delayed gratification

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated
by Gautam Baid
Published 1 Jun 2020

Our world’s moral fabric would be completely transformed if all of humanity imbibed, as a way of life, Seneca’s golden words: “Cherish some man of high character, and keep him ever before your eyes, living as if he were watching you, and ordering all your actions as if he beheld them.”16 CHAPTER 11 THE KEY TO SUCCESS IN LIFE IS DELAYED GRATIFICATION Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago. —Warren Buffett If you’re glued together and honorable and get up every morning and keep learning every day and you’re willing to go in for a lot of deferred gratification all your life, you’re going to succeed. —Charlie Munger People who arbitrage time will almost always outperform. The first order thought of instant gratification is a crowded path, ensuring mediocre results at best. Delayed gratification, which requires second order thinking, is less crowded and more likely to get results.

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Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.” When you save and invest prudently, the benefits are deferred—but crucially, they are also compounded. The U.S. retirement system greatly rewards those who defer gratification. Claiming social security at age seventy leads to 76 percent higher inflation-protected benefits compared with claiming at age sixty-two. Resist instant gratification. Embrace delayed gratification. Wealth, in fact, is what you don’t see. It’s the cars not purchased. The diamonds not bought. The renovations postponed, the clothes forgone and the first-class upgrade declined. It’s assets in the bank that haven’t yet been converted into the stuff you see.

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Under those rules, you’d really think carefully about what you did, and you’d be forced to load up on what you’d really thought about. So you’d do so much better.2 Munger repeatedly brought up the topic of deferred gratification during the 2017 Daily Journal Corporation meeting. He talked about how most investors are looking for a quick buck, but the best investors defer their gratification for much larger gains that come later, in the distant future. Long-term investors look for management teams that are willing to defer gratification. These teams are focused on building a durable economic franchise. They are focused on the longevity of the business. They are willing to forgo near-term earnings to increase long-term value.

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
by Joseph Henrich
Published 7 Sep 2020

We often miss the relationships between the parts or the similarities between phenomena that don’t fit nicely into our categories. That is, we know a lot about individual trees but often miss the forest. WEIRD people are also particularly patient and often hardworking. Through potent self-regulation, we can defer gratification—in financial rewards, pleasure, and security—well into the future in exchange for discomfort and uncertainty in the present. In fact, WEIRD people sometimes take pleasure in hard work and find the experience purifying. Paradoxically, and despite our strong individualism and self-obsession, WEIRD people tend to stick to impartial rules or principles and can be quite trusting, honest, fair, and cooperative toward strangers or anonymous others.

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For example, people from the most patient country, Sweden, can resist the immediate $100 and are willing to wait a year for any amount of money over $144. In contrast, in Africa, Rwandans require at least $212 in a year before they are willing to pass up $100 today. On average, around the globe, people won’t defer gratification for a year until the delayed amount exceeds $189. FIGURE 1.4. Global distribution of patience across 76 countries. Darker shades indicate greater patience. Hatched regions indicate a lack of data.28 This map nicely highlights a continuous spread of global national-level variation in patience, including some variation within Europe.

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The strong relationship between patience and these outcomes emerges even when we look at each world region separately. In fact, the data suggest that greater patience is most strongly linked to positive economic outcomes in less economically developed regions like sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. That is, inclinations to defer gratification may be even more important for economic prosperity where the formal economic and political institutions operate less effectively.30 The same patterns emerge if we compare regions within countries or individuals within local regions. Within countries, regional populations possessing greater average patience generate higher incomes and attain more education.

Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole
by Benjamin R. Barber
Published 1 Jan 2007

In his study positing the vanishing of childhood, social critic Neil Postman observed that it was the idea of childhood that permitted a portrait of the modern idea of adulthood, distinguished by “the characteristics…of a fully literate culture: the capacity for self-restraint, a tolerance for delayed gratification, a sophisticated ability to think conceptually and sequentially, a preoccupation with both historical continuity and the future, a high valuation of reason and hierarchical order.”3 Postman is typical of modern psychological and sociological views of child development, which to some degree track the Protestant ethos (self-restraint, delayed gratification, rationality, and order). Playing on child/ adult dualisms, this perspective suggests that childishness, in contrast to adulthood, privileges: IMPULSE over DELIBERATION; FEELING over REASON; CERTAINTY over UNCERTAINTY; DOGMATISM over DOUBT; PLAY over WORK; PICTURES over WORDS; IMAGES over IDEAS; PLEASURE over HAPPINESS; INSTANT GRATIFICATION over LONG-TERM SATISFACTION; EGOISM over ALTRUISM; PRIVATE over PUBLIC; NARCISSISM over SOCIABILITY; ENTITLEMENT (RIGHT) over OBLIGATION (RESPONSIBILITY); THE TIMELESS PRESENT OVER TEMPORALITY (NOW OVER PAST and FUTURE); THE NEAR over THE REMOTE (INSTANTANEOUS OVER ENDURING); PHYSICAL SEXUALITY over EROTIC LOVE; INDIVIDUALISM OVER COMMUNITY; IGNORANCE over KNOWLEDGE.

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As the domestic market for films shifted to television, rentals, and video-on-demand, the foreign big-screen market became ever more important. Around 1993, foreign box-office revenue overtook domestic revenue for Hollywood films, and today more than 60 percent of exhibition revenue is from overseas markets. Hollywood thus needs exportable blockbusters whose primary target “is people with an underdeveloped capacity for deferred gratification; that is, kids.”66 Since increasingly Hollywood has come to depend on customers who see films three or four times or more, these kids—the “tell me the story again” kids referenced above—are ideal customers, along with the new class of re-juveniled adults. Much the same can be said of the Mexican-made soap operas aimed at the American Latino market, “Bollywood” musicals from India’s prospering film market looking for an export market (Indian action-adventure tough-guy Salman Kahn has been introduced into the United States along with a couple of Bollywood leading ladies), or Madrid’s new appetite for global musicals, all of which suggest that the trends in Hollywood and New York have their global counterparts.

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Planted on a bounteous new continent and combining the burgeoning new free economy’s core values of work, investment, and saving with an energetic and enlightened selfishness on behalf of the common good, the ethos was fortified by a spiritual catechism celebrating altruistic toil, ascetic self-denial, deferred gratification, and a devotion to good works and to charity—all laced with an egalitarianism in which work and faith, virtues available to all, generated both worldly and otherworldly rewards. This new miracle of Protestant theology found a road to the eternal soul’s redemption that passed through self-denial yet nonetheless yielded prosperity for the mortal body.

The Impulse Society: America in the Age of Instant Gratification
by Paul Roberts
Published 1 Sep 2014

In modern economic terms, we “discount” the future—so steeply, in fact, that a reward that requires some waiting must be quite large before we’ll voluntarily choose it over something available right now. In studies, subjects who are offered even comparatively large delayed rewards (say, an Amazon gift certificate to be delivered several weeks later) will consistently reject those rewards in favor of a much smaller immediate reward. In the Princeton brain scan study, most subjects wouldn’t defer gratification even when doing so would have netted them a “return” equivalent to 5 percent a week, or 250 percent a year. “It was ridiculous,” Sam McClure, the Princeton study’s lead author, told me. “If you were making even one percent a week on your bank account, you’d be rich.” Yet this “ridiculous” discount is, in effect, built into our heads, and this helps explain why we constantly make extraordinary intertemporal errors.

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You don’t have the strong sense of community . . . of someone overseeing what it is you’re doing and saying, ‘Hey, don’t be such a chump.’ ”24 Sigmund Freud, when he was describing the process of emotional development nearly a century ago, coined the term reality principle to describe how the healthy individual must learn to defer gratification. To fail to submit to reality—to remain guided instead by the “pleasure principle”—Freud argued, was to lock oneself in an infantile, stunted stage, forever unfulfilled and unsociable. For Freud, the forces of reality were mainly social, such as family and institutional authority. But he could just as well have been talking about market forces, since, generally speaking, a person or organization unable to defer economic gratification is soon ostracized by the efficient market.

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There are depressingly few contemporary examples of celebrated, socially productive men and women working quietly toward the greater good. The very concept of work itself has been degraded. Not so long ago, we told our children that personal success required sustained effort, a willingness to delay gratification, and the capacity to control impulses. But today our children look around, and that’s not what they see. They see their parents and grandparents working hard and being patient and keeping their passions in check and still being tossed aside like an old couch—while investment bankers and reality TV stars appear to make huge, easy dollars.

The Narcissistic Family: Diagnosis and Treatment
by Stephanie Donaldson-Pressman and Robert M. Pressman
Published 31 Jan 1994

One of the authors of this book is an abominable speller but, fortunately, has a word processor that can check spelling. The other cannot understand how electricity works ("You mean, it isn't magic?") but can hire an electrician. There are some skills, however, that we need to learn to have a productive life. Task completion (and the ability it implies to defer gratification) is one of them. To the patient, we say, "You didn't learn it then, but you can now. Now you are a grownup, and you have choices and options." We emphasize that good decision making involves looking at every possible alternate to any situation, and then making the decision based on what will be the best option for oneself.

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In an age of thirty-second television solutions, unrealistic body images, real-life random violence (even at elementary schools), no meaningful gun control, media and entertainment industry preoccupations with sex and violence, nuclear accidents, institutionalized discrimination, police forces out of control, and the decline of both organized religion and the nuclear family, the quick fix is not only encouraged-it looks pretty good. This is especially true for adults from narcissistic homes; those individuals we have treated all have problems with delaying gratification, and all have problems with at least one of the "big three": alcohol and drugs, food, and overspending. After all, in a chaotic and frightening universe, one counts on what one can most easily control. Even in the early 1900s, Jung was writing about his concerns with the direction in which society was moving: away from spiritual grounding and toward self-destructive behaviors.

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If I'd ever thought ... to be able to get a job and an apartment, I'd have jumped at the chance! I was so stupid ... no, I wasn't stupid. You're right. I never thought of it, because it wasn't an option. Not in my family. My God, I wasn't so stupid. It just wasn't an option." Conclusion Patients respond well to the premise that decision making or longrange planning, delaying gratification, project completion-whatever you want to call it-is a learned skill. In this context we use a nonjudgmental, nonblaming approach. It is not that their parents were necessarily bad, but they were unable to teach important skills in this area; we are not talking about a moral failure but about an educational deficit.

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
by Alan Cooper
Published 24 Feb 2004

The principle is a simple one: Let the user do whatever he wants, but keep very detailed records of those actions so that full accountability is easy. Polite Software Gives Instant Gratification Computer programming is all about deferred gratification. Computers do nothing until you've put enormous effort into first writing a program. Software engineers slowly internalize this principle of deferred gratification, and they tend to write programs that behave in the same way. Programs make users enter all possible information before they do even the tiniest bit of work. If another human behaved that way, you'd actively dislike him.

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Managers look at the running prototype and ask, "Why can't we just use this?" The answer is too technically complex and too fraught with uncertainty to have sufficient force to dissuade the manager who sees what looks like a way to avoid months of expensive effort. The essence of good programming is deferred gratification. You put in all of the work up front, and then you reap the rewards later. There are very few tasks that aren't cheaper to do manually. Once written, however, programs can be run a million times with no extra cost. The most expensive program is one that runs once. The cheapest program is the one that runs ten billion times.

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His image became our battle standard. We knew that to make Clevis happy would mean that we would make any and every airplane customer happy. He was our primary persona, and we designed the system for him and him alone. Designing for Clevis Clevis had no experience with computers and no patience for the typical attitude of delayed gratification that most programs have. The solution to Clevis's navigation problem was simple: He could not and would not "navigate," so there could be only one screen. The solution to Clevis's reluctance to explore the interface meant that the product had to be very generous with information. We were parsimonious with choices but copious with information.

The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking
by Saifedean Ammous
Published 23 Mar 2018

Had he had the temperament to study capital theory, he would have understood that the decreased consumption was a natural reaction to the business cycle, which was in turn caused by the expansion of the money supply, as will be discussed in Chapter 6. He would also have understood that the only cause of economic growth in the first place is delayed gratification, saving, and investment, which extend the length of the production cycle and increase the productivity of the methods of production, leading to better standards of living. He would have realized the only reason he was born into a rich family in a rich society was that his ancestors had spent centuries accumulating capital, deferring gratification and investing in the future. But, like the Roman emperors during the decay of the empire, he could never understand the work and sacrifice needed to build his affluence and believed instead that high consumption is the cause of prosperity rather than its consequence.

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But the only way to build the fishing rod is to dedicate an initial amount of time to work that does not produce edible fish, but instead produces a fishing rod. This is an uncertain process, for the fishing rod might not work and the fisherman will have wasted his time to no avail. Not only does investment require delaying gratification, it also always carries with it a risk of failure, which means the investment will only be undertaken with an expectation of a reward. The lower an individual's time preference, the more likely he is to engage in investment, to delay gratification, and to accumulate capital. The more capital is accumulated, the higher the productivity of labor, and the longer the time horizon of production. To understand the difference more vividly, contrast two hypothetical individuals who start off with nothing but their bare hands, and differing time preferences: Harry has a higher time preference than Linda.

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Psychologist Walter Mischel would leave children in a room with a piece of marshmallow or a cookie, and tell the kids they were free to have it if they wanted, but that he will come back in 15 minutes, and if the children had not eaten the candy, he would offer them a second piece as a reward. In other words, the children had the choice between the immediate gratification of a piece of candy, or delaying gratification and receiving two pieces of candy. This is a simple way of testing children's time preference: students with a lower time preference were the ones who could wait for the second piece of candy, whereas the students with the higher time preference could not. Mischel followed up with the children decades later and found significant correlation between having a low time preference as measured with the marshmallow test and good academic achievement, high SAT score, low body mass index, and lack of addiction to drugs.

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
by David Eagleman
Published 29 May 2011

These areas were associated with impulsive behavior, including drug addiction. In contrast, when participants opted for longer-term rewards with higher return, lateral areas of the cortex involved in higher cognition and deliberation were more active.18 And the higher the activity in these lateral areas, the more the participant was willing to defer gratification. Sometime between 2005 and 2006, the United States housing bubble burst. The problem was that 80 percent of recently issued mortgages were adjustable-rate. The subprime borrowers who had signed up for these loans suddenly found themselves stuck with higher payment rates and no way to refinance.

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Note that the two scenarios are identical in that waiting one extra week earns you an extra $10. So why is there a preference reversal between the two?17 It’s because people “discount” the future, an economic term meaning that rewards closer to now are valued more highly than rewards in the distant future. Delaying gratification is difficult. And there is something very special about right now—which always holds the highest value. Kahneman and Tversky’s preference reversal comes about because the discounting has a particular shape: it drops off very quickly into the near future, and then flattens out a bit, as though more distant times are all about the same.

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The observation that people are made of conflicting short- and long-term desires is not a new one. Ancient Jewish writings proposed that the body is composed of two interacting parts: a body (guf), which always wants things now, and a soul (nefesh), which maintains a longer-term view. Similarly, Germans use a fanciful expression for a person trying to delay gratification: he must overcome his innerer schweinehund—which translates, sometimes to the puzzlement of English speakers, as “inner pigdog.” Your behavior—what you do in the world—is simply the end result of the battles. But the story gets better, because the different parties in the brain can learn about their interactions with one another.

The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity
by Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott
Published 1 Jun 2016

There is evidence that people differ in their capacity to exercise self-control and these differences manifest themselves from an early age. For example, studies of young children show that even by the age of three, some are more able to exercise self-control and defer gratification than others – in this case, to hold back eating a marshmallow now with the promise of two marshmallows in 30 minutes.6 Being able to defer gratification can be important in mastery, since acquiring a skill often entails deferring short-term pleasure (watching the next episode of a mini-series) for long-term gain (being able to speak Italian). However, there is also evidence that this self-control is a learned behaviour and that people can be taught to defer immediate gratification in order to achieve personal mastery.

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Agenda for Change 1Parfit, D., Reasons and Persons (Clarendon Press, 1984). 2Archer, M., The Reflexive Imperative (Cambridge University Press, 2012). 3Kahneman, D., Thinking Fast and Slow (Penguin, 2011). 4Heffernan, M., Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril (Simon & Schuster, 2011). 5Eliot, T. S., Four Quartets (Harcourt, 1943). 6The original experiments on delayed gratification took place at Stanford in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Mischel, W., The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control (Bantam Press, 2014). 7Dweck, C., Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (Random House, 2006). 8Zhenghao, C., Alcorn, B., Christensen, C., Eriksson, N., Koller, D. and Emanuel, E.

Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain
by Fintan O'Toole
Published 22 Jan 2018

It functions as an English version of the famous Stanford marshmallow test in which children’s capacity for delayed gratification was assessed by offering them a choice between one treat now or two treats a little later. Boris fails the toast test – even his wife’s suffering in childbirth is not enough to make him prioritize her needs over his own. Yet even while confessing his sin, he is also evoking the thrills of rebelling against constraint. The none too subliminal message is: screw deferred gratification. Secondly, the story contains a parable of British politics over the previous half-century. The ‘person who is i/c [in charge of] toast’ is a parody of the officiousness of a wartime economy and of nationalized industry.

The Politics of Pain
by Fintan O'Toole
Published 2 Oct 2019

It functions as an English version of the famous Stanford marshmallow test in which children’s capacity for delayed gratification was assessed by offering them a choice between one treat now or two treats a little later. Boris fails the toast test – even his wife’s suffering in childbirth is not enough to make him prioritize her needs over his own. Yet even while confessing his sin, he is also evoking the thrills of rebelling against constraint. The none too subliminal message is: screw deferred gratification. Secondly, the story contains a parable of British politics over the previous half-century. The ‘person who is i/c [in charge of] toast’ is a parody of the officiousness of a wartime economy and of nationalized industry.

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100
by Michio Kaku
Published 15 Mar 2011

When one compensates for socioeconomic factors, one finds that one characteristic sometimes stands out from all the others: the ability to delay gratification. According to the long-term studies of Walter Mischel of Columbia University, and many others, children who were able to refrain from immediate gratification (e.g., eating a marshmallow given to them) and held out for greater long-term rewards (getting two marshmallows instead of one) consistently scored higher on almost every measure of future success, in SATs, life, love, and career. But being able to defer gratification also refers to a higher level of awareness and consciousness. These children were able to simulate the future and realize that future rewards were greater.

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Clausewitz, Carl von Cloning, 3.­1, 3.­2 Cloud computing, 1.­1, 7.­1 Cochlear implants Code breaking Collins, Francis Comets Common sense, 2.­1, 2.­2, 2.­3, 7.­1, 7.­2 Computers animations created by augmented reality bioinformatics brain simulations carbon nanotubes and cloud computing, 1.­1, 7.­1 digital divide DNA computers driverless cars exponential growth of computer power (Moore’s law), 1.­1, 1.­2, 1.­3, 4.­1 fairy tale life and far future (2070) four stages of technology and Internet glasses and contact lenses, 1.­1, 1.­2 medicine and midcentury (2030) mind control of molecular and atomic transistors nanotechnology and near future (present to 2030) optical computers parallel processing physics of computer revolution quantum computers quantum dot computers quantum theory and, 1.­1, 4.­1, 4.­2, 4.­3 scrap computers self-­assembly and silicon chips, limitations of, 1.­1, 1.­2, 4.­1 telekinesis with 3-­D technology universal translators virtual reality wall screens See also Mind reading; Robotics/­AI Condorcet, Marquis de Conscious robots, 2.­1, 2.­2 Constellation Program COROT satellite, 6.­1, 8.­1 Crick, Francis Criminology Crutzen, Paul Culture in Type I civilization Customization of products Cybertourism, itr.­1, itr.­2 CYC project Damasio, Antonio Dating in 2100, 9.­1, 9.­2, 9.­3, 9.­4 Davies, Stephen Da Vinci robotic system Dawkins, Richard, 3.­1, 3.­2, 3.­3 Dawn computer Dean, Thomas Decoherence problem Deep Blue computer, 2.­1, 2.­2, 2.­3 Delayed gratification DEMO fusion reactor Depression treatments Designer children, 3.­1, 3.­2, 3.­3 Developing nations, 7.­1, 7.­2 Diamandis, Peter Dictatorships Digital divide Dinosaur resurrection Disease, elimination of, 3.­1, 8.­1 DNA chips DNA computers Dog breeds Donoghue, John, 1.­1, 1.­2 Dreams, photographing of Drexler, Eric Driverless cars Duell, Charles H.­

Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible
by William N. Goetzmann
Published 11 Apr 2016

INVESTMENT Consumption and production use current capital; investment provides that capital. It is the basic technology for saving for the future. That is why pension funds hold stocks and bonds and other financial assets. Investing money rather than spending it requires delaying gratification. No one likes to delay gratification without a good reason. For investors, a key incentive is the expectation of higher future consumption. In the simplest form of a financial contract—a loan—the lender expects to get back the money lent plus some extra amount: interest. The longer the loan is made for, the longer the investor delays personal consumption and thus, typically, the more interest is promised in compensation.

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In fact, it was precisely the inequality of the distribution of wealth which made possible those vast accumulations of fixed wealth and of capital improvements which distinguished that age from all others. Herein lay, in fact, the main justification of the Capitalist System.1 To Keynes, the “double bluff” of the capitalist system was inherently unstable. His biggest complaint was the stinginess of the ruling class—their psychological fixation on saving up money. Keynes’s antagonism toward deferred gratification—toward moving economic value from the present into the future—is what made him acutely critical of the peace treaty. He saw the war as a turning point toward a new financial order. It showed the working classes just what they were missing, and it made the capitalist class realize their savings were worthless when facing an extremely uncertain future.

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See also maritime insurance intellectual property rights, 197; in seventeenth-century England, 328. See also patents interest: in ancient Chinese mathematical treatise, 164; based on 360-day year, 29; charged by seventh-century Chinese pawnshop, 179; compound, 16, 35–37; Fibonacci’s calculation of, 240, 242–43; for the lender’s delayed gratification, 6; on loans in Roman grain trade, 117; paid in labor, 42; as return on investment, 6–7; Roman law and, 235; on some census contracts, 216; Sumerian idea of, 44; Templars’ compensation instead of, 213–14; urbanism giving rise to, 40–41; on Venetian public debt, 230–31. See also investment; loans; usury interest rates: capped in Rome of third century CE, 132; in China, 164, 200; in Code of Hammurabi, 46; Keynes on, 461, 462, 466; in Law’s financial plan, 353–54, 355; in second-millennium Ur, 51 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 457–58, 459.

Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (And How to Take Advantage of It)
by William Poundstone
Published 1 Jan 2010

The chart on the previous page shows the history of the price-to-earnings ratio of the stocks in the S&P Index. The S&P is a broad index computed from 500 companies presently accounting for about three-quarters of American’s total investment in domestic stocks. Like the price for a black box, the P/E ratio represents a capacity to defer gratification. You might think that this capacity would be a constant of human nature or else a slowly changing variable of American consumer culture. The chart tells a different story. The jittery line is the P/E ratio (using average earnings of the previous ten years, a measure Shiller uses). For reference, the thick gray line shows the historical average P/E ratio of about 16.

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You might also reason that the box is worth less than your current life expectancy in dollars, since that limits how many dollar bills you can collect. (For the record, the box keeps working after the original owner’s death, and you’re allowed to bequeath it to anyone you like.) Your price for the box should have something to do with your capacity for delayed gratification. That is, you’re giving up some of your hard-earned money now, in the form of the purchase price, to enjoy a stream of earnings later. Someone who is focused on the present moment—the guy who’s always maxing out his credit cards—might not be interested in the box at all. Someone who looks at the long term might be willing to pay a relatively high price.

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
by Christopher Lasch
Published 16 Sep 1991

Desire Domesticated The more thoughtful among Macaulay's contemporaries, however, could not entirely suppress the disturbing consideration that a social order based on the promise of universal abundance might find it hard to justify even the minimal sacrifices presupposed by Adam Smith's otherwise self‐ regulating economy. Hume had astutely pointed out, when the philosophy of plenty was still in its infancy, that it might weaken even the residual inclination to defer gratification. Human beings "are always much inclin'd to prefer present interest to distant and remote," he observed ; "nor is it easy for them to resist the temptation of any advantage that they may immediately enjoy." As long as "the pleasures of life [were] few," this form of temptation did not pose a great threat to social order.

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Commercial societies, however, could be expected to intensify the pursuit of "feverish, empty amusements"; and the "avidity ... of acquiring goods and possessions" was "insatiable, perpetual, universal, and directly destructive of society." In the nineteenth century, the hope that commerce would make men "easy and sociable," not acquisitive and rapacious, came to rest largely on the institutionalization of deferred gratification supposedly provided by the family—the heart and soul of the middle-class way of life. Nineteenth-century philanthropists, humanitarians, and social reformers argued with one voice that the revolution of rising expectations meant a higher standard of domestic life, not an orgy of self-indulgence activated by fantasies of inordinate personal wealth, of riches painlessly acquired through speculation or fraud, of an abundance of wine and women.

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The "extension of civilization downward" demanded the demolition of the "social obstacles which divide men into classes." Workers had to be seen as potential consumers entitled to an "emotional corrective of the barren industrial grind." Consumption would expand their "wants" and create the "possibility of choice"—including the choice of deferred gratification over immediate indulgence. Their "investment in tomorrow's goods" would make it possible for "society to increase its output and to broaden its productive areas." Both the progressive movement and the New Deal drew heavily on this kind of thinking, which linked progress to the democratization of consumption and held out the promise of a new civilization based on leisure for all.

The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society
by Charles Handy
Published 12 Mar 2015

Living in the present is all very well, but if we fail the Marshmallow Test we will short-change our future. Walter Mischel, a leading expert on self-control, devised the Marshmallow Test almost 50 years ago. In an empty room he presented young children with a choice: take one marshmallow now or wait a while and have two. It was a test of deferred gratification. After observing the later lives of the children he was convinced that deferred gratification was crucial to a successful life, to better social functioning and to a greater sense of self-worth. If he is right then the world of instant constant communication is endangering the successful futures of our young. I discuss some further implications in Essay 15, ‘The Necessity of Others’.

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‘We have to learn by eavesdropping on our savvier colleagues, by playing around on the machines when we have any free time, or by asking when we get stuck.’ Just as my small grandchildren do, I thought. The front-loading theory of education assumes that young people are prepared to take on board the proposition that what they are asked to learn will be useful one day and that it can all be safely warehoused until they need it. Deferred gratification of this sort is a tough ask of young people and, unsurprisingly, not usually successful. Learning without context is hard, and learning without use soon evaporates, as we discover when learning a new language. So much of what we spend our time on in schools must surely be wasted. Instead, if we do learn most from living, we would do well to remember that the living starts early.

The Centrist Manifesto
by Charles Wheelan
Published 18 Apr 2013

Both political parties talk a good game around fiscal discipline at the same time they are making the problem worse with unfunded tax cuts, new spending, or both. The growing debt is unfair to future generations and dangerously destabilizing to the financial system (which is not particularly stable to begin with). More broadly, the American public has developed a remarkable inability to defer gratification. We seem unable or unwilling to make the short-term sacrifices necessary to build a more prosperous society; the political system panders to that shortsighted view. This is a country that was built on huge public and private investments that paid dividends, decade after decade, generation after generation: the land grant universities, the interstate highway system, the transcontinental railroad.

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On a table in front of them was a desirable treat or toy, such as a marshmallow. Each child could eat the treat or take the toy at any point; however, the children were also told that if they avoided eating the tantalizing treat for a short period, then they would get two treats once the time elapsed. In other words, there was a big payoff for deferring gratification. Some kids could do it; others could not. What’s remarkable is how predictive that behavior turned out to be of success later in life. The kids who did not rush to eat the marshmallow turned out to have higher SAT scores, better grades, less criminal activity, and many other positive life outcomes, even decades later.9 The United States is currently a country that not only gobbles down its marshmallows but also borrows extra marshmallows from China and eats them too.

That Used to Be Us
by Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum
Published 1 Sep 2011

LAX’s dingy, cramped United Airlines domestic terminal feels like a faded 1970s movie star who once was considered hip but has had one too many face-lifts and simply can’t hide the wrinkles anymore. But in many ways, LAX, JFK, and Penn Station are us. We are the United States of Deferred Maintenance. (China, by contrast, is the People’s Republic of Deferred Gratification.) In the Terrible Twos, our roads got more crowded, our bridges got creakier, our water systems got leakier, and the lines in our airports got longer. In 2009, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) issued a Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, and gave America an overall grade of D.

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A well-functioning political system must be rooted in something deeper than itself: a culture, which is most vividly expressed through certain values. We believe that as the boomer generation has assumed a dominant place in American society, the country has strayed from three of the core values on which American greatness depended in the past. The first of these changes involves a shift from long-term investment and delayed gratification, which were characteristic of the Greatest Generation, to short-term gratification and get-it-now-while-you-can thinking, which alas is typical of the baby boom generation. The second change is the loss of confidence in our institutions and in the authority of their leaders across the society.

A Framework for Understanding Poverty
by Ruby K. Payne
Published 4 May 2012

"Mediated scheduling"- Based on routine. Ability to schedule and plan ahead. Ability to represent the future abstractly and therefore set goals. 3. "Mediation of positive anticipation"-Ability to control the present for a happy representation of the future. 4. "Mediation of inhibition and control"- Ability to defer gratification, think before acting, control impulsiveness. 5. "Mediated representation of the future"-Ability to construe imaginatively a future scenario based on facts. 6. "Mediation of verbal stimulation"-Use of precise language for defining and categorizing the environment. 7. "Mediated precision "-Ability to precisely define situations, things, people, etc., and use that precise thinking for problem-solving.

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"Some of the social and psychological characteristics include living in crowded quarters, a lack of privacy, gregariousness, a high incidence of alcoholism, frequent resort to violence in the settlement of quarrels, frequent use of physical violence in the training of children, wife beating, early initiation into sex, free unions or consensual marriages, a relatively high incidence of the abandonment of mothers and children, a trend toward mother-centered families and a much greater knowledge of maternal relatives, the predominance of the nuclear family, a strong predisposition to authoritarianism, and a great emphasis upon family solidarity-an ideal only rarely achieved. Other traits include a strong present time orientation with relatively little ability to defer gratification and plan for the future, a sense of resignation and fatalism based upon the realities of their difficult life situation, a belief in male superiority which reaches its crystallization in machismo or the cult of masculinity, a corresponding martyr complex among women, and finally, a high tolerance for psychological pathology of all sorts."

Die With Zero: Getting All You Can From Your Money and Your Life
by Bill Perkins
Published 27 Jul 2020

But what kind of memory would that be? Look, many of us are inclined to delay gratification and save for the future. And the ability to delay gratification serves us well. Being able to get to work on time, paying everyday bills, taking care of our kids, putting food on the table—these are the essentials in life. But actually delaying gratification is helpful only to a point. If you have your nose to the grindstone too much every day, you run the risk of waking up one morning and realizing that you may have delayed too much. And, at the extreme, indefinitely delayed gratification means no gratification. So at what point is it better not to delay?

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Until then, most of us go through life as if we had all the time in the world. Some of that behavior is rational. It would be foolish to live every day as if it were your last: You wouldn’t bother to work, or study for a test, or visit the dentist. So it makes sense to delay gratification to some extent, because that pays off in the long run. But the sad truth is that too many people delay gratification for too long, or indefinitely. They put off what they want to do until it’s too late, saving money for experiences they will never enjoy. Living as if your life were infinite is the opposite of taking the long view: It’s terribly shortsighted.

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This is how the famous marshmallow test, created for preschoolers by psychologist Walter Mischel at Stanford in the 1960s, is set up: Would you rather have one marshmallow now, or two marshmallows 15 minutes from now? Many three-year-olds might say they’d rather have two marshmallows in 15 minutes, but once that tempting marshmallow is in front of them, many can’t wait. Adults usually have a better ability to delay gratification—very often to the point where delaying gratification no longer serves them well. In effect, they are opting not for one marshmallow now or two marshmallows in 15 minutes, but for one and a half marshmallows ten years later! When it’s presented in that way, the mistake seems obvious. So how do you apply this logic to your spending decisions?

Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World
by Jevin D. West and Carl T. Bergstrom
Published 3 Aug 2020

When you see scatter plots and related forms of data visualization, ask yourself (and maybe the person who created the graph): Is the structure of the graph suggesting a causal relationship that isn’t there? DELAYED GRATIFICATION AND COMMON CAUSE One of the hallmark discoveries of social psychology is the role that delayed gratification plays in a successful life. At the heart of delayed gratification theory is an experiment known as the marshmallow test. A four-year-old is presented with alternative rewards: one marshmallow or two marshmallows. He is told that he can have a single marshmallow anytime—but if he can wait for a while, he can have two marshmallows.

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The authors of the original studies were careful to explain that their results demonstrated correlation: Delayed gratification is predictive of later academic success and emotional well-being. They did not demonstrate causation: The ability to delay gratification does not necessarily cause later success and well-being.*6 But as these results filtered through the popular press, the line between correlation and causation became blurred. The results of the marshmallow test and other related studies were reported as evidence that ability to delay gratification causes success later in life. These assumptions about causation are often used as grounds to make a prescription: Improve your future by learning to delay gratification.

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These assumptions about causation are often used as grounds to make a prescription: Improve your future by learning to delay gratification. In response to the marshmallow test, pop-psych and pop-business outlets promote training methods. Lifehacker exhorted us to “Build the Skill of Delayed Gratification.” “If you can manage to turn delaying gratification into a regular habit,” read the copy beneath a stock photo of marshmallows in Fast Company, “you may be able to take your own performance from just mediocre to top-notch.” In an article titled “40-Year-Old Stanford Study Reveals the 1 Quality Your Children Need to Succeed In Life,” Inc. magazine explains how to cultivate this ability in our children: In other words, actively establish a system for delayed gratification in your young one’s brain by promising small rewards for any work done and then delivering on it.

The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Doto Get More of It
by Kelly McGonigal
Published 1 Dec 2011

But when you start with the immediate reward (the $50 check in your hand) and consider the benefits of delaying gratification for a larger reward, it also feels like a loss. Economists have found that you will come up with more reasons to justify choosing whichever reward you think about first. People who start by asking themselves, “Why should I take the check for $50?” will think of more reasons to support immediate gratification (“I can really use the money,” “Who knows if the $100 check will even be good in ninety days?”). People who start by asking themselves, “Why should I take the check for $100?” will think of more reasons to support delaying gratification (“That will buy twice as many groceries,” “I’m going to need money just as much in ninety days as I do now”).

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Below are three ideas for making the future feel real, and for getting to know your future self. Pick one that appeals to you and try it out this week. 1. Create a Future Memory. Neuroscientists at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany have shown that imagining the future helps people delay gratification. You don’t even need to think about the future rewards of delaying gratification—just thinking about the future seems to work. For example, if you’re trying to decide between starting a project now or putting it off, imagine yourself grocery shopping next week, or at a meeting you have scheduled. When you picture the future, the brain begins to think more concretely and immediately about the consequences of your present choices.

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A TIME TO WAIT, AND A TIME TO GIVE IN We’ve been assuming that it is always better to delay gratification. But is it? Ran Kivetz, a marketing researcher at Columbia University, has found that some people have a very difficult time choosing current happiness over future rewards. They consistently put off pleasure in the name of work, virtue, or future happiness—but eventually, they regret their decisions. Kivetz calls this condition hyperopia—a fancy way of saying farsighted. Most people, as we’ve seen, are perpetually nearsighted. When the promise of reward is in front of their eyes, they cannot see past it to the value of delaying gratification. People who suffer from hyperopia are chronically farsighted—they cannot see the value of giving in today.

The Meritocracy Myth
by Stephen J. McNamee
Published 17 Jul 2013

In more familiar terms, these attitudes and traits are summarized by the phrase “having the right attitude.” Having the right attitude is associated with qualities like ambition, energy, motivation, and trustworthiness. It may also involve subtler traits like good judgment, sense of personal responsibility, willingness to defer gratification, persistence in the face of adversity, willingness to take risks, getting along with others, assertiveness, independence, and the like. Conversely, a lack of proper attitudes, as evidenced by laziness, shiftlessness, indolence, deficient self-discipline, unreliability, disruptiveness, and so on, is associated with the failure to achieve.

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It is one thing, for instance, to say that the poor have a “present time orientation” because they are hedonistic thrill seekers who live for the moment. However, it is another thing altogether to say that, regardless of one’s personal value system, one is forced to focus on the present if one is not sure where one’s next meal might come from. The middle and upper classes have the luxury of being able to plan ahead and defer gratification (for instance, going to college instead of accepting a low-paid service job) precisely because their present is secure. Similarly, the poor may have modest ambitions not because they are unmotivated but because they make a realistic assessment of limited life chances. In this formulation, exhibited behaviors and perceptions associated with a “culture of poverty” reflect the effects of poverty, not the causes.

