As a good yuppie should, I read The New Yorker, and this week’s edition features an article that, aside from being fascinating, provided me some inspiration and a long-term goal.
The article is about delayed gratification. More specifically, it’s about a 40-year-long study on delayed gratification that is offering researchers insight into how patience and a focus on future rewards impact a person’s success.
The study started with a seemingly simple test: Sit a 4-year-old in a room in front of a plate plated with a single marshmallow. Tell the 4-year-old she has two options: she can eat the marshmallow now, or she can wait a few minutes and be rewarded with two marshmallows. If she finds she can’t wait, she can ring a bell, signifying that she has given up, and she gets to eat the one marshmallow.
By ctoverdrive, via Flickr
Lots of kids could not wait for that marshmallow.
About 12 years after the marshmallow test was first performed, Walter Mischel, the psychologist who designed it, revisited the kids who underwent the first wave of testing, assessing, among other things, their test scores, sociability and capacity to plan.
He found that the ones who ate the marshmallow weren’t doing as well as the ones who resisted.
They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.
These trends continued into adulthood. In their 30s, the people who could wait for the second marshmallow had a lower body-mass index and were less likely to use drugs. On average, they retained their ability to control themselves, and they were skinnier and less heroin-dependent because of it.
What this means for personal finance is not that anyone who, as a child, couldn’t wait to eat their candy is doomed to eternal bankruptcy. I think it’s more nuanced than that.
For me, the takeaway comes later, in the section about how some kids tricked themselves into waiting for their reward:
But Mischel has found a shortcut. When he and his colleagues taught children a simple set of mental tricks - such as pretending that the candy is only a pucture, surrounded by an imaginary frame - he dramatically improved their self-control. The kids who hadn’t been able to wait sixty seconds could now wait fifteen minutes. “All I’ve done is given them some tips from their mental user manual,” Mischel says. “Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it.”
The takeaway is this: For me a huge part of learning to control my spending habits, learning to focus on needs over wants, learning to save for the future instead of buying something now, will be figuring out how to delay my gratification.
So I’ve figured that out. But how to day-to-day delay? It’s not enough to simply deceive myself. I’m not 4 anymore. I can’t pretend those shiny, pretty shoes are a big ugly dirt clods or that trip to New York will not be ridiculously fun.
What I can do is pinpoint the bad habits I’ve developed and slowly sift them out. As The New Yorker says:
[Mischel] knows that it’s not enough just to teach kids mental tricks - the real challenge is turning those tricks into habits, and that requires years of diligent practice.
So then, here I go. I’ll consciously decide to delay my ability to delay my gratification. I can’t do it all now. I’ll get there a tiny bit at a time. A tiny bit at a time is OK. Wait for that marshmallow. OK, here I go.
