Stop relying on sheer willpower to plough through difficult tasks: How to make your brain voluntarily get addicted to tackling tough challenges?

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Editor's note: Pitting willpower against dopamine is a losing battle by default. What truly widens the gap between people is not grinding through things by brute force, but replacing the information sources on your screen, and rewriting your brain's desire circuits through immediate action. This article is based on a translated piece of work.

For nearly two decades, I ran away from anything that was even slightly difficult.

I spent my entire adolescence playing video games, and then spent years mindlessly scrolling through my phone every single day.

That used to be my normal state. It took me years to train my brain to only crave the easy pleasures that I could get with zero effort.

Now, I can sit down and focus on writing for hours every day, and I can also read books for hours straight.

More importantly, this is not something I force myself to do, but something I genuinely want to do from the bottom of my heart. The sense of fulfillment they bring me is something that playing games and scrolling through my phone can never match.

Just a few years ago, this was not just difficult for me — it was completely impossible. I could not even sit still with a book for 5 minutes. My brain was simply not wired to function in this way.

How did I make it happen?

You may have already heard all kinds of neuroscience explanations for this kind of phenomenon:

Research on dopamine receptors, neural pathways, habit formation, and which areas of the brain get activated when you do different things.

But this article is not going to talk about those boring theories.

I just want to honestly share how all this happened to me: what exactly I did, what I experienced, and what practical insights you can get from it.

The Starting Point

Even just two years ago, I still had no motivation to do even one meaningful thing.

Doing any real work required me to force myself hard. I had to keep my willpower tensed up all the time, but this state never lasted more than two weeks. In the end, I always reverted to my old ways — scrolling through feeds, playing games, chasing all the cheap, easily accessible dopamine stimulation around me.

In fact, before that, I had been consuming personal growth content for several years. The desire to change was always there. But every time I watched an inspirational video, I would only feel pumped up for at most one afternoon, or if it hit me harder, I could only keep the momentum for a full day before quickly falling back to my old self. Nothing really stuck with me.

Until I stumbled upon Sam Ovens' YouTube channel.

He focuses on talking about business and business-oriented personal improvement. There was a quality about him that deeply attracted me, a feeling that no other creator had ever given me before. This was a person who had really delivered solid, tangible results. He cuts straight to the point when analyzing problems without any fluff, and I could not stop watching his content. Later I found out that he has the same personality type as me, which also played a part in this, but that is a topic for another article.

So I started binging his entire channel like crazy. For days on end, I watched from morning till night. I took notes while watching, paused from time to time to think about what he was saying, and even rewatched certain segments over and over.

After a few days, something quietly changed qualitatively. I started to become self-disciplined, but it was not the kind of self-discipline I used to have where I gritted my teeth and forced myself through. It happened naturally, and I did not even deliberately try to make it happen.

In the past, I would always listen to music when driving, no exceptions. One day I suddenly thought, why not switch to that podcast episode I had been wanting to listen to? Since then, I have never listened to music in my car again. Eventually, I even completely cut music out of my life, because I realized it was distracting my focus. That alone was enough to make me give it up without hesitation. This is just a tiny microcosm of the snowball effect triggered by reshaping attention.

However, all this information intake was not just passive absorption.

All these accumulations eventually led to a 7-day "monk mode" deep work period, which was the most self-disciplined period in my life (I wrote down the specific operation plan in another article). During that time, I set up a YouTube channel and started sharing my own articles online. But because I hated video editing, I quickly gave up YouTube and eventually moved to the Substack platform that I love, and have been writing there ever since.

Looking at it from a broader perspective, the pattern is crystal clear: I consumed an excessive amount of the "right, high-quality input", and then the entire downstream behavior chain changed accordingly. Bad habits fell off naturally without me fighting them tooth and nail; good habits came to fruition effortlessly without me forcing them into place. I found the career that truly belongs to me. And the source of all this was just that I changed where I directed my attention.

In Essence, You Are the Sum of All Your Attention

People always like to say: "You are the average of the five friends you spend the most time with." That statement makes sense, but I prefer another way of putting it: you are essentially the sum of all your attention.