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W., 1 , 2 Bush, George W., 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 C Calvinism, 1 , 2 capitalism as a continuum, 1 entrepreneurial capitalists, 1 , 2 , 3 free-market expression, 1 , 2 hard work and self-denial as aspects of, 1 human capital, 1 risk, 1 , 2 , 3 turn-of-the-century capitalists, 1 , 2 venture capitalists, 1 wealth inequality in capitalist societies, 1 Carnegie, Andrew, 1 , 2 Catholics and Catholicism, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 Chambliss, William, 1 charitable giving, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 children American Dreams for, 1 , 2.1-2.2 cost of raising, 1 cultural capital and, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 in culture-of-poverty theory, 1.1-1.2 discrimination and, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 downward mobility, insulation from, 1.1-1.2 education and parental influence, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7 , 8 health issues, 1 , 2 as heirs, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 of immigrants, 1 numbers, declining, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 parental occupation, effects on, 1 of the privileged, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 proposed reforms benefiting, 1 , 2.1-2.2 in a pure meritocratic system, 1 social class, education affected by, 1 social mobility and, 1 , 2 Clinton, Hillary, 1 , 2 cognitive elite, 1 , 2 Coleman, James S., 1 , 2 college American dream, as part of, 1 , 2 aptitude tests, 1 , 2 cognitive elect sorted out by, 1 credentialism, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 employment during attendance, 1 enrollment, 1.1-1.2 , 2 funding accounts, 1 hiring practices, 1.1-1.2 income, effects on completion, 1.1-1.2 job prospects, 1.1-1.2 legacy admissions, 1.1-1.2 , 2 student debt, 1 , 2.1-2.2 tracking, effects of, 1.1-1.2 types of colleges and social standing, 1.1-1.2 , 2 the wealthy and, 1 , 2 , 3 Collins, Randall, 1 , 2 , 3 Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (Murray), 1.1-1.2 competition capitalism and, 1 , 2 destructive vs. constructive forms, 1.1-1.2 discrimination reducing, 1 , 2 , 3 at elite colleges, 1 , 2 foot race metaphor, 1 foreign business competition, 1.1-1.2 large corporations discouraging, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 reforms enhancing, 1 , 2 women and, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 T The Competition Paradigm (Rosenau), 1.1-1.2 C conflict theory of inequality, 1.1-1.2 , 2 corporations, large American economy, dominating, 1 , 2 ascent of, 1.1-1.2 competition, discouraging, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 highly concentrated industries, 1 , 2 , 3 labor unions and, 1 , 2 megamergers, 1.1-1.2 , 2 reform suggestions, 1 restructuring, 1.1-1.2 , 2 self-employment affected by, 1 , 2 , 3 small businesses, vs., 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 Countrywide financial corporation, 1 , 2 Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites (Stevens), 1 credentials credential underemployment, 1 cultural credentials, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 importance of, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 inflation of, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 nonvalidated, 1 opportunities to earn, 1 cultural capital acquisition of, 1.1-1.2 defined, 1 , 2 , 3 discrimination and, 1 , 2 educational inequalities, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 elite circles, acceptance into, 1 employers impressed with, 1.1-1.2 government programs leveling field, 1 information access, 1 inheritance and, 1 , 2 media portrayals, 1 nouveau riche, 1 right attitude, 1 social climbing, 1.1-1.2 , 2 transmission settings, 1.1-1.2 U.S. presidents, exemplifying, 1.1-1.2 culture-of-poverty theory, 1.1-1.2 , 2 D debt as a coping strategy, 1.1-1.2 Great Recession, during, 1 , 2 , 3 housing/mortgage debt, 1 , 2 as a liability, 1 student loans, 1 , 2.1-2.2 democracy, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8.1-8.2 Democracy in America (de Tocqueville), 1.1-1.2 disabled Americans, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 discrimination affirmative action as a remedy, 1.1-1.2 ageism, 1.1-1.2 , 2 American Dream, affecting, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8.1-8.2 , 9.1-9.2 , 10.1-10.2 , 11 continuing effects of, 1.1-1.2 , 2 the disabled, experiences of, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 in education, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6 expansion of opportunity and, 1 heterosexist prejudices, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 in-group solidarity, 1.1-1.2 institutional favoritism, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 legal and political injustice, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 occupational unfairness, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 the physically attractive as favored, 1.1-1.2 racial bigotry, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7 , 8 reform movements combating, 1.1-1.2 , 2 religious intolerance, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 residential inequity, 1.1-1.2 , 2 women, experiences of, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6.1-6.2 , 7.1-7.2 , 8.1-8.2 , 9.1-9.2 Domhoff, William, 1 , 2 Duncan, Otis Dudley, 1 E education affirmative action and, 1 , 2 African Americans, educational issues of, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 American Dream, as part of, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 cognitive elite and educational attainment, 1 credentials, importance of, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 discrimination affecting, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6 educational endogamy, 1 government spending on, 1.1-1.2 , 2 human capital theory, 1 , 2 income affected by, 1 individualism, aiding in, 1 inequalities and, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 occupational opportunities, linked to, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 , 7.1-7.2 , 8.1-8.2 , 9.1-9.2 , 10 , 11.1-11.2 , 12 , 13.1-13.2 parental circumstances affecting, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 school completion, 1 school quality and school funding, 1.1-1.2 social/cultural capital and, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 success, as a factor in, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 teacher salary discrepancies, 1 , 2 women and, 1.1-1.2 , 2 See also college T The Education-Jobs Gap (Livingstone), 1 E employment See occupations endogamy, 1.1-1.2 entrepreneurs and entrepreneurialism American respect for, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 education vs., 1 , 2.1-2.2 entrepreneurial capitalists, 1 , 2 , 3 entrepreneurial traits, 1 , 2 franchisees not considered as entrepreneurs, 1 irregular economy, participation in, 1.1-1.2 luck as part of success, 1 , 2 random-walk hypothesis, 1 social capital, use of, 1 , 2 , 3 upward mobility, aiming for, 1 , 2 See also self-employment Etcoff, Nancy, 1.1-1.2 ethics See moral character F Forbes magazine income listings, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 franchises, 1.1-1.2 , 2 free-market economy, 1.1-1.2 , 2 T The Frontier in American History (Turner), 1.1-1.2 F frontier influence in America, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 functional theory of inequality, 1 G gambling, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 Gates, Bill, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 Gendall, Murray, 1 Gilded Age, 1 , 2 , 3 Gini coefficient, 1.1-1.2 Gladwell, Malcolm, 1 , 2 glass ceiling, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 government programs education funding, 1 , 2 , 3 health care, 1 , 2 highway subsidies and suburb development, 1 , 2 home ownership, encouraging, 1 , 2 land giveaways, 1 the poor as targets of, 1 , 2 , 3 proposed asset-building policies, 1.1-1.2 “thousand points of light” as alternative, 1 transfer payment, 1 Granovetter, Mark, 1.1-1.2 Great Depression, 1 , 2 , 3 Great Recession African Americans affected by, 1 , 2 age discrimination during, 1 class issues resulting from, 1 debt and bankruptcies, rise of, 1.1-1.2 factors leading to, 1.1-1.2 home ownership during, 1.1-1.2 , 2 mortgage debt as contributor, 1 retirement delays caused by, 1 self-employment increase, 1 white-collar crime leading to, 1 H Hamermesh, Daniel S., 1.1-1.2 , 2 hard work beauty achieved through, 1 capitalism, associated with, 1 , 2 consumption as reward, 1 as determinant of inequality, 1 increased work hours as a coping strategy, 1.1-1.2 modest effects of, 1 self-made men and, 1 as a success factor, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 health health care plans, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6 older workers, 1 wealth affecting, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 Herrnstein, Richard, 1.1-1.2 , 2 hierarchy-of-needs theory, 1 , 2 higher education See college hiring practices, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 Hispanics, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 Hochschild, Jennifer, 1 hockey player success, 1.1-1.2 Home Advantage (Lareau), 1.1-1.2 home ownership, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 homosexuality and discriminatory practices, 1.1-1.2 , 2 human capital, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 I IBM, 1.1-1.2 immigrants, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 individualism as culturally dominant, 1 democracy, expressed through, 1 , 2.1-2.2 as greatly valued, 1 , 2 immigrants and, 1.1-1.2 as part of the entrepreneurial personality, 1 pioneer spirit reinforcing, 1 through self-employment, 1 self-help books promoting, 1 inequalities charitable giving as a means of reducing, 1.1-1.2 conflict and functional theories of, 1.1-1.2 economic inequalities, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 educational system and, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 gender inequality, 1.1-1.2 government spending as a factor, 1 , 2 ideologies of, 1.1-1.2 labor unions working to reduce, 1 matrix of domination, 1 residential inequalities, 1 , 2 taxes and, 1.1-1.2 , 2 in wages and income, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 in wealth, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 inheritance advantages of wealth inheritance, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 attitudes towards, 1 , 2 baby boomers and, 1.1-1.2 , 2 conflict theories, within, 1 cultural capital and, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 domestic partnerships and, 1 estate and inheritance taxes, 1.1-1.2 , 2 of estates, 1 , 2 Forbes magazine, heirs listed in, 1.1-1.2 inequalities, perpetuating, 1 , 2 , 3 luck and, 1 as a natural right, 1 nepotism and, 1.1-1.2 as a nonmerit factor, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 old money and, 1.1-1.2 parental motivation, 1.1-1.2 , 2 primogeniture, 1 relay race, compared to, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 wealth distribution through, 1 women and inheritance of wealth, 1 In Praise of Nepotism: A Natural History (Bellow), 1.1-1.2 A An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Smith), 1 I integrity, 1 , 2.1-2.2 inter vivo transfers, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 investments, economic, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11.1-11.2 , 12 , 13 IQ and IQ tests, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 irregular economy, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 J Jencks, Christopher, 1 , 2 jobs See occupations Jones, Janelle, 1.1-1.2 K Kildall, Gary, 1.1-1.2 Kozol, Jonathan, 1 L labor unions, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 Lareau, Annette, 1.1-1.2 Lears, Jackson, 1 Lewis, Oscar, 1.1-1.2 Livingstone, David W., 1 , 2 lookism, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 lottery, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 lower class See working class luck denial of, 1.1-1.2 , 2 with gambling, 1 getting ahead, as a factor in, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 lottery and, 1 , 2 as a nonmerit factor, 1 as part of capitalism, 1 in striking it rich, 1 , 2 wealth attainment and, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 M marriage career interruptions due to, 1 marrying into money, 1 , 2 the poor and, 1 , 2.1-2.2 sexual discrimination and, 1.1-1.2 , 2 trailing partners and hiring practices, 1 upper class and, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 Marx, Karl, 1 Maslow, Abraham, 1 , 2 Massey, Douglas S., 1 , 2 Matthew effect, 1 , 2 matrix of domination, 1.1-1.2 Medicare, 1 , 2.1-2.2 mentors, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 meritocracy affirmative action and, 1 American promotion of merit, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 coping strategies, 1 , 2 credentials, lack of as a barrier, 1.1-1.2 as a desired outcome, 1 discrimination as the antithesis of merit, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8 , 9.1-9.2 , 10 , 11 education as a merit filter, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 employment opportunities, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 entrepreneurial success, 1 fairness of the system, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 folklore of, 1 government spending and, 1.1-1.2 , 2 in the hiring process, 1.1-1.2 , 2 human capital factors, 1 , 2 , 3 income based on merit, 1 inheritance as a nonmerit factor, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13.1-13.2 intergenerational wealth transfers, 1.1-1.2 legacy preferences as nonmerit based, 1.1-1.2 , 2 luck as a nonmerit factor, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 market trends, 1.1-1.2 meritocratic aristocracy, 1.1-1.2 nepotism as nonmeritorious, 1.1-1.2 the new elite as extra-meritorious, 1 noblesse oblige increasing potential for, 1 nonmerit factors suppressing merit, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 Barack Obama as example of, 1.1-1.2 , 2 the past, reverence for, 1 physical attractiveness as a nonmerit factor, 1 , 2 pure merit system, 1.1-1.2 reform movements and, 1 , 2 self-employment as an expression of, 1 social and cultural capital as nonmerit factors, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7 , 8.1-8.2 , 9 , 10 , 11 structural mobility and, 1.1-1.2 talents and abilities of the merit formula, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 taxes and nonmerit advantages, 1.1-1.2 Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 Microsoft, 1.1-1.2 middle class America as not middle class, 1 asset building, 1 cultural capital, 1.1-1.2 deferment of gratification, 1 education and, 1 , 2 , 3 Great Recession affecting, 1 home ownership, 1 inner cities, flight from, 1 , 2 Barack Obama, background of, 1.1-1.2 old class vs. new, 1.1-1.2 precarious status of, 1.1-1.2 sports choices of, 1 upper-middle class, 1 , 2 T The Millionaire Mind (Stanley), 1 M millionaires, 1 , 2 , 3 minority groups affirmative action, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 asset accumulation, 1.1-1.2 core employment, underrepresentation in, 1 disadvantages of, 1 discrimination experiences, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 education issues, 1.1-1.2 as inner city dwellers, 1 opportunities expanding, 1 , 2 , 3 self-employment and, 1 social capital, lack of, 1 , 2 , 3 moral character, 1.1-1.2 , 2 Mormons, 1 Murray, Charles, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 Muslims, 1.1-1.2 N National College Athletic Association (NCAA), 1 nepotism, 1.1-1.2 , 2 net worth affirmative action and, 1 defined, 1 by income group, 1 of minority groups, 1 of Barack Obama family, 1 of one percenters, 1 , 2 , 3 of Walton heirs, 1.1-1.2 wealth scale, 1.1-1.2 new elite, 1 , 2.1-2.2 noblesse oblige, 1.1-1.2 O Obama, Barack, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 Obama, Michelle, 1.1-1.2 occupations attitude as a factor, 1 , 2 blue-collar jobs, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 CEO salaries, 1.1-1.2 , 2 changes in opportunities, 1.1-1.2 , 2 cultural capital and, 1.1-1.2 , 2 the disabled and employment difficulties, 1 discrimination, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 downsizing, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 education linked to, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 , 7.1-7.2 , 8 , 9.1-9.2 , 10.1-10.2 , 11 , 12.1-12.2 , 13 , 14.1-14.2 fastest growing jobs, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 health hazards, 1 nepotism and, 1 , 2 occupational mobility, 1.1-1.2 , 2 occupational segregation, 1 , 2.1-2.2 outsourcing, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 physical attraction and occupational success, 1 self-employment and, 1 self-made men, 1.1-1.2 social capital and occupational opportunities, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 wages, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6.1-6.2 , 7.1-7.2 , 8 white-collar jobs, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 Occupy Wall Street (OWS), 1 old boy networks, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 old money, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 Outliers: The Story of Success (Gladwell), 1 , 2 outsourcing, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 ownership class, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 P Paterson, Tim, 1 Peale, Norman Vincent, 1.1-1.2 pensions, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 pink-collar ghetto, 1.1-1.2 poverty children affected by, 1 , 2 culture-of-poverty theory, 1.1-1.2 , 2 full-time work below poverty level, 1 as a matter of attitude, 1 meritocracy and, 1 , 2 minority rates of, 1 , 2 poverty threshold, 1 regional variations in poverty rates, 1.1-1.2 , 2 senior citizens and poverty rates, 1 U.S. poverty rates, 1 T The Power of Positive Thinking (Peale), 1.1-1.2 P Protestants and the Protestant ethic, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 Puritan values, 1.1-1.2 R racism and racial issues affirmative action, 1.1-1.2 athletes and, 1 crime and the legal system, 1.1-1.2 disabilities, disproportionate experience of, 1 discrimination and, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7 , 8 in education, 1.1-1.2 employment, affecting, 1 Great Recession worsening racial equality, 1 home ownership, 1 ideologies of inequality, as part of, 1 income gaps, 1 language skills and, 1 Obama, election of, 1 , 2 scientific racism, 1.1-1.2 segregation, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 social capital and, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 white flight, 1 , 2 random-walk hypothesis, 1 recession See Great Recession references, 1 , 2 , 3 retirement as part of the American Dream, 1 , 2 delayment as a coping strategy, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 home ownership and funding of, 1 as jeopardized, 1 , 2.1-2.2 proposed supplementation, 1 self-employment and, 1 , 2 , 3 right attitude, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 T The Rise of Meritocracy, 1870–2033:An Essay on Education and Equality (Young), 1 , 2 R Rivera, Lauren, 1 Rosenau, Pauline Vaillancourt, 1.1-1.2 S Schmitt, John, 1.1-1.2 schools See education segregation educational, 1 , 2 , 3 occupational, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 racial, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 residential, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 of the wealthy, 1.1-1.2 white flight, 1 See also discrimination self-employment American Dream, as exemplifying, 1 franchises, 1 freelancing, 1 , 2 income, 1.1-1.2 irregular economy and, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 petty bourgeoisie and, 1 psychological characteristics, 1 rates of, diminished, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8 risk, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 subcontractors, 1 taxes, 1.1-1.2 , 2 women and minorities, 1.1-1.2 self-help books, 1 , 2 self-made individuals, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 , 6 sexual harassment, 1.1-1.2 Shapiro, Thomas, 1 , 2.1-2.2 slaves and slavery, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 small businesses, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6 , 7.1-7.2 , 8 , 9 Smith, Adam, 1 social capital benefits of, 1.1-1.2 , 2 defined, 1 , 2 , 3 discrimination and, 1 , 2 economic opportunities, having access to, 1 , 2 , 3 education and, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 mentorship as a form of, 1 nepotism and, 1.1-1.2 , 2 racism and lack of, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 restricted access, effects of, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 social climbing, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 of U.S. presidents, 1.1-1.2 weak ties, 1.1-1.2 social climbing, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 social clubs, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 social mobility athletic and artistic abilities, associated with, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 cultural capital as a factor in, 1 education link, 1 , 2 , 3 hard work as a factor, 1 individual merit, 1 integrity hindering, 1.1-1.2 marrying for money, 1 reduction of opportunities, 1 , 2 during Republican administrations, 1 role of government, 1 , 2 social climbing, 1.1-1.2 , 2 status attainment, 1 through self-employment, 1 social reform movements, 1.1-1.2 Social Register, 1 social reproduction theory, 1.1-1.2 , 2 Social Security, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 Something for Nothing: Luck in America (Lears), 1.1-1.2 T the South, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 , 5 S Stanley, Thomas, 1 status-attainment theory, 1.1-1.2 Stevens, Mitchell, 1 stock market, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 student loans, 1 , 2.1-2.2 success athletic success, 1 , 2.1-2.2 attitudes associated with, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 birth timing and, 1.1-1.2 , 2 cultural capital, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 discrimination, achieving success through, 1 education, as a factor in, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 entrepreneurial success, 1 , 2 , 3 God’s grace, success as sign of, 1 , 2 hard work and, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 human capital factors, 1 individualism as key to, 1 intelligence as a determinant, 1 luck as important, 1 meritocracy myth and, 1 mind-power ethic as success formula, 1.1-1.2 moral character and, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 parental involvement, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 the right stuff, being made of as key, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 small businesses and, 1 social capital increasing likelihood of, 1 , 2 , 3 suburban living as marker of, 1 10,000 hour rule, 1 women and, 1 , 2 supply side, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6.1-6.2 Survival of the Prettiest (Etcoff), 1.1-1.2 Swift, Adam, 1.1-1.2 T talent and abilities American aristocracy, 1 American Dream, leading to, 1 of athletes and celebrities, 1 education enhancing, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 functional theory of inequality, 1 jobs matched to talent, 1 success achieved through, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 talent-use gap, 1 upward mobility and, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 taxes capital gains, 1.1-1.2 estate taxes, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 government policies linked with, 1 , 2 incentives and credits, 1.1-1.2 income taxes, lowered by Republicans, 1 irregular economy, avoiding, 1.1-1.2 progressive taxation, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 property taxes and school funding, 1.1-1.2 self-employment and, 1.1-1.2 , 2 Social Security affected by, 1 , 2 the South and lower taxes, 1 tax breaks for the wealthy, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 of urban areas, 1 , 2 Thurow, Lester, 1 , 2.1-2.2 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1.1-1.2 , 2 tracking, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 , 4 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 1.1-1.2 U Unequal Childhoods (Lareau), 1 upper class charitable giving and, 1 cultural capital, holders of, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 , 5 deferred gratification, capability of, 1 distinctive lifestyle, 1.1-1.2 , 2 education, 1 , 2 endogamy, tendency towards, 1.1-1.2 as exclusive, 1.1-1.2 , 2 as isolated, 1.1-1.2 one percenters as members, 1 Plymouth Puritans as wellspring, 1 political power, 1.1-1.2 social clubs, frequenting, 1.1-1.2 virtues found in, 1 WASP background of, 1 women of, 1 , 2 , 3 upward mobility attitudes as affecting, 1 barriers to, 1 through college education, 1 credentialism and, 1 downward mobility, vs., 1 through entrepreneurialism, 1 glass ceiling as limiting, 1 integrity as suppressing, 1.1-1.2 irregular economy, as avenue, 1 marriage as a means of, 1.1-1.2 Michelle Obama as example, 1 slowing rates of, 1 See also social climbing See also social mobility V Vedder, Richard, 1 , 2 virtue, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 W Walmart, 1 Walton, Sam, 1 , 2 , 3 wealth accumulation gaps, 1 , 2 , 3 advantages of wealth inheritance, 1 , 2.1-2.2 capital investments, 1 charitable giving and the wealthy, 1 , 2.1-2.2 culture of, 1 , 2 discrimination and, 1 , 2 distribution as skewed, 1.1-1.2 Forbes magazine listings, 1.1-1.2 gambling, attainment through, 1 government intervention, 1.1-1.2 , 2 Great Recession affecting, 1 guilt feelings, 1.1-1.2 hard work as negligible, 1 inequalities of, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 lottery, wealth attainment through, 1 luck as a factor, 1 , 2.1-2.2 , 3 marriage rates, affecting, 1 nepotism aiding in transference of, 1 old money, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 one percenters, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ostentatious displays of, 1 political power, 1.1-1.2 property ownership producing, 1 , 2 pursuit of as a moral issue, 1.1-1.2 , 2 race affecting, 1 social and cultural capital, converted to, 1 , 2 the superwealthy, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4.1-4.2 tax breaks for the wealthy, 1 taxes on, 1.1-1.2 transfers of, 1.1-1.2 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 women and, 1 See also inheritance See also self-employment Weber, Max, 1.1-1.2 welfare, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs), 1.1-1.2 , 2 white-collar crime, 1.1-1.2 , 2 Wilson, William Julius, 1 , 2 Winfrey, Oprah, 1.1-1.2 Wisconsin school, 1.1-1.2 women attractiveness as a success factor, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 discrimination against, 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5.1-5.2 , 6.1-6.2 , 7.1-7.2 , 8.1-8.2 , 9.1-9.2 , 10 economic disparities, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 educational attainment, 1.1-1.2 , 2 family concerns, 1.1-1.2 , 2.1-2.2 , 3.1-3.2 glass ceiling, experiencing, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4 inferiority, feelings of, 1.1-1.2 labor force participation, increasing, 1.1-1.2 , 2 mentorships, access to, 1 , 2.1-2.2 occupational disparities, 1 , 2 , 3.1-3.2 , 4.1-4.2 , 5.1-5.2 political underrepresentation, 1.1-1.2 self-employment and, 1.1-1.2 as trailing partners, 1 of the upper class, 1 , 2 , 3 working class American Dream and, 1 cultural capital, lack of, 1.1-1.2 , 2 economic instability, 1.1-1.2 education issues, 1 , 2 , 3 hard work and, 1 health risks, 1 home ownership, 1 lower class value stretch, 1 nepotism, effect of, 1 the new lower class, 1 women and incomes, 1 work See hard work See occupations Y Young, Michael, 1 , 2 About the Authors Stephen J.

Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence
by Anna Lembke
Published 24 Aug 2021

The Stanford marshmallow experiment was a series of studies led by psychologist Walter Mischel in the late 1960s at Stanford University to study delayed gratification. Children between the ages of three and six were offered a choice between one small reward provided immediately (a marshmallow) or two small rewards (two marshmallows) if the child could wait for approximately fifteen minutes without eating the first marshmallow. During that time, the researcher left the room and then returned. The marshmallow was placed on a plate on a table in a room that was otherwise empty of distractions: no toys, no other children. The purpose of the study was to determine when delayed gratification develops in children. Subsequent studies examined what kinds of real-life outcomes are associated with the ability, or lack thereof, to delay gratification.

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One patient told me that when he was using methamphetamine, he convinced himself that time didn’t count. He felt as though he could stitch it back together later without anyone realizing a piece had gone missing. I imagined him floating in the night sky, big as a constellation, sewing together a rent in the universe. High-dopamine goods mess with our ability to delay gratification, a phenomenon called delay discounting. Delay discounting refers to the fact that the value of a reward goes down the longer we have to wait for it. Most of us would rather get twenty dollars today than a year from now. Our tendency to overvalue short-term rewards over longer-term ones can be influenced by many factors.

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The purpose of the study was to determine when delayed gratification develops in children. Subsequent studies examined what kinds of real-life outcomes are associated with the ability, or lack thereof, to delay gratification. The researchers discovered that of approximately one hundred children, one-third made it long enough to get the second marshmallow. Age was a major determinant: the older the child, the more able to delay. In follow-up studies, children who were able to wait for the second marshmallow tended to have better SAT scores and better educational attainment, and were overall cognitively and socially better-adjusted adolescents. One detail of the experiment that is less well known is what the children did during those fifteen minutes of struggling not to eat the first marshmallow.

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay
by Frank Partnoy
Published 15 Jan 2012

The KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) Academy in Philadelphia gives its students shirts emblazoned with the slogan DON’T EAT THE MARSHMALLOW.26 Obsessive mothers and fathers fret about whether they have a (doomed) One-Marshmallow Child or a (triumphant) Two-Marshmallow Child. Blogs such as Raising CEO Kids and Growing Rich Kids advise how to teach children about the pecuniary blessings of delayed gratification. Some parents have taken to rewarding good behavior not with immediate praise or presents but with tickets that are redeemable only at a later date. Yet concluding that children are better off delaying gratification doesn’t tell us why waiting is so much easier for some than others. The marshmallow tests might be widely known, but their results are not well understood. Although we have some understanding of the brain regions that are triggered by these kinds of tests, we don’t really know whether some four-year-olds are naturally able to wait fifteen minutes to get a second marshmallow and therefore do better in life, or whether we can save impatient children by training them to delay gratification for a few extra minutes.

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Leonardi, Sarah-Jane Vick, and Valérie Dufour, “Waiting for More: The Performance of Domestic Dogs (Canis familiaris) on Exchange Tasks,” Animal Cognition 15(1, 2012): 107–120. If you are interested in a literature survey of experiments on delayed gratification in animals, Leonardi, Vick, and Dufour’s article is a go-to source. 2. Some other animals, especially primates, are also very good at delaying gratification. Chimpanzees will wait up to eighteen minutes for their favorite food. Theodore A. Evans and Michael J. Beran, “Chimpanzees Use Self-Distraction to Cope with Impulsivity,” Biology Letters 3(2007): 599–602. 3. The recent popular books I have in mind when I refer to what many psychologists call systems 1 (automatic/intuitive) and 2 (deliberative/analytical) and to behavioral economists’ claims that our biases are predictable are Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), and Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (Harper Perennial, 2010).

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Zentall, “Mental Time Travel in Animals: A Challenging Question,” Behavioral Process 72(2, 2006): 173–183. 8. Sterck and Dufour, “First Test,” p. 334. 9. In 2011 scientists published a study of bonobos that replicated experiments with young children from the 1950s: both groups learned to delay gratification for similar periods of time when the source of the reward was more reliable. Jeffrey R. Stevens, Alexandra G. Rosati, Sarah R. Heilbronner, and Nelly Mühlhoff, “Waiting for Grapes: Expectancy and Delayed Gratification in Bonobos,” International Journal of Comparative Psychology 24(2011): 99–111. The bonobos that delayed longer probably wouldn’t later score well on the Scholastic Aptitude Test, though. 10.

The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance
by Steven Kotler
Published 4 Mar 2014

The results caught Zimbardo’s attention, but not because he was interested in delayed gratification. Rather, because they seemed to confirm his childhood suspicions about time. Zimbardo noticed two competing “time perspectives” at work in Mischel’s experiment. A time perspective is the technical name for the “permanent filter” Zimbardo described. It’s essentially our attitude toward time. For example, in Mischel’s experiment, the kids who ate the marshmallow immediately were present hedonists. They lived for the now and not the later. It wasn’t that they were unable to delay gratification, it’s that not delaying gratification—the downstream result of being a present hedonist—was their strategy for living.

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It is larger than the difference between the abilities of children from families who parents have graduate degrees and children whose parents did not finish high school. The ability to delay gratification at four is twice as good a predictor of later SAT scores as IQ. Poor impulse control is also a better predictor of juvenile delinquency than IQ.” But there’s another issue. According to psychologists, by definition, action and adventure athletes are “sensation seekers.” They’re impulsive pleasure junkies. Delayed gratification is not their game. Hell, in a 2009 Outside magazine profile of Shane McConkey, journalist Tim Sohn wrote: “Riding in a backpack as his mother skied, a three-year-old McConkey would shake the pack’s support bars while making known what he wanted: ‘Pow, Mommy, pow,’ or ‘Bump, Mommy, bump.”

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It’s Kumon math tutoring, Baby Einstein, Suzuki violin, et al. But it’s also the world McConkey walked away from that naked day at Vail. He turned his back on the factory, yet somehow still went on to become Superman. Finally, the trouble with marshmallows. In 1972, Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel performed a fairly straightforward study in delayed gratification: he offered four-year-old children a marshmallow. Either the kids could eat it immediately or, if they waited for him to return from running a short errand, they would get two marshmallows as a reward. Most kids couldn’t wait. They ate the marshmallow the moment Mischel left the room. Yet a small percentage could resist temptation and, over time, this turned out to a big deal.

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest
by Edward Chancellor
Published 15 Aug 2022

In the late 1960s, Walter Mischel, a psychologist at Stanford University, made a famous study of deferred gratification. Under controlled conditions, children were offered a choice between consuming a single treat immediately or waiting a quarter of an hour to receive double the reward. Originally titled ‘The Preschool Self-Imposed Delay of Immediate Gratification for the Sake of Delayed but More Valued Rewards Paradigm’, Mischel’s study is popularly known, after the particular reward on offer, as ‘The Marshmallow Test’.55 Of the six hundred children who took the original test, a third of the children deferred gratification long enough to receive their extra marshmallow.

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Martin Wolf, 2014 We have seen in earlier chapters how interest affects both the valuation and allocation of capital. Interest also influences how much saving takes place. When people save for a rainy day or for retirement, they must consume less today. The exercise of thrift is not an easy task. Immediate pleasures generally rank higher than deferred gratification. As Oxford’s first Professor of Political Economy, Nassau Senior, put it in 1836: ‘To abstain from the enjoyment which is in our power, or to seek distant rather than immediate results, are among the most painful exertions of the human will.’1 Interest is the wage of abstinence, said Senior.

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D., 163–4 Röpke, Wilhelm, 97, 100, 299 Rothbard, Murray, 30 Rothermere, Lord, 93 Roubini, Nouriel, 207, 254 Rousseff, Dilma, 258 Rucellai, Giovanni, 21 Rueff, Jacques, 85, 91, 115‡, 251 Ruskin, John, 180–81 Sainsbury’s (British grocery chain), 160 Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy, Duke of, 50–51, 52, 57 Samuelson, Paul, 246–7 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 292 Savills (property consultants), 174 saving: bonus of compound interest, 190; China’s savings glut, 268–9; as deferred gratification, 29, 188–90; and interest, xxiv, 44, 77, 188–93, 194–9, 205–6; interest as ‘wages of abstinence’, xxiv, xxv, 188–91; savings glut hypothesis, 115–16, 117, 126, 128–9, 132, 191, 252; Terborgh on, 125* savings & loan crisis, US, 111, 145 Say, Jean-Baptiste, 99 Sbrancia, Maria Belen, 290 Scandinavian banking crisis (early 1990s), 136 Schacht, Hjalmar, 82, 92, 312 Schäuble, Wolfgang, 299 Scheidel, Walter, 204 Schumpeter, Joseph, 16, 32, 46, 95, 218; Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), 126, 140, 296–7; ‘creative destruction’ idea, xx, 140–43, 153, 296–7; on deflation, 100; History of Economic Analysis, xviii; view of intellectuals, 297 Schwartz, Anna, 98, 99, 105, 116 Schwarzman, Steven, 207 Sears (department store), 169–70 secular stagnation, 77, 124–8, 131, 132–9, 151, 205–6 Sée, Henri Eugene, Modern Capitalism (1928), 28* Seneca the Younger, 20–21 Senior, Nassau, 188, 191 Senn, Martin, 193 shadow banks: in Canada, 174–5; in China, 266, 270, 282*, 283–5, 286; collapse in subprime crisis, 221, 283; illiquid products, 226–7; re-emergence after 2008 crisis, 221, 227, 231, 233; structured finance products, 116, 227, 283–5; Trust companies as precursors of, 84*; types of, 221; ‘Ultra-short’ bond exchange-traded funds (ETFs), 227 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of, 27 ‘shareholder value’ philosophy, 163–6, 167, 170–71 Shaw, Edward, 286 Shaw, Leslie, 83, 83* Shiba Inu (cryptocurrency), 308 Shin, Hyun Song, 254, 263 Shiyan, Hubei province, 275 Silicon Valley, 148, 151, 173, 176, 204 Silver, Morris, 7, 11 Singer, Paul, 185, 246 Smith, Adam, 14, 174; on monopolies, 162, 298; view of interest, 27, 27*, 31, 183; on wealth, 181; The Wealth of Nations (1776), xxii, 27–8, 27*, 31 Smithers, Andrew, Productivity and the Bonus Culture (2019), 152* Smoot–Hawley Act (1930), 261 socialism, 188, 297, 298 Soddy, Frederick, 181, 242 Solon the ‘Lawgiver’, 9, 18 Solow, Bob, 128 Somary, Felix, 94–5, 308 Sombart, Werner, Modern Capitalism, 22* Soros, George, 148*, 273, 283 South Africa, 258 South America: loans/securities from, 77, 79–80; precious metals from, 49, 168; speculation in bonds from, 64, 65–6, 91; trade during Napoleonic Wars, 70 South Korea, 267 South Sea Bubble (1720), 62, 65*, 68, 69, 307 Soviet Union, 278 Spain, 144–5, 147, 168, 213, 253, 279; mortgage bonds (cédulas), 117 Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs), 307 speculative manias, xxiii; Borio on, 135; and cryptocurrencies, 177–9; ‘hyperbolic discounting’ during, 176–7; in period from 1630s to 1840s, 64–6, 67–72, 73, 74, 75–6, 77–8, 79–80; technology companies in post-crisis years, 176–9; before Wall Street Crash (1929), 91 see also Mississippi bubble Spencer, Grant, 177 Sraffa, Piero, 42 St Ambrose, 18 St Augustine, 18–19, 202 St Bonaventure, 19 Stable Money League/Association, 87, 96 Standard Oil, 157 state capitalism, 280, 284, 292–5, 297, 298 Stefanel (Italian clothing company), 147 Stein, Jeremy, 231, 233 Steuart, Sir James, 53, 273 ‘sticky prices’ theory, 87* Strong, Benjamin, 82–3, 86–8, 90*, 92, 93, 98, 112 Stuckey’s Bank, 63, 66–7 subprime mortgage crisis, xxii, 114, 116, 117–18, 131, 211, 292; produces ‘dash for cash’, 227; unwinding of carry trades during, 221, 227 Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, 12 Suez Canal, 78 Sumerian civilization, 4, 6, 8, 15 Summers, Larry, 124–5, 127, 129, 185, 230, 230*, 235, 302 Sumner, William Graham, ‘Forgotten Man’, xx, xxii, 198 Susa, Henry of, 25 Svensson, Lars, 247 Sweden, 174, 241, 242, 244, 245, 247, 294 Sweezy, Paul, 156 Swiss National Bank, 172–3, 293–4 Switzerland, 172, 174, 226, 233, 241, 244, 245 Sydney (Australia), 175 Sylla, Richard, 4, 11, 68, 109 Tacitus, 20–21 Tasker, Peter, 271 Tawney, R.H., 201 tax structures, 164; offshore tax havens, 210 Taylor, John, 116–17, 129, 252 Tencent, 283 Tencin, Claudine Alexandrine Guérin, Madame de, 51 Terborgh, George, 125–6, 127 Tesla, 176–7 Theranos, 149 Thiel, Peter, 263 Third Avenue (investment company), 227–8 Thornton, Daniel, 192 Thornton, Henry, 41–2, 66*, 70, 75 Thornton, Henry Sykes, 66* Tiberius, Roman Emperor, 12 time, concept of, xviii; and act of saving, 188–90; canonical ‘hours’, 21; and Lewis Carroll, 309; in era of ultra-low interest rates, 59, 177; Franklin on, xviii, 22, 28; and Hayek, 32; interest as ‘time value of money’, xxiv, xxv–xxvi, 10, 14–15, 16, 20, 22, 26–7, 28–32; Lord King’s ‘paradox of policy’, 194, 230*; the Marshmallow Test, 29, 189; and medieval scholars, 19–20; Renaissance writings on, 21; secularization of, 21–2; speculators’ misunderstanding of, 59; and thought in ancient world, 20–21; time as individual’s possession, 20, 21, 25; ‘time in production’, xxiv, 14–15, 16, 22, 95, 95†, 141; ‘time preference’ theory, xxiv*, 28–32, 42, 95, 188–9; Thomas Wilson’s ideas, 26–7, 28, 30 Time-Warner, 167 Tooke, Thomas, 69 Toporowski, Jan, 167 Torrens, Robert, 66 Toys ‘R’ Us, 169 trade and commerce: in ancient world, 6, 7–8, 12, 14, 15; Atlantic trade, 59; business partnerships (commenda, societas), 26; commercial classes/interests, 35, 36–7, 38–40, 41, 43, 44, 66–7; commercial importance of time, xviii, 15–16, 21, 22; emergence of modern trade cycle, 62–4; expansion of in Middle Ages, 19, 21–3, 25–6; international trade, 6, 15, 23, 24, 59, 252–3, 261–2; and Italian Renaissance, 21; in medieval Italy, 21–3; mercantile/shipping loans, 6, 12, 14, 22–3, 26, 219 TransAmerica Life Insurance, 199* Trichet, Jean-Claude, 239 Trollope, Anthony, The Way We Live Now, 73 Truman, Harry, 84 The Truman Show (Peter Weir film, 1998), 185–7 Trump, Donald, 185, 261, 262, 291–2, 299, 304, 310 trusts/monopolies: in early twentieth century Europe, 159; Lenin on, 159–60; merger ‘tsunami’ after 2008 crisis, 160–63, 161*, 168–70, 182–3, 237, 298; ‘platform companies’, 161; Adam Smith on, 162, 298; in US robber baron era, 156, 157–9, 203 tulip mania (1630s), 68 Tunisia, 255 Turgot, Anne-Robert Jacques, 15, 28–9, 30, 218 Turkey, xxiii, 252, 258–60, 263 Turkmenistan, 262 Turner, Adair, 292 TXU (energy company), 162 Uber, 149, 150 ‘unicorn’ start-up companies, 148–50, 153, 155, 173, 176–7 Union Pacific Railroad, 157, 158 United States: as bubble economy, 184–7; credit expansion of 1920s, 87–91, 92–4, 96–8, 112, 203; Democrats’ Green New Deal policy, 302; economic expansion (1929–41), 143; economy in Bretton Woods era, 291, 302; financial crisis (1873), 157; foreign securities/loans in 1920s, 91; inflation in 1970s, 108–9; Knickerbocker Panic (1907), 83–4; large-scale immigration into, 78; loan of farm animals in, 4; long-term interest rates (1945–2021), 134; loss of manufacturing jobs to China, 261*, 261; low economic vitality in post-crisis decade, 124, 150–53, 191; monetary policy in 1900s, 83–4, 83*; post-Second World War recovery, 126; public debt today, 291–2, 291*; recessions of early 1980s, 109–10, 151; reversal of global capital flows (late-1920s), 93; robber baron era, 156–9, 203; shift from manufacturing towards services, 167–8, 182; and zombification, 146, 152–3, 155 see also Federal Reserve, US United States Steel Corporation, 157–8 Universities Superannuation Scheme, UK, 196 Useless Ethereum Token, 178 usury: attacked from left and right, 17; attitudes to in ancient world, 17–18, 19, 20–21, 219; in Britain, 24, 26–7, 34, 40, 42, 65‡, 65; Church law forbids, 18–19, 23–4; definitions in Elizabethan era, 26–7; etymology of word, 5; Galiani on, 218–19, 220, 221; and Jews, 18; Marx on, 16, 200–201; medieval Church acknowledges risk, 25–6; Old Testament restrictions on, 17; Proudhon-Bastiat debate on, xvii–xix, xxi, xxii, xxv, 9; in Renaissance world, 22–3; scholastic attack on, 18–20, 23–4, 25 Valeant Pharmaceuticals, 161, 168–9 Vancouver, 175 Veblen, Thorstein, Theory of Business Enterprise (1904), 158, 159, 166 Velde, François, 58*, 59 Venice, 22, 23 Vinci, Leonardo da, Salvator Mundi, 208–9 VIX index, 228–9, 254 La Voix du Peuple, xvii–xix volatility, 153, 228–30, 233, 234, 254, 304, 305 Volcker, Paul, 108–9, 121, 145, 184, 240 Voltaire, 57 Wainwright, Oliver, 209 Waldman, Steve, 206 Waldorf Astoria, New York, 285–6 Wall Street Crash (October 1929): Fed’s response to, 98, 100, 101, 108; Fisher and Keynes fail to foresee, 94–5; Hayek’s interpretation of, 101, 105; low real rates in 1920s USA, 87–91, 89, 92–4, 96–8, 203; low/stable inflation at time of, 134; monetarist view of, 98–9, 101, 105, 108; predictions/warnings of, 93–5, 96, 101, 105, 308; reversal of international capital flows (late-1920s), 93, 93*, 261 WallStreetBets, 307, 309 Walpole, Horace, 62–3 Warburg, Paul, 94 Warsh, Kevin, 228 wealth: ‘Buddenbrooks effect’, 216; conspicuous consumption by mega-rich, 54–5, 208–10, 212; definitions of, 179–82, 216; elite displays as signs of inequality, 209–10, 212; virtual wealth bubbles, 179, 180, 181–2, 185, 193–5, 206, 215, 216–17, 217†, 229–30, 237; wealth illusion, 193–5, 198 Welch, Jack, 170, 171 Wells, H.

