What does it mean that remove temptation rather than resist it?

Eliminating the tempting option is more reliable than resisting it through willpower.

Example: You decide to stop eating cookies after dinner. Night one, you tell yourself you will simply not eat the cookies in the pantry. You last forty minutes before you walk to the kitchen, open the cabinet, and eat three. Night two, you repeat the resolution with more conviction. You last an hour. Night three, you throw the cookies away before dinner. You do not eat cookies. Nothing about your desire for cookies changed across the three nights. What changed was the availability of the option. On nights one and two, you were running a willpower contest between your present self and your craving — a contest your craving won because it did not tire, while your willpower did. On night three, there was no contest. The craving fired, found no target, and dissipated. You did not become more disciplined. You became more architectural. You stopped fighting the temptation and removed the thing being tempted toward.

Try this: Identify one behavior you have repeatedly tried to resist through willpower and failed. It might be checking your phone first thing in the morning, snacking late at night, opening social media during deep work, buying things you do not need, or hitting snooze on your alarm. For the next seven days, do not try to resist the behavior. Instead, remove or relocate the object of temptation. If the problem is your phone in the morning, charge it in another room overnight. If the problem is snacking, stop buying the snack. If the problem is social media during work, use a site blocker or delete the apps from your phone during work hours. If the problem is the snooze button, place your alarm across the room so you must stand to silence it. Track two things each day: whether the unwanted behavior occurred, and how much mental effort you spent thinking about it. You are looking for the signature result — the behavior stops and the mental effort drops to near zero, because there is nothing left to resist.