The Marshmallow Experiment

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Today’s Issue

In 1972, a famous Stanford experiment revealed one of the most critical traits of successful people (in any domain).

It’s called The Marshmallow Experiment.

Today, we’re going to learn the key lesson and how to apply it.

Let’s dive in.

The Marshmallow Experiment

In 1972, Stanford professor Walter Mischel and his team published a study.

It’s became famously known as The Marshmallow Experiment.

Here’s the gist:

• A team of psychologists conducted research on a group of children, ages 3.5 to 5.5

• They’d bring a child into a room and offer them a treat (a marshmallow or something else)

• The researcher would then leave for about 15 minutes and make the child a deal

• If the child didn’t eat the treat while the researcher was gone, they’d get a second treat when the researcher returned

• If the child did eat the treat while the researcher was gone, they wouldn’t get a second

• Then the researcher left the room

Some children ate the treat and some didn’t.

Here’s where it gets interesting.

The researchers then tracked these children over the next four decades, doing follow-up studies.

Their key finding: The children who were able to wait and NOT eat the marshmallow performed significantly better in many different areas as adults than the children who did not wait.

The children who waited ended up having (in general):

• higher SAT scores

• lower likelihood of obesity

• lower levels of substance abuse

• better social skills (reported by their parents)

Almost across the board, they became higher-functioning individuals.

The Key Lesson

This experiment is about the ability to delay gratification.

The series of experiments conducted over four decades showed that, on average, the ability to delay gratification is a critical driver of success in life.

This dynamic plays out across our lives.

We’re constantly faced with choices and each comes with a tradeoff.

• Train or play video games?

• Eat fast food or a healthy meal?

• Prepare for a presentation or wing it?

• Be faithful in my relationship or cheat?

• Be a present parent or prioritize other things?

There are endless examples of this.

Delaying some form of gratification is almost always the better thing to do.

So, if we want to be successful (in anything), we must develop the skill of delayed gratification.

How to Develop Delayed Gratification

The skill of delayed gratification is simple, though not easy.

Do you have the discipline to delay doing the easy thing in favor of doing the current harder thing?

Fortunately, we can train this.

Without getting too academic, we need to prove to our brains that if we delay gratification now, we’ll see some benefit for it later (University of Rochester researchers did a follow-up study to The Marshmallow Experiment on this).

Simple tactics to train this:

• Pick one small thing to “delay” every day. Example: I’m not going to do X until I do Y. Complete Y and then reward yourself with X.

• Start a consistency tracker. See how long you can prevent yourself from doing something by marking a calendar each day that you delay the decision (Jerry Seinfeld famously does this to reinforce his writing habit).

• Say no to something today, but then say yes in a week. Example: I’m not going to make that Amazon purchase today, but I will in a week (then do it).

These are just a few simple ideas.

The key is to train our brains to believe that if we delay gratification now, we WILL benefit from it later.

Summary

Ultimately, The Marshmallow Experiment is not about treats or trivial impulsive behavior.

It’s about building a critical life skill that every high-performer — regardless of domain — utilizes.

The ability to delay gratification drives our:

• habits

• mindset

• work ethic

• consistency

• ability to focus

And much more.

Discipline is a muscle.

We all need the discipline of delaying gratification.

Patient effort pays off over time.

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