The 1% Rule: How to Fall in Love With the Process and Achieve Your Wildest Dreams
by Tommy Baker
Published 18 Feb 2018

However, because this has become the status quo, we run from delayed gratification in nearly every life circumstance. The easiest place to see this is our waistlines. As of print, 40% of adults and 19% of children in the United States are classified as obese. This is not an issue of know-how, access, or information. It’s simple human behavior: We’re unwilling to delay gratification of our most basic human desires. While I do have empathy and compassion for people who struggle with their weight, if you’re unable to delay gratification with food, that’s on you. Everyone knows what to eat, and access to healthy food is more affordable than ever.

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CULTIVATING PERSISTENCE HAVE A CHIP ON YOUR SHOULDER DO YOU WANT IT BADLY ENOUGH? COMPLACENCY KILLS PERSISTENCE HOW YOU DO ONE THING IS HOW YOU DO EVERYTHING CHAPTER 7: ENDURANCE ENDURANCE IS MESSY A DECADE OF OVERNIGHT SUCCESS YOUR MOUNTAIN IS YOURS FALL IN LOVE WITH DELAYED GRATIFICATION ALWAYS MOVING FORWARD TAKE NOTE ALONG THE JOURNEY CULTIVATING ENDURANCE CHAPTER 8: THE 1% BLUEPRINT THE 1% QUESTION PARKINSON’S LAW ANSWERING THE QUESTION E-MAIL AND SOCIAL MEDIA CAN WAIT AUDIT DELETION RESISTANCE DAILY GAME CHAPTER 9: CRAFT YOUR VISION LET GO PAINT YOUR MASTERPIECE NORTH STAR TEST DRIVING ARIZONA THE TIGHT ROPE SURRENDER CRAFTING YOUR VISION BELIEF IS THE SECRET SAUCE CHAPTER 10: REVERSE ENGINEER YOUR SUCCESS SCREW THE HOW WHAT WOULD HAVE TO HAPPEN?

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Gary Vaynerchuk’s first YouTube video is a prime example—crappy graphics, a raw Gary, a bad haircut, and no keynote speech clips from thousands in the crowd. In your industry, you too can identify one person and go back to their start or early evolutions and, instead of letting yourself off the hook, become inspired by what’s possible for you. FALL IN LOVE WITH DELAYED GRATIFICATION Instant gratification is an endurance killer. As a culture, it has become the expectation that you and I can have anything we want right here, right now, with very little work. Want to go on a hot date tonight? No, you don’t have to stir up the confidence to talk to her and risk rejection.

Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life
by Henry Cloud
Published 1 Apr 1992

In her desire to do the right thing, or to avoid conflict, she ends up taking on problems that God never intended her to take on: her mother’s chronic loneliness, her boss’s irresponsibility, her friend’s unending crises, her church leader’s guilt-ridden message of self-sacrifice, and her husband’s immaturity. And her problems don’t end there. Sherrie’s inability to say no has significantly affected her son’s ability to delay gratification and behave himself in school, and, in some way, this inability may be driving her daughter to withdraw. Any confusion of responsibility and ownership in our lives is a problem of boundaries. Just as homeowners set physical property lines around their land, we need to set mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual boundaries for our lives to help us distinguish what is our responsibility and what isn’t.

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Indeed, controllers do lots of damage to others, but they also have boundary problems. Let’s see what goes on underneath. Controllers are undisciplined people. They have little ability to curb their impulses or desires. While it appears that they “get what they want in life,” they are still slaves to their appetites. Delaying gratification is difficult for them. That’s why they hate the word no from others. They desperately need to learn to listen to the boundaries of others to help them observe their own. Controllers also are limited in their ability to take responsibility for owning their lives. Having relied on bullying or indirectness, they can’t function on their own in the world.

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Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. (Heb. 12:10–11) When parents greet their children’s disagreement, disobedience, or practicing with simple hostility, the children are denied the benefit of being trained. They don’t learn that delaying gratification and being responsible have benefits. They only learn how to avoid someone’s wrath. Ever wonder why some Christians fear an angry God, no matter how much they read about his love? The results of this hostility are difficult to see because these children quickly learn how to hide under a compliant smile.

Turning Pro: Tap Your Inner Power and Create Your Life's Work
by Steven Pressfield
Published 14 Aug 2011

THE PROFESSIONAL LIVES IN THE PRESENT The amateur spends his time in the past and the future. He permits himself to fear and to hope. The professional has taught himself to banish these distractions. When Stephen Sondheim makes a hat, he is thinking of nothing else. He is immersed. He loses himself in the work and in the moment. THE PROFESSIONAL DEFERS GRATIFICATION I’m guilty of checking my e-mail. Are you? We’re crazy. What do we imagine we’re going to find in our Inbox? The children who were able to sit for three minutes with a marshmallow on the table in front of them without eating it were rewarded with two marshmallows when the experimenter returned.

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
by James Clear
Published 15 Oct 2018

Our preference for instant gratification reveals an important truth about success: because of how we are wired, most people will spend all day chasing quick hits of satisfaction. The road less traveled is the road of delayed gratification. If you’re willing to wait for the rewards, you’ll face less competition and often get a bigger payoff. As the saying goes, the last mile is always the least crowded. This is precisely what research has shown. People who are better at delaying gratification have higher SAT scores, lower levels of substance abuse, lower likelihood of obesity, better responses to stress, and superior social skills. We’ve all seen this play out in our own lives.

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If you don’t buy desserts and chips at the store, you’ll often eat healthier food when you get home. At some point, success in nearly every field requires you to ignore an immediate reward in favor of a delayed reward. Here’s the problem: most people know that delaying gratification is the wise approach. They want the benefits of good habits: to be healthy, productive, at peace. But these outcomes are seldom top-of-mind at the decisive moment. Thankfully, it’s possible to train yourself to delay gratification—but you need to work with the grain of human nature, not against it. The best way to do this is to add a little bit of immediate pleasure to the habits that pay off in the long-run and a little bit of immediate pain to ones that don’t.

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And so the present self can trounce all over its dreams.” For more, see Daniel Goldstein, “The Battle between Your Present and Future Self,” TEDSalon NY2011, November 2011, video, https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_goldstein_the_battle_between_your_present_and_future_self. People who are better at delaying gratification have higher SAT scores: Walter Mischel, Ebbe B. Ebbesen, and Antonette Raskoff Zeiss, “Cognitive and Attentional Mechanisms in Delay of Gratification,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 21, no. 2 (1972), doi:10.1037/h0032198; W. Mischel, Y. Shoda, and M. Rodriguez, “Delay of Gratification in Children,” Science 244, no. 4907 (1989), doi:10.1126/science.2658056; Walter Mischel, Yuichi Shoda, and Philip K.

Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter
by Dr. Dan Ariely and Jeff Kreisler
Published 7 Nov 2017

Rob’s story—and that of retirement saving in general—highlights our problems with delayed gratification and self-control. We have a hard time resisting temptation, even when we know all too well what is good for us. Raise your hand if you promised yourself last night that you’d wake up early and work out today. Keep your hand up if raising your hand is all the exercise you’ve gotten today. Delayed gratification and self-control are not strictly about the psychology of money, of course, but our ability to delay gratification and to control ourselves influence how we manage (or really, how we mismanage) our money, for better or worse.

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Everyone recognizes that the moment we open a phone while driving increases the probability that we will die in a dramatic way. Everyone also recognizes that doing so is a really stupid way to risk our own lives and the lives of others. Nobody thinks it’s a wise choice. Nevertheless, we keep on doing it. Why are we so foolish? Because of these emotional factors—our inability to delay gratification, the uncertainty of dying from texting while driving, and our overconfidence in our ability to avoid death. Together these factors distort the value equation. We continue to be “perfect people” in the future, but that text is now. Now tempts us. We spend more money than we know we should, eat more than we know we should, and, depending upon our divine affinity, sin more than we know we should.

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See feelings and emotions endless soup bowl research, 27–28, 192–93 end-of-life healthcare decisions, 121 endowment effect, 114–15, 120–23, 158 energy usage, 79–80, 248–49 Enron, 51 evaluability/comparisons, 33, 37–39, 202–4 executive pay in America, 101–2 expectations, 167–81 overview, 180–81, 214–16, 220–21 anticipation period, 170, 171–72 and branding, 174–76 and delayed gratification, 178–79 distortion of value judgments, 167–70 experience and effect of, 170–71, 172–74 influence of rituals and language, 179–80 past experiences’ influence on, 176–78 and pricing apps, 102–3 suave victor vs. likely loser, 6 experience and effect of expectations, 170–71, 172–74 external vs. internal anchors, 106 EZ-Pass technology, 85 fairness aspect of value, 131–48 overview, 134–35, 137–38, 148, 219–20 cost of knowledge and acquired skills, 139–42 fair effort, 139–43 fixed costs vs. marginal costs, 143 language and, 159–60 responses to perceived unfairness, 131–34, 135–39 ultimatum game, 135–36 See also effort and perception of fairness or value feelings and emotions about money, 49–51 and decisions made in the present vs. the future, 185–89, 190 manipulating ourselves with, 233 pricing experiences and, 104–6 valuing possessions based on, 115 See also human nature financial crisis of 2008, 52 financial decision-making, 237–51 overview, 255–56 choices based on descriptions vs. items, 153–56 complexity of, 8–9, 33 conscious vs. unconscious decisions, 109 fudging made up rules, 54 improving our financial environments, 251, 253–58 and outside forces, 237–40 and pain avoidance techniques, 68–71 psychological mistakes, 5–6 questions to consider, x–xi simplifying the process, 48–49 subscription offers illustrating relativity problem, 34–35 sunk costs and decision to continue, 126–30 understanding forces at play, xi–xii See also money mistakes; opportunity costs financial literacy, xi–xii, 13, 43 fixed costs vs. marginal costs, 143 Frederick, Shane, 12–13 free advice, 225 “free” items.

No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea
by James Livingston
Published 15 Feb 2016

Now it’s a fetter on the development of the forces of production. It chains us to a past we don’t have to relive: it’s a repetition compulsion. So how, then, can the symptom, the compulsion to work, function as an attempted cure? Only by releasing us, finally, from the drive to produce a surplus, to defer gratification, to save for a rainy day. Only by allowing us to comprehend that by now most of our labor has become socially unnecessary—that is, work with little, diminishing, or no value in the labor market. Only by showing us that hard work is hard time, nothing more, nothing less. When we understand that simple fact, the criterion of need—from each according to his or her abilities, to each according to his or her needs—can modulate, and perhaps replace, the principle of productivity.

Meet the Frugalwoods: Achieving Financial Independence Through Simple Living
by Elizabeth Willard Thames
Published 6 Mar 2018

In the unfurling of this personal frugality boot camp, Nate and I made the discovery that we were both second-marshmallow kids. Not literally, as we weren’t lucky enough to be actual subjects in this research experiment, but we fall into a category of people wired from an early age for delayed gratification. You’ve probably heard of what’s often referred to as the Stanford marshmallow study of the ’60s and ’70s, in which preschoolers underwent a now-classic test in delayed gratification. In this experiment, researchers sat a preschooler at a desk alone in a room, with two marshmallows atop the desk and the following instructions: the researcher needed to leave the room for a moment and the child could either eat one marshmallow while the researcher was absent or, if the child could wait until the researcher returned, the child could eat both marshmallows.

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In May 1992, which was the final month of my second-grade career, I had one hundred coupons at last. I got to take Tenderheart Bear home with me. She was covered in dust because, as my teacher explained to my mom, those big stuffed animals had been sitting up on that top shelf for years. I don’t know why Nate and I are both so attuned to the merits of delayed gratification, but it’s an attribute we’ve brought out and enhanced in each other. Sacrificing short-term desires like lattes and scones on Saturday afternoons for the long-term gains of living life on our own terms makes rational sense to both of us. It also appeals to our ingrained desire for efficiency.

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I’m astounded at how many ways there are to waste money, and at how many of them I’ve personally fallen victim to. Marketers diligently create needs we never knew we had and many products advertised to us fill false needs. This type of spending skirts the question of what we really want out of life. It’s the classic conundrum of forgoing delayed gratification played out day after day, purchase after purchase. The more we buy, and buy into this culture of more, the more we think we need. It’s a vicious, endless cycle. While I’m pretty sure the phrase “extreme frugality” sounds like a penance, it’s actually the exact opposite. It’s a deliverance.

The Cheapskate Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of Americans Living Happily Below Their Means
by Jeff Yeager
Published 8 Jun 2010

I’ve heard a lot of cheapskate slogans that would make great bumper stickers for my Cheap Pride Movement, but that one from Miser Adviser Lucy Feller is the undisputed winner, combining the two major pillars of cheapskate life: delayed gratification and Crock-Pot cooking. Lucy was speaking specifically about teaching children the importance of being patient, particularly when it comes to wanting things like the latest designer fashions or newest techno-gadget. Not only does she have three kids of her own, but she’s been an elementary school teacher ever since her own children started attending school, so Lucy’s had plenty of discussions about the virtues of delayed gratification. The oxygen mask approach to raising children is, in large part, an exercise in saying “no” to your kids.

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While the cheapskate next door is all in favor of rooting out true bargains, the thought process they put into it—what I call “premeditated shopping”—and the fact that they don’t really enjoy shopping, overrides the impulse to buy stuff they don’t need just because it’s being sold at a good price. When we cheapskates shop, we shop deliberately. Premeditated shopping has two tenets: prior planning and delayed gratification. Whether we’re shopping for groceries, clothing, or just about anything else, we always make a shopping list before we leave home. And that shopping list isn’t just dictated off the top of our head as we head for the store. It’s usually been composed on an ongoing basis and takes into account things we already have on hand, to avoid buying things unnecessarily.

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About nine out of ten of cheapskates polled say that they routinely research and comparison shop for items that cost $20 or more, most often relying on the Internet and Consumer Reports to facilitate that process. But even once the cheapskate has researched and targeted an item to be purchased, he’s usually in no hurry to rush out and buy it, unless it’s on sale or it’s a true necessity. The cheapskate next door thrives on delayed gratification, or “spending procrastination,” as I call it: Put off buying today what you can always buy tomorrow. Many cheapskates practice what I called in my first book a “mandatory waiting period”: waiting at least a week or two between the time you see a (discretionary) item in the store, and when you go back to buy it.

You Are What You Read
by Jodie Jackson
Published 3 Apr 2019

This could involve reading long-form articles and reading from news organisations that practise slow journalism. Slow journalism is a growing movement developed in response to this fast-paced media environment; it takes a longer-term view on issues to include depth, analysis and reflection rather than simply breaking news. This could include news magazines like The Correspondent, Delayed Gratification or The Week. Headlines are not the only pitfall to avoid when arming yourself against being misinformed by the news. A common informational hazard is that the news tends to report more on the extraordinary rather than the ordinary. The psychological paradox of this is that the more we hear about the odd and the extraordinary, the more it starts to seem normal and ordinary.

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Long-form articles can ‘allow consumers to engage with complex subjects in more detail and allow journalists to bring in more sources, consider more points of view, add historical context and cover events too complex to tell in limited words.’8 This is not to say that all long-form news accomplishes the above or that short-form does not have its own value. ‘In our pursuit of quality, it is important for us to analyse all the information in order to gain a balanced perspective. With this in mind, I would recommend reading, in addition to other news sources, slower journalism, from news organisations such as Delayed Gratification, The Correspondent, The Economist, Time and The Week. The conflict between good-quality journalism and profitability is not just a problem for the industry; it is our problem to solve too. We rely so heavily on the news to help us understand as well as help shape our society, and poor-quality information will lead to poor-quality decisions.

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Notes 1 Harbison, F., quoted in Teheranian, M., Communications policy for national development, Routledge, London, 2016. 2 Schramm, W., Mass media and national development, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1973. 3 The Total Audience Report: Q1 2016, Nielsen.com, available at: http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/reports/2016/the-total-audience-report-q1-2016.html 4 Johnson, C., The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption, O’Reilly Media, London, 2015. 5 Ibid., p. 31. 6 Ibid., p. 35. 7 Merrill, J., The Elite Press, Pitman, New York, 1968, p. 20. 8 Mitchell, A., Stocking, G. and Matsa, K., ‘Long-Form Reading Shows Signs of Life in Our Mobile News World’, Pew Research Center for Journalism & Media, 5 May 2016. 9 Shearer, E. and Gottfried, J., News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2017, Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project, 2018, available at: http://www.journalism.org/2017/09/07/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2017/ 10 Pariser, E., Beware online ‘filter bubbles’, Ted.com, 2018, available at: https://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles 11 Vinderslev, A., BuzzFeed: The top 10 examples of BuzzFeed doing native advertising, Native Advertising Institute, 2018, assssssvailable at: https://nativeadvertisinginstitute.com/blog/10-examples-buzzfeed-native-advertising/ RESOURCES News organisations: ‘BBC World Hacks’ BRIGHT Magazine The Correspondent Delayed Gratification INKLINE Monocle News Deeply The Optimist Daily Positive News Solutions Journalism Network Sparknews ‘The Upside’ (by the Guardian) The Week ‘What’s Working’ (by the Huffington Post) YES! Media Books: The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity by Steven Pinker Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now by Alan Rusbridger Broadcasting Happiness: The Science of Igniting and Sustaining Positive Change by Michelle Gielan Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress by Steven Pinker Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – And Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling, with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund A Force for Good: How the American News Media Have Propelled Positive Change by Rodger Streitmatter The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption by Clay A.

Paper Promises
by Philip Coggan
Published 1 Dec 2011

As with illegal drugs today, or Prohibition in the 1920s, criminals are the main beneficiaries when governments ban things that people desperately want. However, the moralists would not have worried that usury laws restricted the options of borrowers, as well as lenders. They argued that an avoidance of debt was good for the soul. Having to defer gratification was a way of instilling self-discipline. Debt was the road to ruin: ‘He who goes a borrowing goes a sorrowing,’ as Benjamin Franklin wrote. The distinction between productive and unproductive loans is hard to make absolute. Many people might make a loan to a friend or family member without being paid back; they might also make loans to strangers as an act of charity.

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IGNORING POLONIUS 1 James Macdonald, A Free Nation Deep in Debt: The Financial Roots of Democracy, Princeton, 2003. 2 Sidney Homer and Richard Sylla, A History of Interest Rates, 4th edn, New York, 2005. 3 Macdonald, A Free Nation. 4 Charles Kindleberger, A Financial History of Western Europe, London, 1984. 5 Virginia Cowles, The Great Swindle: The Story of the South Sea Bubble, London, 1960. 6 Hilaire Belloc, Usury, London, 1931. 7 Homer and Sylla, Interest Rates. 8 Ibid. 9 Plutarch, Life of Lucullus. 10 Homer and Sylla, Interest Rates. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ian Mortimer, The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III, the Father of the English Nation, London, 2006. 14 Macdonald, A Free Nation. 15 Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, This Time Is Different, Princeton, 2009. 16 All quotes from Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, London, 2004. 17 From ibid. 18 Homer and Sylla, Interest Rates. 19 One might raise the objection that the debtor is making no such rational calculation, that he or she is unable to wait to get his or her hands on the desired goods. This is a problem of deferred gratification. But the creditor has to be sure that the debtor will be able to repay, so the system still depends on the prospect of growth. 20 Lendol Calder, Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit, Princeton, 1999. 21 Ibid. 22 Some economists think that Keynes was wrong about this, on the grounds that saving must always equal investment.

Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis
by David Boyle
Published 15 Jan 2014

They cling on also in a variety of forms and versions, highly eclectic and quite impossible to define. The middle classes are like elephants: you know one when you see one. The key question is whether there is anything any more which holds these disparate identities together. Patrick Hutber’s thrift may have disappeared. Even the sense of deferred gratification which used to define the middle classes is not quite as secure as it was. The famous experiment by Walter Mischel in the 1960s offered four-year-olds one marshmallow now or two in twenty minutes and found that those who waited went on to enormously outperform the others in the US scholastic aptitude tests.

…

The middle classes, whoever they are, are absolutely committed to health, independence and education and whatever will promote it, even if they interpret the path to that ideal — working harder or working less — in very different ways. It still requires sacrifice, saving and planning ahead. It still means deferred gratification. It still means the middle classes turn out independent-minded, intelligent children quite capable of understanding the world, even if sometimes they don’t. But it also explains that embattled sense that goes beyond economics. This is a cultural struggle for survival as well as an economic one.

Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
by Dan Ariely
Published 19 Feb 2007

This approach might not be as effective as the dictatorial treatment, but it can help push us in the right direction (perhaps even more so if we train people to do it, and give them experience in setting their own deadlines). What’s the bottom line? We have problems with self-control, related to immediate and delayed gratification—no doubt there. But each of the problems we face has potential self-control mechanisms, as well. If we can’t save from our paycheck, we can take advantage of our employer’s automatic deduction option; if we don’t have the will to exercise regularly alone, we can make an appointment to exercise in the company of our friends.

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I kept a bucket within reach to catch the vomit that would inevitably come up, after which the fever, shivering, and headache would begin. At some point I would fall asleep and wake up aching with flulike symptoms. By noon I would be more or less OK and would go back to work. The difficulty that I, and the rest of the patients, had with the interferon was the basic problem of delayed gratification and self-control. On every injection day I was faced with a trade-off between giving myself an injection and feeling sick for the next 16 hours (a negative immediate effect), and the hope that the treatment would cure me in the long term (a positive long-term effect). At the end of the six-month trial the doctors told me that I was the only patient in the protocol who had followed the regimen in the way they designed it.

…

THE LESSON I took away from my interferon treatment is a general one: if a particular desired behavior results in an immediate negative outcome (punishment), this behavior will be very difficult to promote, even if the ultimate outcome (in my case, improved health) is highly desirable. After all, that’s what the problem of delayed gratification is all about. Certainly, we know that exercising regularly and eating more vegetables will help us be healthier, even if we don’t live to be as old as the Delany sisters; but because it is very hard to hold a vivid image of our future health in our mind’s eye, we can’t keep from reaching for the doughnuts.

Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization
by Edward Slingerland
Published 31 May 2021

As people age, we see gray matter density decreasing and white matter density increasing in the frontal cortex, and this reflects a corresponding decline in performance on the lateral-thinking creativity task. The more the frontal cortex matures, the less flexible our cognition becomes. The PFC, while key for remaining on task and delaying gratification, is the deadly enemy of creativity. It allows us to remain laser-focused on task but blinds us to remote possibilities. Both creativity and learning new associations require a relaxation of cognitive control that allows the mind to wander.23 An fMRI study of jazz pianists showed that the transition from playing scales or a completely written-out tune to freely improvising was reflected by a downregulation of the PFC.24 Other correlational evidence points in the same direction.

…

As adults, the childish drive to meander, examine boogers, and play becomes subordinated to productive routine. Get up, dress, commute, work, eat, sleep, repeat. This is the realm of the PFC, that center of executive control, and it is no accident that its maturation corresponds to an increased ability to stay on task, delay gratification, and subordinate emotions and desires to abstract reason and the achievement of practical goals. And it couldn’t be otherwise. Truth be told, as fun and endearing as they are, children are completely useless. If they were in charge of things we’d be doomed. My thirteen-year-old daughter cannot be relied upon to turn off the oven after she uses it, to remember to walk the dog, or even to hang up a wet towel rather than throw it in a heap on the floor.

…

My thirteen-year-old daughter cannot be relied upon to turn off the oven after she uses it, to remember to walk the dog, or even to hang up a wet towel rather than throw it in a heap on the floor. Even so, she is a laser-focused superachiever compared to her five-year-old self. The PFC is a physiologically expensive bit of machinery, and we evolved it for a reason. The ability to remain task-focused, repress emotions, and delay gratification is a crucial human trait. We cannot remain children forever. This is why we shouldn’t make too much of a four year-old’s ability to outfox an adult in the counterintuitive version of the blicket test. Reflecting on their apparent creativity advantage, Alison Gopnik draws upon an analogy from the corporate world: There’s a kind of evolutionary division of labor between children and adults.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
by Susan Cain
Published 24 Jan 2012

Our place on this continuum influences our choice of friends and mates, and how we make conversation, resolve differences, and show love. It affects the careers we choose and whether or not we succeed at them. It governs how likely we are to exercise, commit adultery, function well without sleep, learn from our mistakes, place big bets in the stock market, delay gratification, be a good leader, and ask “what if.”* It’s reflected in our brain pathways, neurotransmitters, and remote corners of our nervous systems. Today introversion and extroversion are two of the most exhaustively researched subjects in personality psychology, arousing the curiosity of hundreds of scientists.

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Remember that first client I told you about, the one I called Laura in order to protect her identity? That was a story about me. I was my own first client. * Answer key: exercise: extroverts; commit adultery: extroverts; function well without sleep: introverts; learn from our mistakes: introverts; place big bets: extroverts; delay gratification: introverts; be a good leader: in some cases introverts, in other cases extroverts, depending on the type of leadership called for; ask “what if”: introverts. * Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, W. B. Yeats, Frédéric Chopin, Marcel Proust, J. M. Barrie, George Orwell, Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss), Charles Schulz, Steven Spielberg, Larry Page, J.

