Delayed Gratification

A little while back I had the opportunity to speak to a group of MBA students at Szabist University here in Islamabad. I wanted to gear the conversation towards what I thought a graduating class would most benefit from. So I decided to share one of the first realities of life I had to learn when I graduated college.

And that was the concept of, you guessed it, delayed gratification. It's pretty simple. You can choose to have something now, or you can choose to have something bigger and better later. Stanford University did an experiment back in the 1960s with 4-5 year old kids. They gave each of them a marshmallow and told them they could either have it now, or if they waited for 15 minutes, they could have two. Sounds like a pretty sweet bargain to me! Stanford continued to study the same group of children for the next 40 years, and ended up finding that the kids who had practiced delayed gratification had better grades in school, lower levels of substance abuse, better stress management, and were more self-motivated overall. Turns out, success usually comes down to choosing the harder option, and disciplining yourself day in and day out

Success is not an accident. It comes to those who take massive actions. Actions that are deliberate, conscious and most importantly, continuous. It’s not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives, but what we do on a consistent basis. We choose our behaviors and our habits based on what will happen as a result, and successful people choose their behaviors and habits very intentionally. Effective people know that the benefit they’ll receive from eliminating bad habits far outweighs the difficulties of forming good ones. They do what needs to be done, whether they like doing it or not.

It is said that teaching is learning twice, and I had such a great time sharing my experiences with students who I'm confident will continue to find success in their lives.