Delayed Gratification: The How To and Why

Delayed gratification is resisting short term temptation in order to achieve long term success. You are sacrificing short term gain for long term gain. It is one of the most important factors of successful people. Much more important than character qualities such as high intelligence or effective communication. Master this behavior and you will be just fine.

Companies know that people don’t really practice delayed gratification. The masses are impatient and want things and they want it now. Amazon is now employing single day deliveries to exploit this even further. Amazon wants to make you dependent on their quality services.

They understand that the masses don’t want to wait for things to come to them. So what do they do? One-day shipping. Even same-day shipping that delivers customer’s orders right to their doorstep. The benefit is that you get what you ordered faster, the negative unintended consequence is that you are now hooked on Amazon’s product offerings.

So if competitors don’t offer the same benefits that you enjoy from Amazon, you’ll buy from Amazon instead.

When I was younger, I wanted things and I wanted them now. However, what I failed to realize was that it is a bad character trait to have. Going too quickly leads to burnout and going 100 miles per hour leads to a car accident. The one who can wait for things is the one who will win in the long run.

Patience is a virtue. Without it, you are prone to other people using your impatience against you for their own personal gain. You don’t have any power if this happens to you. The other person does.

What Exactly is Delayed Gratification?

Delayed gratification is resisting arm’s length gratification and delaying it to the future for an even higher reward and gratification. It’s when a person declines an immediate reward in the present in exchange for a greater reward in the future.

It’s a classic situation when a person fights with him or herself in order to get ahead. In other words, it’s the most expensive enemy you will face because evolutionary advantage was given to the person who had it now. The one who found food source the quickest could feed their family. Speed was very important in our caveman times.

Much like wisdom teeth, speed isn’t necessary to survive now. If we want food, we can just nonchalantly walk down to a restaurant, buy food, and go home. It’s not just food, either. When we want anything else, very rarely will we need to get it quickly in order to survive.

We can slowly take our time because there’s plenty left for everyone else too.

Even though times have dramatically changed, we still can’t shake off our evolutionary behaviors that allowed us to pass down our DNA. Therefore, people still exhibit these behaviors and can’t understand how the behavior harms them in the long run. When people don’t practice patience and self control, it encourages them to be dependent.

Dependency is the ultimate way to lose in the long run.

One way that you can practice delayed gratification is by SMASHING that social share button and post to your favorite social media for the Google algorithm! As soon as all of your friends know how beneficial it is to wait, then we can all create successful people and share the success.

So with that said, let’s get into the actual and tangible benefits of practicing self control!

The Stanford Marshmallow Test and Benefits of Delayed Gratification

A Stanford research study conducted in the 1960’s designed a simple test for children that highlighted how impactful patience really is. The children were sitting in a room with one marshmallow in front of them completely within arm’s length.

The researcher gave them a choice. They could either eat the marshmallow now or wait 15 minutes to get another whole marshmallow.

The children who practiced delayed gratification and actually had the willpower to wait scored higher on standardized tests and had better health. It wasn’t intelligence, effort, nor genetics that played in their way to success.

It was patience. That means that you don’t need a natural gift to succeed and plow away towards your goals.

You need self-control and the ability to control your emotions, actions, and thought.

One caveat is that the results of our efforts don’t show up that quickly. As adults, waiting 15 minutes to get a 100% return is an easy concept to soak in. I mean, if you knew the $100,000 you put in the stock market will turn into $200,000 in 15 minutes, why wouldn’t you wait? Almost no one will choose to cash out at that instant.

However, the idea is still transferable. Maybe it’s not 15 minutes that you’ll have to wait but maybe it’s 7 years. Are you willing to wait that long to double your money? Most people aren’t, which is why they can’t get ahead.

Below are some of the benefits of actually waiting to get your reward.

1) You Become Richer

The ones who achieved financial independence understand that it is near impossible to make a lot of money in a short amount of time. They approach their finances with a long term view. Most people who’ve achieved financial freedom are in their 30’s, 40’s, or 50’s. They’ve left their money in the stock market for years, if not decades.

They diligently squirreled away their paycheck and actually saved their money in hopes for a better life down the road. Even during wild volatile swings such as the financial crisis and the coronavirus pandemic. They just stay the course and let their money do the heavy lifting for them.

