If you expect to do anything important in life – stay healthy, develop expertise, build a business, become financially independent – there is one quality that you absolutely need: the ability to delay gratification Knowledge, skill and experience are essential, of course. A little bit of luck now and then is useful too. But without a healthy dose of patience, the willingness to forgo some comforts and conveniences in the present, in service of a better future, no one ever makes it too far. Good things can be taken too far, though and if you’re not careful this capacity to delay gratification can turn into procrastination and become an impediment to experiencing life.
Delayed gratification is not a new idea. It’s been around for a long time and holds a prominent place in many of the world’s major religions and philosophies. Even a skim through the texts and scriptures of these traditions will reveal that our predecessors clearly understood its utility. This idea gained popularity outside religious and philosophical realms in the 1970s after Walter Mischel, a professor at Columbia University, published the results of a series of experiments conducted at the Bing School at Stanford University[1]. In pop culture, this experiment came to be known as the Marshmallow Experiment. In brief, the researchers wanted to understand how children, 4-6-year-olds, reacted when presented with an option to take one marshmallow immediately or wait fifteen minutes to get two. The researchers recorded the results and followed up with the students after they reached adolescence and deduced that those who waited for two marshmallows, the ones who had delayed gratification, had better results in life: they behaved better, handled stress better, and even did better on exams.
Recent research[2], however, has exposed some imperfections with the methodologies and conclusions of the original experiment. Two weaknesses, amongst others: one, that conclusions were drawn from responses of only a subset of the participants, and two, all participants were from similar backgrounds (Bing School at Stanford). Researchers reran the experiment after adjusting for these shortcomings – use a larger pool of participants from diverse backgrounds and include responses from all participants for final analysis – and made a surprising discovery: the capacity to delay gratification was influenced less by will power and more by the child’s environment. Children from an environment of abundance, used to receiving what they had been promised, were more willing to delay gratification than those from an environment of scarcity, not guaranteed to receive what they had been promised.
This result does sound strange. But consider a case where what you do now or later are similar, more or less. Would it be unreasonable in such a scenario to cash in on the experience now? Warren Buffet thinks there is some merit to not always waiting[3].
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hey, Warren and Charlie. I’m Neil Nerrono. I’m 13 years old and from San Francisco. I feel like I see you in our living room a lot. My dad is constantly playing these videos of you at these meetings. And he teaches me a lot of lessons about you guys. But many of them require the delayed gratification skill. I want to know, is there any way that kids can develop the delayed gratification skill? …
WARREN BUFFETT: … [I]f you think of a 30-year government bond paying 3 percent, and you allow for, as an individual, paying some taxes on the 3 percent you’ll receive, and you’ll have the Federal Reserve Board saying that their objective is to have 2 percent inflation, you’ll really see that delayed gratification, if you own a long government bond, is that, you know, you get to go to Disneyland and ride the same number of rides 30 years from now that you would if you did it now.The low-interest rates, for people who invest in fixed-dollar investments, really mean that you really aren’t going to eat steak later on if you eat hamburgers now, which is what I used to preach to my wife and children and anybody else that would listen, many years ago.
So, it’s — I don’t necessarily think that, for all families, in all circumstances, that saving money is necessarily the best thing to do in life. I mean, you know, if you really tell your kids they can —whatever it may be — they never go to the movies, or we’ll never go to Disneyland or something of the sort, because if I save this money, 30 years from now, you know, well, we’ll be able to stay a week instead of two days.I think there’s a lot to be said for doing things that bring you and your family enjoyment, rather than trying to save every dime.
So, I — delayed gratification is not necessarily an unqualified course of action under all circumstances.
I always believed in spending two or three cents out of every dollar I earn and saving the rest. But I’ve always had everything I wanted.
I mean, one thing you should understand, if you aren’t happy having $50,000 or a hundred thousand dollars, you’re not going to be happy if you have 50 million or a hundred million. I mean, a certain amount of money does make you feel — and those around you — feel better, just in terms of being more secure, in some cases. But loads and loads of money — I probably know as many rich people as just about anybody. And I do not — I don’t think they’re happier because they get super-rich. I think they are happier when they don’t have to worry about money. But you don’t see a correlation between happiness and money, beyond a certain place. So, don’t go overboard on delayed gratification.
Excerpt from Berkshire Hathaway’s 2019 annual shareholder’s meeting.
The promise of delayed gratification is that by sacrificing a little now, you can have more later. But if the quality (or cost) of a particular experience remains the same, or similar, now or in the future, it makes sense to cash in sooner than later. And even if the future version could be better, keep in mind that you won’t have time to do everything later.
While it’s not always the best course of action, it is understandable if someone with limited means keeps pushing things out. What’s unfortunate is that even people with the means sometimes fall into this trap albeit for slightly different reasons. Here I’m referring to those who wait endlessly for the better versions in the future, without realizing they could wait forever. Say you have a goal to save $X for a family vacation. As you get close to this goal, you realize that if you wait a little longer, you can save more for a better vacation, and if you wait even longer it could be significantly better. After a while, you’ve stockpiled a load of cash but never had that vacation. If the idea of saving up and missing a vacation sounds ludicrous, imagine saving up for that cross-country trip with your best friend, to start your own business, or to retire and never doing it – delaying gratification becomes a creative form of procrastination.
And it’s not always about money either. Life becomes all about goals and we get robbed of our everyday experiences. We pursue activities in the interest of status, fame, or power only to discover much later that they weren’t worth it. The expected gratification never materialized and all that time is gone.
Delayed gratification is an extremely useful skill to cultivate but it should not be treated as an “unqualified course of action” under all circumstances. Used purposefully it can help you achieve important things in life: learn a new skill, lose weight, or build a nest egg. But, if you’re not careful it becomes a creative form of procrastination. Remember, a bird in hand is worth two in the bush. Sometimes, when you have a marshmallow in hand, you should just eat it.
Want to dig deeper?
The key to developing self-restraint is preparation, not will power.
[1] Shoda, Y. & Mischel, W. & Peake, P.K.. (1990). Predicting adolescent cognitive and social competence from preschool delay of gratification: Identifying diagnostic conditions. Development Psychology. 26. 392-406. The original Marshmallow Experiment.
[2] Watts, Tyler & Duncan, Greg & Quan, Haonan. (2018). Revisiting the Marshmallow Test: A Conceptual Replication Investigating Links Between Early Gratification Delay and Later Outcomes. Psychological Science. 29. 10.1177/0956797618761661. More recent paper that refutes part of the findings of the Marshmallow Experiment (click link for pdf)
[3] Complete transcript from Berkshire Hathaway’s 2019 annual shareholders meeting. The exchange quoted in this post is question #22 on page 29
N-gram viewer for the phrase ‘delayed gratification’. Note the precipitous dip in usage/citations of this phrase after 2010; unsure what this means, but interesting nevertheless. (Note to self: find out what this means)
Link to image on Flickr. Image credit ‘poppet with a camera’
The Skatter Brain 