I wonder how much of people’s frustrations with aspects of their life are due to a lack of understanding of habit. It’s a concept that any self-conscious being is probably familiar with but the depth tends to stop there. How many people take time (or read books!) to understand how habits have shaped their lives, or the more difficult task of how to break undesirable habits as well as form good ones. It is a bit of a meta-cognitive task but not outside of the reach of the majority of people, I would imagine. To the extent that willpower is a useful concept, making and breaking habits certainly requires some of it. But the key is, having the skills to do so more efficiently allows for less expenditure of energy/willpower/whatever in order to accomplish the same task. This seems powerful yet we don’t see habit management skills being explicitly sought out by most people.