If they apply the minimalist lifestyle, there isn’t a whole bit of stuff they need to continue to buy anyway. They already refrain from acquiring more stuff to fit their lifestyle. So what do they do?

They practice delayed gratification even further and buy assets that are going to make them even more money in the future.

2) You are Healthier

Can you resist food that is right in front of you? Can you resist the drive thru of a fast food place in order to get home and enjoy a home cooked meal? If the answer is yes, delayed gratification is positively benefiting you. The ones who cave in to their temptations and pick up some McDonald’s on their way home are the ones who are losing.

It’s completely fine to cave in to your temptations once in a while. However, the ones who are unable to resist the temptation once are unable to for other times as well. If you do wait 30 more minutes in order to eat healthier food, you can control your weight and health easier.

Not only can it help you lose weight, it can help you live a higher quality life as well. Life is long, might as well make it high quality.

3) More Life Satisfaction

The ones who are impatient will be in for a rude awakening. Nothing that’s worth doing in life is handed to you on a silver platter just like that at the snap of your fingers. That’s just not life. As a result, when the impatient people find out that isn’t the case, they become dissatisfied with life.

Think start to wonder if there’s something wrong with them and look for things to blame. Most likely, they’ll start to blame others and expect others to do things for them. The others are too busy taking care of their own life, it’s unlikely they will take care of others. Depend on nobody else but yourself.

The ones who use delayed gratification to their advantage have a better time realizing the harsh reality that you can’t easily and quickly achieve your goals. They will be less disappointed in the long run and as a result, enjoy life much more.

Even a simple thing as a paycheck takes two weeks before you receive the money.

4) You Don’t Give Up Easily

The impatient will give up at the first sign of trouble. When they find out that they didn’t become millionaires in a month of investing in the stock market, they give up. They look for a faster way to get there and look into speculative bets such as penny stocks or finding the next GameStop.

Or they find out that financial independence means they have to give up eating out so they give up just like that. Delayed gratification may mean you cut eating out from 7 times a week to 3. Afterwards, you can either keep it at 3 or cut it out even further to one or none. Then you can enjoy the benefits that come along with self-control.

I haven’t eaten out for dinner that often in the past four years. When there’s a big milestone celebration, I would make my way down to the local Brazilian steakhouse and enjoy some delicious Picanhas or steak. However, that’s the exception, not the rule. Do I enjoy going out to dinner and eating a nice meal? Of course I do.

But I don’t mind cutting that down if it means I can achieve the long term goal of financial independence even faster.

How to Apply Delayed Gratification

Below are ways that you can use to practice delayed gratification.

1) Accurately Estimate the Time to Complete Something

It could be a long term goal such as reaching financial independence or a short term goal of saving up for a week to attend a concert. Whatever it may be, if you accurately forecast the time needed to get there, then you don’t feel the pressure anymore. You don’t have to feel nervous that you could achieve your goals at any second.

You can just take your time, stay the course, and keep going. My financial independence journey I estimate will take around 8 years to complete. I am at year 5, so I am almost at the finish line. I do get antsy at times at how close I am to reaching my goals. However, I remind myself often that I just need to practice delayed gratification and keep my emotions intact.

It’s difficult when I’m just three years away from reaching a goal but I also don’t want my goal to fall apart at the last second because I was impatient. If you accurately forecast the time it takes for you to achieve something, it becomes easier to skip eating out on dinner and invest the savings.

2) Associate Yourself With the Right People

Peer pressure and social influence matters much more than we realize. Actually, we probably don’t notice how much it influences us because we just let it happen. We don’t think it’s a bad thing because it’s the friends that we chose. As a result, even if your friends are a bad influence, you still don’t mind following the crowd and do what they’re doing.

If you associate yourself with the people who like delayed gratification, you’re more likely to delay rewards as well. The opposite is true. If your friends eat out every day and invite you over every day, there’s little chance that you will say no. Some days you might but most days, you will say yes.

When your friends’ goals and interests are misaligned with your goals and interests, then it becomes a problem. That’s why your social circle matters in your success more than you know. Why do you think the saying is the rich get richer and the poor get poorer? Some of that is by design and how the game is created.

Some of that is because the rich like hanging out with other rich people and vice versa. It’s human nature to segregate ourselves into cliques that are similar to us.

