: Review your progress at the end of each week to see where your focus slipped and where your willpower held strong.
Introduce minor, controlled challenges into your daily routine. Choose to take the stairs instead of the elevator, or finish your shower with thirty seconds of cold water. These small acts train the brain to tolerate discomfort.
After a legal name change in 1924, he became Édouard Théodore-Aubanel and entered the family printing business in 1926. For over four decades, until his death in 1970, Edward Aubanel was a publisher working in Avignon, a city in the heart of Provence. He was a humanist, a bibliophile, and, perhaps most notably, the founder and editor of the review Vita Latina , established in 1956 to promote the use of living Latin.
In the lexicon of self-improvement, "willpower" is often treated like a mythical fuel tank. We talk about it as something we "run out of" by Tuesday afternoon, or a magical reserve that separates the successful from the stagnant. It is viewed as a finite resource, a character trait you either possess or you don't.
I'd like to introduce you to William Edward Aubanel, also known as Will Power, an American poet, novelist, and short story writer from California.
In the pantheon of 19th-century French literature, names like Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire dominate. But in the sun-scorched south, in the langue d’oc of Provence, a different kind of titan emerged. His name was (1829–1886).
Aubanel famously wrote: