Reminding Yourself of Your Future

Back in August, I recommended Henry Hazlitt’s self-help book, The Way to Will Power. I still do. I thought of that book recently when I read Peter’s exhortation:

Therefore, gird up the loins of your mind, staying sober, fully place hope on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

1 Peter 1:13

In my opinion, this exhortation is strongly related to becoming a better man and guarding your heart. Writing to believers, Peter basically tells his readers to regularly remind themselves of where they are headed and why. He wants them to develop a strong habit of doing this and not let anything distract them from maintaining the habit.

Why?

This is where Henry Hazlitt’s book on will-power might help us (see the linked post for free text and an audio version!). Surprisingly, Hazlitt begins his book on will-power by denying the will even exists! In the third chapter he finally explains what he thinks “will-power” really is:

When we say a man has will-power, we mean that he has a certain desire which persists and predominates for a comparatively long period. It is not being constantly dethroned by a multitude of other desires. Either the other desires are not strong enough, or it is too strong for them (which as we shall see later, is more than a mere verbal distinction); and if perchance this desire is forced to abdicate for a little while, which may sometimes happen with the strongest-willed persons, it quickly throws out the usurping desire and reigns again.

This dominant desire is usually a wish for something remote. The man who obeys it is setting the expected advantage of the future against the supposed advantages of the present. He will not eat an extra slice of that delicious pie, for he knows that if he did he would two hours later be suffering the agonies of indigestion. He will not gaze at that pretty girl on the subway seat opposite, for he has embarked upon the noble enterprise of improving his mind; he has set aside his trip to work in the mornings for concentration on some serious subject; he will not be distracted. Or he will stay late at the office; he will take his work home with him; he will whip his brain on when it is tired; he will shorten his holidays, eliminate social enjoyments and endanger his health, for he has resolved upon Success in Life.

Will-Power, then, may be defined as the ability to keep a remote desire so vividly in mind that immediate desires which interfere with it are not gratified.

In the next chapter he elaborates:

I have said, for instance, that there is no such thing as the will considered as an entity, that it is simply a name we give first to one desire and then to another. But by way of setting off those desires which we commonly call “the will” from those desires which “the will” opposes, I have said that the will, in general, represents desires for remote, as opposed to immediate, gratifications. Yet we may generalize still further. As long as we keep in the background of our minds that the will is really an abstraction, there is no harm in speaking of it a good part of the time as if it were an entity; and insofar as it can be said to represent a definite and permanent entity, the will may be defined as our desire to be a certain sort of character. This is still a desire, you see, and it is still an abstraction; for our desire to be a certain sort of character may mean at one moment a desire to be honest, at another moment a desire not to get drunk, and at still another moment a desire to concentrate on something.

When we commonly speak of the will and think of it as if it were a definite concrete thing, it is this desire to be a certain sort of character, I think, that we commonly have in mind. When popular language says that a man is the slave of his desires, it means that he acts upon the cravings and impulses that from time to time arise, though in retrospect he will know that such actions would never be done by the kind of character he wants to be. When popular language says that a man is the master of his own desires, that he holds them in leash and under his control, it means that this desire to be a certain kind of character is at all times vivid and powerful enough to be acted upon in preference to any other fleeting or recurrent desire that may beckon him.

I do not want to endorse or subscribe to every element of Hazlitt’s philosophy. I am not sure of all the implications. But I do think that Peter is basically exhorting every Christian to hold his hope “at all times vivid and powerful enough to be acted upon in preference to any other fleeting or recurrent desire that may beckon him.” He wants us to “keep a remote desire so vividly in mind that immediate desires which interfere with it are not gratified.”