Strategy (Part 2): The Will

So far, in talking about Strategy, we’ve taken it for granted that “you” want certain outcomes, and can set goals to make that happen. But on closer examination, this “you” turns out to be more complex. All of us have experienced “wanting” something we know we’d be better off without, or the opposite, knowing we “should” want something, but lacking the motivation to make it happen. To think clearly and effectively about strategy, then, it’s helpful to clarify what part of ourselves we ought to heed in setting goals and going after them, which I propose ought to be the old-fashioned notion of the Will.

Desire, Wanting, and the Will

As is so often the case, it’s helpful to start by returning to Plato. He proposed a three-part division of the self or soul: the nous, or rational faculty, the thymos, or “spirited” faculty, and the epithymos, or appetitive faculty. To take them in reverse order, the epithymos is the part of you that desires the things all animals want: food, sex, comfort, and so forth. The thymos is the part of you that feels “stirred” by strong feelings: anger, pride, courage, and so forth. The nous is the part of you that can think, reason, and plan. Clearly, as a philosopher, Plato exalted the nous above the other two bits, but crucially, he did not think that it was desirable (or even possible) to suppress or excise the others. Instead, a well-ordered person ought to strive to bring all three parts into alignment, all “playing for the same team.” Your epithymos ought to be trained to pull you toward what you truly need, your thymos to strengthen you in pursuit of worthy ends, and your nous set above them steering you to higher and longer-term ends than either the thymos or epithymos might on their own.

We have here a star to how we might want to think about strategy. We ought to find ways to satisfy the desires of our epithymos that harness the vigor of our thymos and yet stand up to the logical demands of our nous. Something is still missing, however: what is take these three in hand and harmonize them? In Plato’s conception, this was a job for the nous, which he believed to be our highest and most divine part of the soul. In my own experience, though, I have found the dictates of conscious rationality a bit weak as a basis for ordering the other parts of myself, and so I find it helpful to consider the Will.

To my thinking (influenced by thinkers such as Schopenhauer), there is something fundamental about the Will that sets it apart from thinking, spirit, or desire. Imagine you’re trying to lose weight and you’re presented with a slice of cake. Your nous knows that you don’t need the calories and it will set you back on your plans. Your thymos might bristle at the challenge, or thrill at the opportunity to celebrate. Your epithymos, meanwhile, makes your mouth water for the anticipated deliciousness of sweet, sweet sugar.

But do you eat it, though? What decides to heed the remonstrations of your nous or follow the impulses of your epithymos? I would say it’s your Will. The irreducible part of you that decides. We’ve all had days where “doing the right thing” comes easy, and we’ve all had days where it’s a nearly unbearable struggle. Sure, there are ways to manage and cultivate such motivation, and it’s certainly much easier to do things when you have it, but motivation is not the same as Will. If you wake up bright eyed and bushy tailed and hit your morning workout feeling good, you’re motivated. On the other hand, if you struggle out of bed, drag yourself to the weights and make yourself pick them up even though you really, really don’t want to, you’re certainly not “motivated.” But in both cases, your Will was to work out, and you did so.

The Will, then, is what chooses our strategies and determines whether we follow them (but not necessarily achieve our goals, thanks to our old friend uncertainty). Under this view, the Will is a part of ourselves we can train and strengthen that will ultimately steer the course of our lives.

Training the Will

The only way to truly train the Will is through practice, which means choosing to do something and then doing it, merely because you chose to. You can, and indeed it can be helpful to do so, choose something entirely arbitrary and non-consequential: for example, every time you see yourself in your bathroom mirror, touch your nose. For the less decisive amongst us, such basic training is a good place to start. In the long run, though, none of us seek to train the Will merely to perform silly, arbitrary tasks, but instead to get more of what we truly want out of life. And that’s where Plato’s model can help us out.

Theoretically, you could train the Will by making yourself do things you don’t really want: cold showers, punishing physical exercise, eating disgusting foods, whatever. You might call such exercises “training the Will in hard mode.” There’s value in this: think of every martials arts movie with the student sweeping or doing other mundane chores as a way of learning humility and discipline. But for things that you want to do consistently in the long run, going all stick and no carrot is setting yourself up for failure.

Let’s take the weight loss example I mentioned earlier. You have decided that you want to be healthier, and that doing so involves losing some weight. You could choose some faddish crash diet, or starve yourself, or make yourself only eat disgusting foods so that you won’t be tempted to over-indulge. But if you try any of these approaches, since you’re a human with a thymos and epithymos, you’re likely to quit, or even to rebel: not only will you not follow your stupid diet, you’ll eat the whole cake! Screw you, diet! (That’s your thymos talking). If you treat these fundamental building blocks of yourself as defective parts or wayward servants in need of harsh discipline, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

Now, imagine a very different approach to losing weight. You identify some foods you enjoy and ask “how might I make these healthier?” Perhaps instead of instant ramen, you work out a way to make pasta noodles taste more like ramen noodles and start making your own broth (here’s an easy one: fry some ground pork or breakfast sausage, add a bit more water than you want broth, then season with onion and garlic powder and soy sauce. Add a bit of ginger if you’re feeling adventurous). Once you’ve got the hang of that, maybe go a bit further: add some veggies in there. You’re now eating real food that tastes enough like the less healthy thing you used to enjoy, so your epithymos is happy enough, you’re doing something for yourself instead of relying on others, so your thymos can be proud, and you are getting closer to your goals, so your nous is on board too. One happy, harmonious whole that you can keep going for the long haul.

