Natural Selection, Survival of the Fittest: The Stronger One's Willpower, the Stronger One's Vitality
Human beings have survived in the harsh natural world since ancient times, always following the law of natural selection, survival of the fittest—the elimination of the unfit.
Recently I came across a news report: at the Nangang Campus of Heilongjiang Provincial Hospital, in the Urology Department, there is a centenarian cancer-fighting star named Wang He. Twenty years ago he was diagnosed with prostate cancer accompanied by bone metastasis, and now he has lived to the age of 100. The secret to his longevity is that he has persisted in swimming every day; up until the age of 99 he still swam daily, and even in winter he would take winter swims.
Swimming is indeed very helpful for the rehabilitation of prostate cancer. A study by American scientists involving more than 47,000 men showed that swimming for about half an hour a day helps to fight against and delay the onset and progression of prostate cancer.
But very few people can truly keep swimming day after day for twenty years. Among the cancer patients I treat, there are still many lung-cancer patients who cannot quit smoking, and liver-cancer patients who cannot give up alcohol and their craving for greasy food. In the final analysis, it is all because these patients' willpower is too weak—they cannot overcome their bad habits and cannot cultivate good ones. If a person, even under the threat of death, is still not enough to change some bad habits, then his willpower is truly poor.
A few years ago, when I went back home, I happened to run into a high-school classmate of mine. At that time he was working as a policeman within the government system. We got along well back in school. We were both sons of peasant families, with poor financial conditions at home; when we were in school we rode old bicycles of our own from our village to the high school and went home only once a month. Every time we went home for a holiday, we traveled together.
That day when I met him, he talked about his life plan. He said this is how he had planned his career: he would work in the system for ten years, then go out and practice as a lawyer for ten years, and after ten years as a lawyer, go into business for another ten years and then retire. He said he could not bear a monotonous life; he wanted his lifetime to be rich in life experiences, so he chose this life plan.
At the time I thought he was probably just talking. But half a year ago, when I called him about something, his family answered the phone. They gave me his new mobile number and told me he really had left his post as a policeman and gone to Guangdong to become a lawyer. While working in the system, he had used his spare time to study, passed the bar examination, become a lawyer, and realized his wish.
His life will probably indeed be as colorful as he wished: his income will not be low, and his life will not be dull. And all of this he earned by overcoming his own inertia with his willpower and striving hard. Such a person deserves the respect of others.
Although we advocate that there should be love in the world and that the strong should help the weak, in the final analysis, what kind of life each person can live and how long they can live depend mainly on themselves. Humankind wants to use morality to rewrite the jungle rule of the law of the strongest, but nature may not agree. The reason the human species has survived in the natural world until today was not achieved through rules that sympathize with the weak, but through rules that continuously eliminate the weak. Weak willpower is an important reason many people become the weak, and also an important cause of unsatisfactory lives and short lives.
Although willpower cannot necessarily completely reshape our bodies and our fate, it is just like that classic line from the currently popular movie Ne Zha: "My destiny is decided by me, not by heaven."
The centenarian cancer-fighting star used his willpower to keep swimming day after day for twenty years and succeeded in fighting the cancer; many of the strong-willed relatives and friends around us have changed their own fates through their willpower. These are all real cases.
When we lament that our fate is unlucky, have we ever considered that we are actually people with weak willpower? When we complain that heaven is unfair, have we ever thought of doing something to train our own willpower?
I recently read a book whose Chinese title is translated as Atomic Habits: How to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones (this is a book well worth recommending; from the title you can understand what it wants to say. I suggest that people with bad living habits read it). Its author, James Clear, was someone who, when in middle school, suffered a serious injury playing baseball, nearly died, and was thought by everyone to be completely incapable of playing baseball again. After he entered Denison University, relying on his own strong willpower, he overcame the defect of his injury, trained his abilities bit by bit, and became a baseball star.
When I encourage some of my patients to give up their bad habits and develop good dietary and exercise habits, I have heard too many excuses. To be honest, behind these excuses there is only one reason: these people's willpower is simply too poor. If they don't put in some effort to strengthen their willpower, then there is no hope of reshaping their own lives in this lifetime.