A small disclaimer per usual - I am not giving advice on how someone should lead their lives. I believe everyone must be given the choice to do what they deem fit.
We are in the midst of an epidemic.
People sit for hours on their phones, mindlessly scrolling through redundant content. Nobody is present. Social media has become overtly sexual. Everyone is being robbed of their ability to focus and pay attention for long periods. Constant comparisons make us feel terrible about ourselves. Seeing someone travel makes us want to travel. How many of you reading this really want to travel?
If you could travel anywhere you wanted to, but you weren’t allowed to post ANY photos on social media, would you still want to travel?
Most of them would not answer with surety now.
Ultra-processed foods are the norm, and eating healthy is a luxury reserved for the well-off. Tracking your food makes you look like an alien to most people. Most people drink their guts off and ingest an absurd amount of drugs to stay stimulated because they’re unhappy with their lives.
I stumbled across the concept of instant and delayed gratification on YouTube in a video describing the study done at Stanford, famously dubbed “The Marshmallow Test” (source included). In principle, children aged 4-5 were given a marshmallow and told that if they waited 15 minutes without eating it, they would get 2 marshmallows. On the contrary, if the children eat it, they don’t get anything.
The researcher would then leave the room for 15 minutes and observe the behaviours exhibited by the children.
Some of them immediately gobbled up the marshmallow, whereas some wandered around and eventually picked up the marshmallow. Some children weathered the storm and waited for the researcher to come back, upon which they were given a second marshmallow or a pretzel stick (Freedom of choice, Hell Yeah!). The lives of the children were tracked for many years into the future to investigate if any patterns were exhibited.
Lo and behold, it was noted that the children who waited for the second marshmallow had a higher income, lower BMI, and a better life overall.
This groundbreaking study has since been quoted in a bazillion articles across the internet.
Just to be clear, there are some problems with the way the Marshmallow test was conducted and the way it is interpreted, so it is helpful to keep these points in mind.
A follow-up study by Watts et al. (source included) still showed a correlation, albeit lower (0.28 compared to around 0.51 in the original study), between delaying gratification and success down the road. However, this correlation disappears when control variables such as parental education and socio-economic status are introduced, implying a higher correlation in predicting the child’s success.
However, the core finding of the study is still relevant - delaying gratification enables better success down the road.
Doing something that feels good in the short term rather than what feels strenuous but is good in the long term will have severe ramifications.
For example, drinking alcohol, smoking, ingesting drugs and partying every day is a lot of fun. It feels like bliss in the short term, but as the years pile on, health suffers. Sleep deprivation takes a toll on cognitive abilities. The years of drug abuse hampers hormonal performance. There are also additional effects on the professional aspect due to not focussing on work, studies, or business. Similarly, doing the hard things, like meditating, reading books, working on a business, and studying for an exam, will compound over the years and have a massive payback later.
This beautiful quote I read in “The Almanack of Naval Ravikant” by Eric Jorgenson goes like this:
Karma is just you, repeating your patterns, virtues, and flaws until you finally get what you deserve
Delay gratification.
Do the hard things today so your future self can be happy and proud of what you did.
Do the hard things today so that your future self has no regrets.
Eat the healthier option.
Lift the heaviest weight you can.
Study as hard as you can.
Separate yourself from the pack.
Doing what the 95% of the people do will give you the results the 95% have!