3) Craft Your Decision Making Process

You’ll have a hard time with this if it’s the first time you’re using delayed gratification. For every big decision that matters in your life, ask yourself if it’s to fulfill a short term need or a long term solution. When my kitchen sink was giving me trouble, I bought a $5 wrench from Amazon.

Not only did it solve my short term problem of the sink not working, it was a long term solution for future problems. I didn’t even think twice about making that purchase because I knew it was a long term fix. When you constantly evaluate whether the decisions you are making is for a long term fix or a short term solution, you can delay gratification.

One way to test whether you are making the right approach to your decision making process is when you go to the grocery store hungry. If you can resist buying food even when you are hungry because you know it’s a short term solution, then you’re on the right track.

The long term is what matters, not the short term.

4) Start Small

You can’t make dramatic changes and expect to change your lifestyle completely at the switch of a button. it doesn’t happen like that. In order to actually stick with it over the long term, you have to start with baby steps.

Instead of eating out every day, you eat out six times in a week then slowly decrease the numbers from there. You can’t quit all of it cold turkey just like that. You can quit cold turkey and follow it for a week or two then you’ll get withdrawal symptoms.

It doesn’t just apply to eating out, either. Another area that you want to work on is working out. If you want to achieve a certain weight, it doesn’t happen overnight. You have to constantly watch your diet and work out in order to get to a weight you want to get to.

Instead of trying to work out 7 times a week like the new year’s resolution folks do, work out twice a week. Then if you become more comfortable, add one more to three times a week. You don’t want to work out more than five times a week because your performance starts to decline afterwards.

However, you get the point. Start practicing delayed gratification in a small way then build up on it as time passes.

Delayed Gratification Means You Have Power

If you can’t control your urges and temptations, then you are prone to influence and manipulation. The clever psychological tricks that companies use to drive more sales will work. It’s one thing if you bought something because you needed to buy it.

It’s another if you bought something because the company advertising made you feel like you needed it.

Restaurant companies know that people are more prone to indulging in late night snacking. When you turn on the TV at 9pm, most are food commercials that show flavory, mouth-watering foods right in front of your face. The point isn’t to get you to go to that restaurant at that moment.

The point is for you to salivate and remember that brand the next time you are hungry.

The marinated and slow cooked shrimp they show on the screen looks so appetizing. However, for the seasoned veteran who uses delayed gratification often, it has no effect on them. They brush it off as just another clever advertising trick and go to bed shortly afterwards.

However, most give in to their urges and visit that restaurant the next time they are hungry. Maybe even for a family outing. If you are one of them, your power is gone. You are completely at the mercy of the restaurants’ influence. If you want to re-claim power, then you need to practice self control and delay the rewards.

Go to a restaurant because you want to, not because someone else wanted you to. Subliminal messaging causes you to do the latter. It’s an expensive enemy that most people don’t win against. I lost against myself many times and I will continue to do so.

As long as you win against yourself more times than you lose, then you are using delayed gratification correctly.

Self Control Your Way to Success

It’s fascinating how success isn’t pre-determined through genetics, parental influence, or the birth lottery. It’s behavioral characteristic such as self control, patience, and delayed gratification that makes all the difference in the world. I was shocked when I first found out about the results of the Stanford marshmallow study.

These days, I control my urges the best that I can. If I’m hungry in the middle of the night, I eat a light snack so that I don’t feel bloated when I go to sleep. I practice delayed gratification for the night and eat in the morning. If you don’t control your decisions, actions, urges, and temptations, then who’s really pulling the strings?

Do you really trust another person to make your decisions for you? If you don’t live a life on your terms, you will live on someone else’s terms. You can prevent that by resisting temptation and your urges. Much like a fox who waits until its prey jumps out to pounce on, you should play the waiting game until you are in a position to pounce.

You don’t need a lot of things to survive, anyways. If you have a roof over your head, food on the table, a computer, and internet access, then there’s not really more you need to live. There’s no need to buy the newest model of a car, you can wait until it becomes available in the used market. There isn’t a lot of things that you need to survive.

All of the consumerist marketing that is prevalent today convinces you that you need to buy whatever they’re selling. That couldn’t be more false. They need your money more than you need their product. Resist the temptation and move on to bigger and better things.

How to Practice Delayed Gratification List:

• Accurately estimate time to complete
• Associate yourself with the right people
• Craft your decision making process
• Start small