Earlier when I talked about how committing 100% is easier than committing 99%, what I was really talking about is the conservation of willpower.

Whenever possible, we want to avoid using willpower, because it will drain us. Most importantly, constantly relying on willpower and effort to study Japanese will set you up for failure.

I'll let the experts explain. Here is a quote from an article by James Clear…

The Willpower Muscle

Decades of research have discovered that willpower is not something you have or don't have, but rather it is a resource that can be used up and restored. Like tired muscles at the end of a workout, your willpower can become depleted if you use it too much. Much of this research is explained in excellent books like The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal and Willpower by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney.

A classic example can be found by looking at college students. During finals week, students use all of their willpower to study and everything else collapses as a result. People eat whatever they can find, students who haven't smoked all semester start lighting up outside the library, and many people can't even muster the strength to change out of their sweatpants. There is only so much willpower to go around.

We don't typically think about willpower and motivation as a finite resource that is impacted by all of the things we do throughout the day, but that's exactly how it works.

- James Clear, “ How to Stick With Good Habits Even When Your Willpower is Gone"

I don't really have explicit advice on how to avoid using willpower. Rather, the conservation of willpower is one of the underlying principles of a number of topics that I bring up in this guide (notably, study habits, which we just looked at and removing barriers, which I talk about in Phase #3).