I got spammed by a company that wants me to go to its site and take some sort of psych test to assess my willpower. The comment said their studies show that “when it comes to being disciplined and making healthy lifestyle changes, men tend to have a stronger resolve than women” and that “women may have a little more difficulty staying away from temptation and sticking to healthy habits this year.” Apparently, 46 percent of women rated their willpower as good compared to 61 percent of men.
Since the company has obviously made up its minds about my determination to stick to my resolve based on my gender, there doesn’t seem much point in following through. But besides that, the study seems dubious.
Their sweeping statements about men and women’s relative resolve was based on approximately 200 self-assessments, which isn’t exactly a “study” but more of a poll. Many things could skew the results. Perhaps men who didn’t have a strong resolve when it came to health resolutions didn’t want to go on record as having a weak resolve and so didn’t respond. Perhaps women are harder on themselves than men are, and see any infraction as a lack of resolution where men let it slough off. Perhaps men overrate themselves. Perhaps women have a better knowledge of themselves. Or perhaps men and women interpret their resolve differently. For example, if someone vows to eat healthier and passes on a second piece of cake when normally they would eat three pieces, that could be interpreted as sticking with their resolve and having willpower.
The poll revealed that “if pressured by a friend to “pig out” (after eating healthily for an entire week), 7% of women would totally give in, 46% would only share some of their friend’s junk food, and 47% would stay disciplined and eat healthy. For men, 8% would give in, 41% would share, and 51% would stay disciplined.” Not exactly a resounding indictment of women or a pat on the back for men. Assuming that the participants in the poll were equally divided between men and women, only four more men than women claimed they would stay disciplined. Which means that almost half of both sexes say they won’t. (The poll didn’t reveal if in fact more men would stay disciplined, only that they said they would.)
New Year’s resolutions are always difficult. By making a big yearly resolution, you’re setting yourself up to fail because it’s very difficult to make a major change all at once and stick with it. For one thing, habit is too strong. For another thing, you have to retrain your family and friends so they don’t pressure you back into your pre-resolve lifestyle. For still another thing, once you’ve broken the resolution, there seems less impetus to re-resolve.
Willpower in action seems more like “won’t power,” — “I won’t eat potato chips. I won’t go off my diet. I won’t sleep in instead of exercising.” For myself, I stay away from “won’t power.” The more I say I won’t do something, the more I want to do it. As for willpower, I think it’s highly overrated. I try to do the right thing for my health most of the time, and if I get side-tracked, I don’t beat myself up for it.
One thing for sure — I won’t go to the spammers site and rate my willpower. And I won’t even need any willpower to stick with that resolution!
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Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Connect with Pat on Google+
When I first got the internet in 2007, I embraced it as if it were a wonderful new friend. At the time, my mother was dying and my life mate/soul mate was sick. There was nothing I could do about either of those circumstances, and the internet gave me a place to escape from my real life.
I give my blog spam folder a quick look now and again to make sure that non-spam comments don’t get relegated to spam limbo. Sometimes the spam comments are totally absurd, such as this one: Nice tips. It is actually incomprehensible opinion now, but also from general, that usefulness in addition to significance is usually overwhelming. Thanks once again and all the best.
I’m starting to play rough with Facebook, unfriending people with the same abandon I once friended them — sort of reverse social networking. (Would this be called Unsocial Networking or Social UnNetworking?) Start with 5000 people at random, and then one by one, remove the annoying ones. You know the people I mean:
Bertram's Blog 
What Do You Do If Someone Posts an Insulting Comment on Your Blog?
November 28, 2012 — Pat BertramFor one thing, my posts tend not to be controversial — they’re more of a way of chronicling my journey through life and the writing life. It’s hard for someone to argue that I’m getting it wrong when I can’t get it wrong. I’m being me, and who can argue with that?
For another thing, my readers tend to be intelligent and kind, and they give thoughtful responses that add to the conversation instead of posting negative comments that bring the discussion to an abrupt end.
The other day, however, someone left an insulting comment on my article How Many Books Are Going to be Published in 2012? (Prepare for a Shock) that I didn’t know how to handle. That is not my favorite post by any means, in fact, it’s one of the few I wish I had never written. I’d only written the article as a way of trying to make sense of the current book climate and to show the meteoric increase in the number of books available, not to establish myself as any authority on the subject. And yet it’s become my most quoted article, and the one most frequently linked to.
It’s no wonder that an insulting remark landed on the post. Someone commented: “why would anyone bother to pay attention to a blog which starts off with uninteresting stuff about the author, and then gives data without a source? takes all types, I guess.”
I guess it does take all types. When I see an article that doesn’t lead up to the hype, I merely pass on by without stopping to leave a comment. But, for whatever reason, that person left a comment. I didn’t know whether to delete it or approve it. And if I posted it, I didn’t know whether to respond to it or ignore it. Admittedly, it’s not much of an insult, but it still put me in a quandary.
I asked my blogger friends on Facebook what they do in such a circumstance, and got a whole range of answers from “delete it” to “find where the person lives and go beat them up.” Some people thought that if it had merit or if it said more about the commenter than me, that I should post it but not respond. Some said that if it was a business blog, to delete the comment, that it wasn’t good to have snipers in your store.
The comment now seems innocuous, and the commenter has a point, why would anyone bother to pay attention to that particular blog post? (Though I did give a source, just not a link to the source.) Still, I left his remark in comment limbo until just a few minutes ago. I found the deciding factor in You and Your Blog Suck: 7 Steps to Responding to Negative Comments, a blog post by Marc Ensign. He said, “By deleting it you are telling your readers that they are welcome to say whatever they want as long as they agree with you. The only time I would consider deleting a post is if it was obscene or offensive to your readers.”
Since the comment under consideration is not obscene, not offensive to my readers, not even much of an insult, I took a deep breath and approved the comment.
So, what do you do if someone posts an insulting remark on your blog? Do you delete it or do you approve it so posts where everyone can see it? If you post it, do you answer it or ignore it?
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Pat Bertram is the author of the conspiracy novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Connect with Pat on Google+