I think it’s also interesting to find out what motivates the willpower. What's the intention behind a specific act of willpower? For example, here are two specific instances of willpower in my own life that are so different from each other. Nevertheless, they are willpower. 

When I was kid , from 7 to 11, I was fat. The kind of fat that when my parents took me to Sears to get clothes for the new school year, I would cry because I had to choose from Husky Plus. In the 60s and 70s, boys clothes at Sears came in “slim," “regular," “husky”, and “husky plus." Needless to say, the coolest clothes were in slim and regular sizes. At 11 years old, I was fed up with having to get “fat “ clothes, so I put myself on a diet. The doctor didn’t do it. I did. Under my own supervision. All I ate was  yogurt ... for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I lost 30 pounds, and I finally got to buy “ slims”. It probably wasn't the healthiest way to lose weight, but I was a vain little kid. I was tired of not being cool because I was fat. I had incredible willpower as an 11 year old. I’ll show them! But the motivation and intention was all wrong because It was driven by vanity.

As a teenager, I was a champion swimmer. Therefore, I spent my summers lifeguarding and teaching swimming.  Endless days drinking coke after coke after coke. In the South, a coke is generic for everything from 7Up to Mountain Dew to Coca Cola and Dr Pepper.  Up to 20 cans of sugary acidic soft drink every day.  At the end of my 16th summer, I can remember coughing up blood. I was forced to stop drinking soft drinks. I haven’t had a soft drink since then. 40+ years ago. Kinda the way an alcoholic has to give up alcohol. Go back and do it , and you die. That took willpower, but it was motivated by health. I didn’t want to lose part of my stomach. As time went by, I totally lost any urge to have a sip of a coke. I trained myself to think that it wasn’t necessary, and I didn’t miss it . To this day, if it were 100F outside and all there is to drink is Coke, I could care less about it. Don’t miss it at all. I don’t even remember what it tastes like. A different kind of willpower.

Tell us about your profession with post production for film and commercials.

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I work for a hip, small boutique post facility in Williamsburg Brooklyn called Dungeon Beach. We do sound design, mixing, recording VO ( Voice Over)  & ADR ( Automated Dialogue Replacement) , score composition, color grading, visual effects, and final finishing for indie feature films, docs, network episodic series, commercials, webspots, and even podcasts. Everything that is “post”...under one roof. Once a film project is finished being edited, or “ locked” as we say, it goes out for post... where all the magic happens. My job as the post producer is to negotiate the incoming jobs with the  project directors and producers or the agency producers. That is, I determine whether we want to do them and then  bid on them. Once the bid is accepted,  I then assign the appropriate creatives to the project, schedule the project, and then oversee it until it’s finished. I often sit in on final creative sessions , offering both creative insight , and mediating between our creative team and the client. Quite a bit of hand-holding goes on. I’m there to make sure that the client is happy, protect our creatives and our interests, and to resolve any problems that may come up in the sessions. It’s during the final mix and color sessions that tensions can flare, money can run out, and a calming factor might be needed. That’s my role. My partners affectionately call me “ The Fixer” .

In this last year, I’ve had the fortunate pleasure of working with Zoe Kravitz on her new series High Fidelity as well as Big Little Lies, John Cameron Mitchell’s musical podcast Anthem Homunculous, commercials ranging from Delta Airlines to Adidas to Applegate Farms, and several  feature films premiering at Sundance, Tribeca, and SXSW. My job is never dull. And best of all, I LOVE what I do, where I work, and who I work with. I don’t know a lot of people who can say that.