The Big Picture

Sometimes you lose a forest through the trees. - Chinese Proverb

Suck it up! - Anonymous

About a year or so ago, a co-worker of mine forwarded me a link to Joachim de Posada’s mini-TED Talk that discussed a link between the ability to delay gratification and future success.

In short, Joachim de Posada described a couple of studies in which a group of four year old children were one by one brought into a room. The researchers gave a single marshmallow to each child and said, “I’m leaving you alone with this marshmallow for 15 minutes. You can eat it if you want. When I come back in 15 minutes, if you have not eaten the marshmallow, you can have a second marshmallow.”

(Watch the video if you can – the montage of the children trying to NOT eat the marshmallow is priceless)

In the first study, 2 out of 3 of the children ate the marshmallow, while 1 out of 3 waited and received the second marshmallow.

15 years later the researchers performed a follow-up study on the now grown-up children. 100% of the children who did not eat the marshmallow were successful young adults with good grades and attending universities. By contrast, a large percentage of the children who chose to eat the marshmallow had poor grades, some dropped out of school while others were not accepted to university.

The children who demonstrated self-control were not smarter than the other children – they just had higher emotional intelligence or a greater maturity.

I agree with Dr. Posada’s conclusion that there is a very strong correlation between the ability to delay gratification and future success.

However, Dr. Posada focused his TED Talk on the importance of self-discipline or self-control in the ability to delay gratification.

While I agree that the ability to demonstrate self-control, and therefore delay gratification, is an important aspect to future success – in my humble opinion, I believe it is the ability of an individual to “see the big picture” that provides the incentive and therefore motivates the individual to delay gratification for future reward.

(Maybe I’m just splitting hairs)

On a personal note – any personal success I have achieved, I attribute directly to being able to keep the big picture in mind. Whether it was losing weight – and keeping it off for decades or taking a big pay cut to go to graduate school and completely change careers.

Growing up in a sleepy little beach town – it was very easy to track the choices of my older sister’s classmates.

It was not uncommon for some of our town’s most successful high school students (who were accepted to big name universities) to be unable to deal with no longer being a big fish in a small pond. Instead of being the best and brightest students in the school, they found themselves rather ordinary and returned to our sleepy little beach town and chose to live at home and work at the town’s ritzy restaurants (for big tips) or local construction companies …. while make really good money.

I recall a lot of us who chose to follow through with the humbling experience of suffering for 4-5 years as very average starving students living in crappy apartments found it difficult to return to our home town and not have the disposable income of our cohorts who were living at home and making a lot of money.

It would have been very easy to drop out of school and receive immediate gratification with a high paying job working along side our former classmates. (Some of us did do just that)

For me, I chose to suck it up. I knew that in a few short years that I would be making a lot more money than my classmates who chose to not finish school.

I kept my eyes on the big picture.

I guess I fall into the category of those that chose to not eat the marshmallow.



References

De Posada, J. (2009), Joachim de Posada says, Don't eat the marshmallow yet. TED: Ideas worth spreading, Retrieved February 14, 2010, http://www.ted.com/talks/joachim_de_posada_says_don_t_eat_the_marshmallow_yet.html