No slacking! In the new world order, it's strive or die

YOU COULD be like Harry Redknapp. Not guilty and likely to be next England supremo. You too could have a house on the waterfront at Sandbanks, where I used to go as a little 'un, to watch the ferry crossing the bay to Studland. Redknapp can watch the ferry any time he likes.

You could be like David Cameron, too. The doctors, the nurses, the Royal Colleges, the GPs all tell him the NHS privatisation is bollocks. Cameron doesn't say "Oh sod it, I can't be bothered". He's going to push it through anyway.

You've either got it or you haven't, I used to think. Then Baumeister and Tierney's Willpower forced its way across my desk.

Willpower (they assert, assertively) is a sort of muscle. You can exercise it like you'd exercise any other muscle, in apparently silly and pointless ways.

They're doing the same thing down the gym, but the berks humping away at the Nautilus machines are never going to be called upon to use their strength. The possessor of a trained Will, will.
 
Teach a child to refuse one marshmallow now so that he or she gets two marshmallows later, and 25 years on you end up with a Redknapp, a Cameron, even a Charlotte Church, telling Rupert Murdoch that she'll see him in court.

But is it true? I was prepared to believe in the Triumph of the Will (I'm powerless to resist that sort of thing) until Saturday, when Simon Kuper published a piece in the FT explaining how he and the novelist Jo-Ann Richards had worked out how people really divide up into three groups: Strivers, Fantasists and Slackers.
 
The terms are self-explanatory. You can be a mixture, of course, and the ideal mixture depends on your trade.
The consequences are gripping.

Redknapp, Cameron et al are Strivers. The boardroom bullies are Strivers. The people who impose themselves on us, boss us around, take charge: Strivers all. The world is run by, and for, Strivers.

Strivers will, naturally, exert and nurture their willpower, as Baumeister and Tierney teach. The rest of us won't even see the point in reading the book.

The Strivers hate the Slackers and the Fantasists. They see the unfortunate, the sick, the unemployed, the mentally ill, as Slackers who, if punished enough, will start to Strive.
 
They see Fantasists as troublemakers, who don't live in this mysterious thing called the Real World.

What they don't realise is that we hate them, just as much. And they'll never know. We Fantasists are sitting here imagining them screaming piteously for votes and bonuses as they fry in hell, and the Slackers just can't be bothered.

Religion, too. Chap says "The meek shall inherit the earth" - a fine USP - and next thing you know, it's being run by Strivers, chained together by the knives in each others' backs. There's no escape.

So where do we turn to actually improve ourselves? I asked the richest man I know. "I don't read that stuff," he said. "Self-improvement's for losers."

• Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength by Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney, Allen Lane. ISBN 978-1846143502

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