I think the problem becomes that most people use "willpower", especially when talking about bad habits, in a sense of "just stop doing The Thing". Without deep examination about WHY you do The Thing, that is a very hard thing to do because all the triggers and incentives for you to do The Thing continue to be present and push you back towards doing The Thing. Saying someone lacks Willpower is often a fancy substitution for judging them for a moral failing.
This is largely why the "war on drugs" has failed to make any meaningful headway into stopping drug problems (and how despite more money than ever being poured into the war on drugs, the "opioid epidemic" still happened). This is why the "calories in < calories out" approach to weight loss while a simple and effective measure fails most people, because it doesn't address the root causes of the behavior. Likewise diets don't work because they implicitly are "temporary changes" rather than a permanent change to your entire approach to food. It's also why something like a safe and effective appetite suppressing drug will be so important to weight loss, because when you're not constantly hungry, it's a lot easier to have the "will power" to not eat that whole bag of chips after dinner.
Incentives matter a lot, and immediate incentives matter much more than long term incentives. Finding things that change the immediate incentives and changing those will go a lot further than just "willing" your way into change.
Will power is not some magic force that we are born with. To me "will power" comes from precisely the process you are describing, the self interrogation into the source of these negative behaviors, examination of how they hold you back, and anticipation of what you might be able to achieve if you master them.
What I've observed in people is the disconnect on the last part of that pathway. They understand their deficiencies but they either believe the costs are too great versus what they might be able to achieve otherwise, or they are not able to truly appreciate the scale of change that is possible in their life by starting on the smallest part of their problem. There's also people who were just raised poorly and reliably self defeat at this point as well.
Anyways.. to me, it's like anything else, it's much easier to do if you practice it, and most people just aren't truly given the opportunities to practice it successfully in their formative years.
>To me "will power" comes from precisely the process you are describing, the self interrogation into the source of these negative behaviors, examination of how they hold you back, and anticipation of what you might be able to achieve if you master them.
That may be how you describe it, but just hop into any discussion on Wegovy here on HN (or anywhere else) and observe the number of people who "don't get why it's so hard to just eat less". Or again, look at the entire war on drugs.
Willpower defined as a deep interrogation of your incentives and psychological state and making fundamental changes not (just or even mostly) to your behavior but to the environment around you and the incentives you are responding to, possibly and including accepting that your are unable to change your current environment and incentives and are therefore also unlikely to make the change in behavior you are attempting, is definitely not the norm.
Or to put it in a way that might make more sense to the HN crowd here, not deleting the prod database is as easy as making sure your not on prod when you do destructive things. But putting your prod stuff behind a VPN, having different logins, sanity checks and non-destructive capable default access to prod are all things that will make the chances of you never deleting prod a lot higher than just "be more careful". Yes, putting those systems and blocks in place is being careful in a sense, but it's not the same sense people mean when they say "just be careful and you won't delete prod".
This is largely why the "war on drugs" has failed to make any meaningful headway into stopping drug problems (and how despite more money than ever being poured into the war on drugs, the "opioid epidemic" still happened). This is why the "calories in < calories out" approach to weight loss while a simple and effective measure fails most people, because it doesn't address the root causes of the behavior. Likewise diets don't work because they implicitly are "temporary changes" rather than a permanent change to your entire approach to food. It's also why something like a safe and effective appetite suppressing drug will be so important to weight loss, because when you're not constantly hungry, it's a lot easier to have the "will power" to not eat that whole bag of chips after dinner.
Incentives matter a lot, and immediate incentives matter much more than long term incentives. Finding things that change the immediate incentives and changing those will go a lot further than just "willing" your way into change.