As we said earlier, there’s value in training yourself to do hard things. If you want to get really strong, you won’t be able to settle for a few minutes of calisthenics each morning: you’re going to have to hit the gym in earnest. Likewise, if you want to build a successful business, there will hard decisions and long nights of work. On the other hand, though, one of the best pieces of advice I ever got came, oddly enough, from a book on housekeeping: if you’re struggling to do “the right thing,” make doing the right thing easier. Junk mail piling up by the front door? Don’t resolve to be better about making the hike to the recycling bin, just put a trashcan for recycling by the door. Keep losing your scissors? Buy multiple sets and keep one in each place you tend to use them. Similarly, if you want to eat better, keep better food in your pantry and fridge. Pre-make grab and go stuff to have for breakfast. Choose healthy foods you actually like the taste of over the “better” ones you have to hold your nose to choke down.

Once again, our goal is not to subject the pesky thymos and epithymos (or even the sometimes pesky nous) to the iron rule of a tyrannical Will. Instead, we want the parts of ourselves to work in harmony, to come to actually desire what we believe to be best, to feel pride in successfully getting it. If you find yourself struggling to do what you think you’ve decided to do, it’s helpful to ask “what’s making this hard?” If you find yourself eating less healthy foods even though you like the healthier options you’ve figured out, what is your epithymos really after? Is it the taste? Is it some kind of emotional association? Is it that it takes too much time and effort you’d rather be spending on something else? If you can figure out what that part of you wants, you can start looking for more constructive ways to get it. Your epithymos wants to be entertained instead of “wasting time” cooking? Maybe put a movie on or listen to a podcast while you cook. Instant ramen hits a nostalgia spot from your college days? Okay, maybe it’s a once-in-a-while treat, or when you have your healthier version, you put on a playlist of songs from back in the day. Or whatever. We don’t want to ignore the epithymos or batter it into submission (or the thymos for that matter), instead, we want to find a way its contributions can pull in the same direction as what our nous recognizes as smart and our Will decides to do.

Figuring Out What You Really Want

We’ve talked about how the Will is irreducible. At the end of the day, you either decide to do something or you don’t. You can have a list of pros and cons pages long, elaborate scoring systems that require advanced Excel modeling, lengthy discussions with trusted advisors, and so on, but after all of that, you still have decide, and that’s really all there is to it: yes or no. Do it or don’t do it.

For many of us, this is hard. Especially when it’s a decision that really matters. Most of us have been trained by years and years of school to want and expect solutions to problems rather than decisions. Should I take job A or job B? On some level, I think that if I just get the right information, if I just think about it hard enough, then it will become obvious that one is “objectively” better than the other. In other words, I’m hoping that the decision will turn out not to be, you know, a decision. Picking the objectively better option isn’t really deciding, it’s just being reasonable.

The bad news is that for the big decisions in life, the kind of things for which we might want to craft a careful, long-term strategy, there is rarely an “objectively best” option. Career field A has better pay on average, but requires longer hours and relocating. Career field B is more interesting to you, can be pursued near your friends and family, and might make your more influential. Which one is better? Well, no one can truly say besides you. Important decisions are full of things that differ qualitatively, and how important those qualitative differences are varies wildly between different folks, because we have different wants, needs, and capabilities. I took a pay cut to leave consulting and start teaching because I found the work more rewarding and I didn’t want to travel so much once I had kids. Friends of mine have stuck with consulting for years because they have different needs.

Further complicating things, besides the fact that we all want and need different things, and the stuff that might get us those things tends to be stubbornly resistant to easy measurement and comparison, is that often, there are so many factors involved, so much stuff that can’t be anticipated or predicted from the outside, that the only way to figure out if something works for you is to give it a shot. I could (and did) talk to folks who had done consulting before I applied for jobs, I did research on the career, participated in the consulting club, and otherwise did what I could to figure out whether it was a good option for me, but the only way I could fully understand whether consulting was a viable career for me or not was to become a consultant and do it for a while (I learned a lot and am glad I did it, but here I am, not a consultant anymore).

All of which is to say, there’s value in thinking things through and being intentional, in having a strategy. But strategies have to be put to the test. Between the World Wars, there were fierce debates about what shape naval battles would take in the next war. Slug matches between the heaviest possible battleships? Lightning raids by flotillas of small craft? Something else? It wasn’t until the war actually started that it was decisively shown that aircraft had become the most important factor and aircraft carriers would matter far more than battleships.

When it comes to the big-picture questions about what to do with your life: where to live, how to make a living, whom to love, and so forth, much of the time, you just won’t be able to know ahead of time by thinking about it, talking about it, imagining it. You’ve gotta get out there and try things, get experience. Gaming things out ahead of time can be a good way to avoid costly mistakes or irrevocable decisions, but planning and strategizing can only get you so far. Working out what you truly want, then, is a process, not an event. You try something, see if it turned out how you thought it would, then decide whether to take it farther or change course based on what you’ve learned.