The "five-friend average theory" is just the tip of the iceberg, because the friends around you are nothing more than the destinations of your attention when you spend time with them. But the scope of attention is far broader than the people sitting next to you.

Every piece of information you consume subtly shapes your desires. Your brain keeps adjusting itself according to the continuous "nutrients" it receives. If you immerse yourself in game videos all day long, your brain will crave playing games frantically; but if you spend a lot of time with a real, tangible creator, listening to him break down his ways of thinking, work logic and decision-making paths, your brain will involuntarily pull you in that direction. This phenomenon has been verified over and over again in my life.

The most wonderful part is that in this day and age, you can completely take the initiative to "design" this environment. Nowadays, content output is extremely abundant, and people from all walks of life are building personal brands and sharing their hands-on operational experience. You can even stay at home all day and still surround yourself with a group of doers and ambitious people. Imagine, if you spend all day with successful entrepreneurs, listening to them talk about how they run their lives to great success, your brain will naturally crave to become that kind of person. And now, you can create that exact same environment with just one mobile phone.

This is how "Mimetic Desire" works: the things you crave often depend on what the people around you are craving. When you see someone pursuing a certain goal with extreme focus and passion, your brain will automatically trigger a reflex: "I want that too." And in 2026, the "people around you" refer to the voices in your headphones, the faces on your screen, and the creators in your information feed. Every time you open an app, you are re-choosing your living environment. Your body does not move, but your surroundings have already changed.

So the real question is: what kind of people are you letting yourself be surrounded by?

The Immersion Effect (and Its Pitfall)

When you are fully absorbed and immersed in people who are doing the exact things you want to do, you will start to absorb and manifest their energy. I feel this every single time it happens.

When I read Napoleon's biography, I would walk faster, work harder, and a burst of energy would suddenly surge inside me, making me look at all the self-imposed limits and think: "That's ridiculous, why am I putting up with these limitations?"

When I find a creator that resonates with me and binge-watch his content for a whole day, a wonderful urge will rise in my heart, my way of thinking and acting will change, and my perception of "what is possible" seems to be completely refreshed.

This phenomenon is real. But it only stays at the surface level for now, and cannot sustain itself for long on its own.

Moreover, it often comes with a pitfall: watching the content output by people you admire can easily create the illusion that "you are also getting things done". If you watch three hours of videos about how other people start businesses, your brain will mistakenly think that you have spent an extremely efficient and fulfilling afternoon. But that is not the case at all.

You have created nothing. You just experienced the pleasure of "what if I were him" from a distance behind the screen. I have fallen into this pit countless times myself. Because the content aligns with your goals, you feel like you are "learning" and making progress, but in reality you have no tangible output at all. That urge hits you, you use that momentum to watch a few more hours of content, then the urge fades away, and you are still stuck in the same place.

The reason the urge fades is that you turn around and go back to your original life track. Even if you immerse yourself in the content of high-quality creators for three consecutive days, but then plunge back into scrolling short videos and playing games, the old patterns and old habits that once shaped you will inevitably swallow you up again. Information intake does give you a chance to temporarily switch your environment (that is why I think it is extremely valuable — it is like taking a short trip to another world for a few days), but if you do nothing in that world, you will still return to reality empty-handed.

So what is the essential difference between people who consume the same information but can achieve complete transformation, and those who stay stagnant all the time?

Action Breeds Desire

You do not need to wait until you feel the desire to do difficult things to take action. Real desire only arises after you start acting. I know this sounds counterintuitive, but it is the fact from my own personal experience.

After binging Sam Ovens' content for several days, I became more self-disciplined. This was not because I sat down and solemnly swore "Okay, from now on I am going to be a self-disciplined person". It is because the constant stream of high-quality input completely reset my perception of what "normal" is. Switching from listening to music to listening to podcasts was not some tough chore that I had to grit my teeth to get through, but that I genuinely wanted to listen to that podcast episode more than any song. Action comes from a shift in desire, and the subsequent actions in turn make that desire even stronger.

