavior. And "higher IQ leads to power" (on average, population statistic) is not counterintuitive.

faeriechangling 3y ago
You would think so, but IQ and conscientiousness have essentially zero correlation. Smart but lazy is an actual thing.

omgJustTest 3y ago

Welcome to 101 in people do not like failure.

begueradj 3y ago

Winston Churchill said: “A man is about as big as the things that make him angry”. > But Steve Jobs could also be a tyrant. He was obsessively controlling, and given to fits of rage, throwing tantrums and yelling at employees and board members. (quoted). >Read the internal Tesla employee survey from 2018, where employees called Elon Musk an 'unapproachable tyrant' who fires people 'because of his ego' (Quoted) ... The list is long ...

bitwize 3y ago

Darth Vader is just so much cooler and more menacing than Kylo Ren, and a lot of it is to do with that the latter loses his shit when he encounters an obstacle.

BenFranklin100 3y ago

The second half of the study (setting but not meeting ambitious goalposts) seems to conflate self-control with realism. Setting impossible goals is not a trait one wants in a leader. This result may have little to do with perceptions of self-control.

davidhay 3y ago

It would be interesting to map how powerful a person is to their perceived power via this study.

barrystaes 3y ago

Nice article. It is good to bear in mind the perception of selfcontrol by observers does not actually correlate with the actual selfcontrol that a person exercises.

maverickedouard 3y ago

[dead]

tboyd47 3y ago

Makes you wonder why the stereotype of the "Playboy"-type billionaire who is slave to his desires has been pushed and accepted for long, when it's plainly false.

48864w6ui 3y ago
Is it plainly false in your circles? In mine, only one acquired (economic) power; all the rest inherited, and they do tend more to the playboy stereotypes. (But this dichotomy may largely be due to the fact that only the former is a nerd?)
- tboyd47 3y ago
  Wait 10-20 years and re-evaluate which of them is successful and which isn't.

thecosas 3y ago

Enjoyed this tidbit from the bottom of the article: “To motivate their employees, organizations often want employees to set stretch goals – goals that are challenging and hard-to-reach. However, we found that setting a stretch goal and not meeting it makes someone look less powerful than setting an easy goal and surpassing it,” said Rady School PhD student Shuang Wu, the first author of the paper.

FredPret 3y ago
Let me tell you - I did a five-star job of opening my laptop this morning. Just super - knocked it out of the park.
- m463 3y ago
  don't break the hinge achieving your stretch goal. :)
jyunwai 3y ago
I hadn't considered the aspect of 'looking powerful/competent' before, but I have found setting limited goals useful for thinking strategically. The practical benefits of a limited versus highly ambitious short-term goal from the outset include an avoidance of 'feature creep' where you're tempted to add more nice-to-have features partway through, more self-confidence that you can achieve the goal with a little effort, and a clearly-identified decision point upon achieving the goal, where you can decide whether to continue on with the project for more ambitious goals, or satisfyingly call the project complete. In educational psychology, this is known as the "zone of proximal development" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_proximal_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_proximal_development), which I've also heard as called "i+1 planning."

advael 3y ago

This has a kind of silly sleight of hand I've unfortunately come to expect in psych research. This seems to try to study power while controlling for... power? It can definitely be interesting to see how the personality one projects can influence the social dynamics of a peer group (with the usual caveats that studying people in laboratory conditions for something iterated and evolving like social relationships is famously fraught in the first place), but this notion of power as something that's given to people by social perception on a moment-to-moment basis seems ill-suited to describe the real world, where in many contexts the relevant power is official and considerably less up for social negotiation

JellyBeanThief 3y ago
The word "official" is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting there.
- advael 3y ago
  It's here used as shorthand for "not merely a social illusion constructed by the person it is acting upon" Some power derives from charisma, force of personality, or social fluency. But lots of power, from the perspective of the people it is acting on, derives from or relies on nothing of the sort, and merely requires that consequences can be enacted for failure to cooperate with the power dynamic at play This narrative is not insignificant. A lot of powerful people love to tell a story where power is just a personal competency, and consequently, that anyone's lack of power in any circumstance is, as the gamers say, a skill issue
  - JellyBeanThief 3y ago
    A single person, by definition, can't construct a social illusion. "Social" requires a society, which means at the very least two people. "A social illusion constructed by the person it is acting upon" is nonsense. We could call a language a social illusion. There's nothing red about the word red. And the distinction we draw between "earth" and "sky" is not one that the universe appears to use in its operation. Language does, however, require us to negotiate symbols, their meanings, and the consequences stemming from them. Like in how I rejected your definition of "official" with a rationale which you may attempt to overcome, accommodate... or just walk away from. And like in how we have structured our interactions so far as a contest of truths with bold and uncompromising assertions, when the option remains available to switch to a search for truth with tentative and attackable statements. It's exactly with the same with governments and other organizations, all based on language as they are. We make them up. We make up rules for making them up. Occasionally someone hits someone else with a big stick. But although the stick is real, the reasons why we do things, and the reasons why we believe we can do things with these consequences or those, are things we all work together or in opposition to establish. "Official" included.

hackerlight 3y ago

Ozempic side effects: may cause unwanted power

glp1guide 3y ago
Also, possibly curing cancer: https://glp1.guide/content/glp1-vs-cancer https://glp1.guide/content/glp1-vs-cancer