Willpower and 'Hilton-itis'

"Life is what we make it."

I have no idea who first uttered those words, but I've heard the saying quoted many times. It sums up whatever lessons one may draw from two articles I've bookmarked. Excerpts:

From Willpower is best used with careBy Cordelia Fine

The children were also given a real-life test of their ability to delay gratification. Each was handed a dollar bill in an envelope. They could choose either to keep it or hand it back and get $2 a week later. Their decision was carefully recorded.

The researchers returned in spring. They took note of each child's grades and then looked back to see both how clever, and how self-controlled, that student had been in autumn. What, they wanted to know, was the most important factor in school grades?

The psychologists discovered it was self-control, by a long shot. A child's capacity for self-discipline was about twice as important as his or her IQ when it came to predicting academic success.

From Hilton-itis infecting college students, says profProfessor claims that the disease consists of symptoms related to an overwhelming sense of laziness and entitlement, along with excessive behavior in the form of long nights of partying and drinking.By Spero News

“We need to stop allowing young people to believe that drinking till you puke every weekend is simply normal campus behavior. It’s not.”

After teaching at five major universities and witnessing many campus tragedies, Dr. Watkins argues that parents can be enablers of this form of behavior. He states that parents don’t expect their children to get jobs on campus, don’t enforce academic excellence and protect their children from their own mistakes.
“If you give someone a wheelchair before they learn to walk, then they will never bother to learn to use their legs,” says Watkins, who is now a visiting Scholar with the Center for European Economic Research. “Parents sometimes feel that every little thing must be provided for, and that an energetic 19-year-old is going to use that extra free time to study. Nope, many are going to study 15 hours per week and spend the rest of their time memorizing the local bars, gambling, or having sex with everything that moves. The idle mind is the devil’s workshop.”