Consuming information is only a window leading to a new world, not the destination. The burst of energy you get from immersing yourself in excellent role models is essentially "borrowed energy" that will eventually dissipate. But if you take immediate action while that momentum is still there — even if it is just a tiny step — you create tangible proof for yourself. You have actually accomplished something, and that result belongs to you from that point on. This proof will drive your next action, which in turn generates more proof; before you realize it, you have built your own inertial momentum, which has long been unrelated to the creator you watched three weeks ago.

The later monk mode, the YouTube channel, and the words I shared online were none of them pre-planned. All of this can be traced back to that initial shift of attention, and was solidified through one action after another. Every step forward leads to the next step, and the result of each step makes me want to keep moving forward even more.

While Your Upper Limit Rises, Your Bottom Line Also Rises

There is one point I must make clear: beating game playing and mindless scrolling of negative short videos is never something you can easily get over just by staying calm and peaceful. They are extremely unfair "dopamine switches". The chemical messengers they release in your brain are something you can barely get anywhere else, and are absolutely impossible to experience in your early days of work.

The reason it is so hard to quit them is not because you are weak and incompetent, but because the tiny price you pay is wildly disproportionate to the huge instant reward you get. Behind this are the highest-paid engineer teams in the world, who after years of research, have carefully designed a whole set of mechanisms to keep you glued to that lousy screen. You are fighting a heavy tank with a butter knife.

Therefore, you must get rid of them completely. Not manage them, not moderate them, and definitely not try to "balance" them with some efficient habits. Only by eradicating them completely and leaving them behind can you move on.

This is the true power of "reshaping your attention" — it is not just about rigidly adding new input on top of old habits, but replacing everything entirely. When you fully devote yourself to content that guides you to create and build, games and short videos will gradually lose their hold on you, because your attention has been fully directed elsewhere. You do not need to fight them with willpower at all; you just cut off the attention nutrients they need to survive, and let them starve to death directly.

After finishing the 7-day monk mode, something happened that I did not expect. I knew my upper limit had been raised — I had proven to myself that I was fully capable of doing deep work for 7 consecutive days and producing truly valuable content. But at the same time, my bottom line was also completely raised. I found that I simply could not go back to the old way.

I do not mean that I subjectively "choose not to go back", but that physically, returning to that muddled, fragmented life scattered by trivial things feels "completely impossible". Even just thinking about playing games all day or aimlessly scrolling through information feeds makes my body feel extremely resistant and uncomfortable, as if I have completely lost the ability to do those things. The reshaping of the attention pathways is so thorough that the old default factory settings have been completely erased.

This is what it really looks like when you finally succeed in "making your brain actively crave doing difficult things". You are not forcing a new desire into the pile of old desires, but rewriting the entire neural circuit completely, so that the old switches stop working entirely.

Examine and Choose Your Input Sources

If you are sitting there distressed right now, not knowing how to make yourself genuinely crave those "goals you are supposed to crave", start with your input sources. Who are you watching on a regular basis? Who are you listening to? What are you using to fill your spare time? Is this content aligned with the future direction you want to head towards, or is it constantly pulling you off course into the abyss?

Find someone who is doing the exact "thing you really want to do", someone who is positive and can push you forward. Find someone whose way of thinking resonates deeply with you, and who can make you feel genuinely moved — this point is far more important than you can imagine. For the immersion effect to work, there must be that perfect fit like "cracking a secret code" between you two; not every creator can do that, you have to find the person who can make you have an instant epiphany and resonance.

When that surge of momentum comes over you, do not just sit there feeling moved. Never let "passive absorption" become the end point. Go write something, go make something with your hands, start a project — no matter how bad the work is, no matter how small the scale is, it does not matter. Only real action can build a bridge that transforms the external motivation others give you into your own internal desire.

You never need to force your brain to crave difficult things. You just need to change the nutrients you feed it, and it will naturally rev up and run at full speed.

Translator: boxi.