…

Instead of seeing these kids as vulnerable to adversity, parents should see them as malleable—for worse, but also for better.” He describes eloquently a high-reactive child’s ideal parent: someone who “can read your cues and respect your individuality; is warm and firm in placing demands on you without being harsh or hostile; promotes curiosity, academic achievement, delayed gratification, and self-control; and is not harsh, neglectful, or inconsistent.” This advice is terrific for all parents, of course, but it’s crucial for raising a high-reactive child. (If you think your child might be high-reactive, you’re probably already asking yourself what else you can do to cultivate your son or daughter.

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles
by Steven Pressfield
Published 2 Jun 2002

But they can also be Resistance. When we drug ourselves to blot out our soul’s call, we are being good Americans and exemplary consumers. We’re doing exactly what TV commercials and pop materialist culture have been brainwashing us to do from birth. Instead of applying self-knowledge, self-discipline, delayed gratification and hard work, we simply consume a product. Many pedestrians have been maimed or killed at the intersection of Resistance and Commerce. RESISTANCE AND VICTIMHOOD * * * Doctors estimate that seventy to eighty percent of their business is non-health-related. People aren’t sick, they’re self-dramatizing.

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A PROFESSIONAL IS PATIENT * * * Resistance outwits the amateur with the oldest trick in the book: It uses his own enthusiasm against him. Resistance gets us to plunge into a project with an overambitious and unrealistic timetable for its completion. It knows we can’t sustain that level of intensity. We will hit the wall. We will crash. The professional, on the other hand, understands delayed gratification. He is the ant, not the grasshopper; the tortoise, not the hare. Have you heard the legend of Sylvester Stallone staying up three nights straight to churn out the screenplay for Rocky? I don’t know, it may even be true. But it’s the most pernicious species of myth to set before the awakening writer, because it seduces him into believing he can pull off the big score without pain and without persistence.

Long Game: How Long-Term Thinker Shorthb
by Dorie Clark
Published 14 Oct 2021

She would also be more likely to avoid a number of negative outcomes, including jail time, obesity, and drug use.”2 That much, if you enjoy reading social science or pop business literature, is well known. But the crucial point, which is often missed, is this: you’re not simply one type of person forever, either a Cookie Monster gobbling treats or a diligent saint. All of us can learn to delay gratification and enhance our self-control. In other words, all of us can become long-term thinkers. When it comes to resisting short-term temptations (I’m going to eat that piece of cake or have a second drink), the trick is to “cool” the impulse by, as Konnikova recounts, “putting the object at an imaginary distance (a photograph isn’t a treat) or by reframing it (picturing marshmallows as clouds, not candy).

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See also networks and networking connectors, 150–151 content creation, 103–105, 118–119 gaining recognition through, 125 leveraging, 126–127 Corcoran, Marlena, 83–84 CORE Leadership Program, 63 costs opportunity, 45–46 physical/emotional, 46–47 Covid-19 pandemic, 3–5, 87 creating, 103–105 Crenshaw, Dave, 27–29, 197–198 culture going against the prevailing, 29 on our calling, 56 curiosity, 210 customer service, 40–41 Cutruzzula, Kara, 103–104 Davies, Ali, 24 deadlines, 88–89, 187–188 deception phase of exponential growth, 166–167 delayed gratification, 193–196 Deloitte, 63 Del Val, Dayna, 181–184 Design the Life You Love workshop, 110–111 Diamandis, Peter, 165–166 DiBernardo, Albert, 106, 200–201 Dierickx, Constance, 60–61 Dijksterhuis, Ap, 117–118 distance to empty, 197–199 diversity, long- vs. short-term thinking about, 6–7 documentary filmmaking, 57–58 Do It for Yourself (Cutruzzula), 104 dorieclark.com, 221 Drucker, Peter, 110, 117 Edison, Thomas, 181 Edmondson, Amy, 119 Edwards, Sue, 57–58 email, 21–22 emotional costs, 46–47 The E-Myth Revisited (Gerber), 102 e-newsletters, 220–221 Entrepreneurial You (Clark), 5, 99, 147, 220 entrepreneurship, learning, 101–103 Etsy, 62 execution mode, 3 hidden benefits of, 22–25 expectations, 168–169 experimentation, 15 20% time for, 14, 74–78 failure and, 180–181 expertise, recognition for, 125–127 exploration, 73–93 20% time for, 14, 74–78 carving out time for, 82–85 life portfolios and, 78–80 of New York City, 73–74, 81–82 realizing dreams through, 85–92 exponential growth, 165–167 exponential technologies, 165–166 failure, 9, 15 extreme goals and, 173–179 finding alternatives and, 184–187 involving your community and, 188–190 looking foolish and, 66–67 minimum benefit and, 90 multiple paths and, 181–184 resilience and, 211 rethinking, 173–190 family, 47–48 leveraging for, 120 meaning-based goals and, 55–56 prioritizing, 27–28 saying no and, 39, 46 Feingold, Sarah, 61–62 Fernandez, Jenny, 139–140, 149 Ferrazzi, Keith, 102 Ferriss, Tim, 23 focus, 14–15, 53 deciding what to be bad at and, 39–41 heads-up/heads-down strategy for, 99–100 on money, 55 strategic leverage and, 112, 115–128 thinking in waves and, 95–113 time for exploring, 73–93 Fogg, BJ, 195 FOMO (fear of missing out), 34, 47–48 Forbes, 97–98 Fowlds, Samantha, 205–206 Freestyle Love Supreme Academy, 65–66 Frei, Frances, 40–41 Friedman, Stew, 119 Fun Home (musical), 74 gatekeepers, 161–162 Gautam, Tanvi, 138–139 Gerber, Michael, 102 Germanotta, Stefani, 192 Getting Things Done (Allen), 29–30 Gino, Francesca, 133–134, 149 Give and Take (Grant), 141 Gmail, 75 goals, 14–15, 53 20% time and, 82–85 based on the kind of person you want to be, 65–67 coaches for, 86–88 deadlines for, 88–89 deciding what to be bad at and, 39–41 dreams and, 85–92 evaluating opportunities based on, 38–39 evaluating what you’re doing now and, 59–61 exploring, 92 extreme, 67–72, 173–179 failure and, 173–179 forgetting what others think and, 63–65 getting support for, 86 leveraging for professional, 122–123 optimizing for interesting, 14, 56–59 perseverance and, 157 planning around your priorities and, 27–30 remembering why you started and, 61–63 setting, 55–72 strategic overindexing and, 96–98 time frames for, 90–92 tracking data on, 115–116 Godin, Seth, 171 Goldsmith, Marshall, 109–112, 117 Good Morning America (TV show), 145–146 Good to Great (Collins), 102 Google, 159 20% time at, 14, 74–78 News, 75 X, 76–78 Granovetter, Mark, 132 Grant, Adam, 141 gratification, short-term vs. long-term, 13, 193–196 Gulati, Daniel, 147 Guthier, Christina, 122–123 habits, tiny, 195 Hagel, John, 34 Hall, Jeffrey, 132 Hamilton (musical), 65–66 Harry Potter (Rowling), 161 Harvard Business Review, 97–98, 137, 159 heads-up/heads-down strategy, 99–100 hedonic adaptation, 160 “Hell yeah or no” strategy, 35–37 Hersey, Paul, 109–110 Hesselbein, Frances, 110 Hill, Napoleon, 184 Horn, Sam, 187, 188 Incontrera, Marie, 70–71 information asking for, to evaluate opportunities, 42–44 attention to, 25 hoarding, 12 networking and, 107–108 innovation exponential growth and, 165–166 feature, 7 life portfolios in, 78–80 making time for, 14 space for, 29–30 interest optimizing for, 14, 56–59 setting goals based on, 59–61 time for exploring, 73–78 introverts, 107–108 jazz album, 146–149 Joel, Mitch, 144–145 Johnson, Rukiya, 55–56 Kalin, Rob, 62 KashKlik, 142–143 Kaur, Manbir, 46–47 Kim, W.

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See also Recognized Expert opportunities carving out time for, 82–85 clarity on your north star in evaluating, 37–39 networks and, 108 from pursuing interests, 64–65 saying no and, 14, 26–27, 31–49 opportunity cost, 45–46 Orlean, Susan, 176 Otting, Laura Gassner, 143–146 overindexing, 96–98 overwork, 1–3, 21–30 Covid-19 pandemic and, 3–5 hidden benefits of, 22–25 Page, Larry, 74–75 Parkinson, C. Northcote, 34 patience, 10–11, 15, 157, 159–172 active, 206 networking and, 140 our internal voices and, 160–161 rejection and, 161–165 when things seem bleak, 167–171 The Perfection Detox (Kolber), 88–89 perseverance, 9, 10–11, 15, 157 delayed gratification and, 193–196 distance to empty and, 197–199 gatekeepers and, 161–162 reaping the rewards and, 191–207 rejection and, 161–165 resilience and, 211 savoring the process and, 201–202 seven-year horizon and, 199–201 through failure, 173–190 trusted advisers and, 167, 170–171 understanding the requirements of success and, 196 when things seem bleak, 167–171 personal life, 8–16 setting our own terms for, 13 Pink, Daniel, 169, 170 pound-a-thon campaign, 189 precommitments, 187–188 Presidential Suite (album), 148 press your advantage strategy, 138 priorities leveraging for, 120–128 perseverance and, 157 planning around your, 27–30 productivity multitasking and, 116–118 to-do lists and, 28–29 work hours and, 22 professional development, 122–124 questions and questioning busyness to avoid, 24–25 for evaluating opportunities, 43–48 perseverance and, 167–171 for planning around your priorities, 28 setting extreme goals and, 71 for strategic leveraging, 117 reaping, 108–112, 191–207 recognition, 104–105, 206 content creation and, 125 networking and, 126 patience and, 163–164, 165 social proof and, 126 Recognized Expert, 10, 125, 164–165, 220 Reid, Caitlin Lee, 191–192 Reinventing You (Clark), 4, 9, 150, 219 rejection, 161–165, 211 relationships, 11.

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter
by David Sax
Published 8 Nov 2016

Watson is eagerly expanding Stack into North America, and launching new distribution services that include the ability for magazines to sell readers single issues and annual subscriptions through Stack’s website. “Steve Watson is an absolute legend,” said Rob Orchard, the cofounder and editor of Delayed Gratification, a magazine that was Stack’s pick for January 2014. Delayed Gratification tackles the news with a retrospective, analytical take they call slow journalism, sort of an antithesis to the insta-punditry of digital publishers. “We launched around the same time, and we’ve always supported one another. Stack has been absolutely fantastic in generating interest in magazines.

…

One of the unifying things I found while speaking with people in the United Kingdom’s independent magazine industry is their sheer bullishness on print and its advantages over digital publishing. This was not a romantic notion but a firm economic argument. “The key one is that people will pay for print,” Orchard said. Print, he continued, is a tried-and-true business model. Delayed Gratification takes no advertising revenue, sells roughly five thousand copies of each issue, publishes four times a year, and grosses more than £200,000 in annual revenue. He does this by selling the magazine for more than it costs to produce. That may not seem like much money, but it is more economically viable over the long term than a publication that is shedding millions while figuring out its business model.

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See software computers analog as the future of, 225 in defining digital, xiv design and, 32, 222, 223 in education, 181, 182, 183–185, 187, 196, 199 film manufacturing and, 65 in gaming, 81 and the Great Recession, 156, 157 job creation and, 161–162 music and, ix–x, 7–8, 23, 26 security of, safeguards for, 224 at summer camp, 234 years living with, 237 See also laptops Compuware, 171 Condé Nast, 105, 107 Contributoria (newspaper), 116, 117 Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities (Kelly), 228–229 Cool Tools (blog), 228 correspondence courses, 178, 201, 202 counterculture, 12–13, 206, 225, 229 Coursera, 201 Cowen, Tyler, 166 Craigslist, 107, 124, 126, 146 Cramped, The (blog), 37 Cranium, 76 Creative Cloud, 47 creative destruction, 153, 154, 162, 168 creative-thinking skills, developing, 192, 195, 199, 218 creativity defining jobs by, 154, 155, 158 friction and, 219 limiting, 132, 181, 188 potential for, 35, 36, 39, 63 Criminal Records, 14 critical-thinking skills, developing, 199 Crosley, 17–18, 22 crowdfunding, xvii, 43, 73, 91–92, 94, 95–96, 98, 105, 116, 191 Crupnick, Russ, 18, 19 Cuban, Larry, 179–180, 183 curated content, 223, 224 custom newspapers, 116, 117–120 customer acquisition, 133, 137 cybersecurity, 224 Daily Telegraph, The (newspaper), 114 D’Angelo, 27 Danzig, Richard, 224 Dark Side of the Moon (album), 26 data centers, 161 Dauch, Colby, 84 Daviau, Rob, 84 Davies, Russell, 117 Davis, Miles, 25 Days of Wonder, 91 De Koven, Bernie, 81 Dead Fish Museum, The (D’Ambrosio), 130 Dead Weather, 21 Deal: American Dream, 95–96 Dean, Paul, 90 Delayed Gratification (magazine), 106, 107 Demby, Eric, 145 Department of Record Stores, 13–14 Descalzo, Marco, 57 design business, 32–33, 36 design thinking, 193, 197, 198–199, 199–201, 225 Design Week, 29–30, 32, 47–48 deskilling, 158–159 desktop publishing software, 105 Detroit, economy of, 152, 155–156, 157 Detroit Future City, 171 digital ads, 108, 109, 110, 133 digital age, 9, 31, 182 digital books.

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention
by William Rosen
Published 31 May 2010

Throughout the period 1540–1640, preindustrial Britain exhibited a fair bit6 of both upward and downward mobility, largely due to primogeniture, which obliged a prosperous landowner to leave his land to only one of his sons—and the typical landowner had up to eight. Since all but one of those sons would have to find his own niche in the economy, “craftsman’s sons became laborers,7 merchant’s sons petty laborers, large landowner’s sons smallholders” carrying with them the habits of hard work, deferred gratification, literacy, and a disposition to settle disputes peacefully, all of which showed a decided increase during the eighteenth century. As upper-class habits trickled throughout society, so did economic growth. This theory explains fairly well why the son of a country squire might find himself learning the craft of a carpenter, and it may explain some critical aspects of historical growth in national wealth, particularly in Britain.

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He was Robert Stephenson, of Newcastle, and along with his father, George, is Trevithick’s only serious competitor for the title of “father of railways.” THE DEPICTION OF GEORGE STEPHENSON by Samuel Smiles, the prolific biographer and self-help author* who did more than anyone else to establish the heroic archetype for British inventors, is a textbook example of self-discipline and deferred gratification. His first job was as a picker: a laborer whose entire job was separating coal from the stones that accompanied it from mineshaft to colliery. Soon enough he was working as an assistant fireman, then as the “plugman” operating a set of valves on the steam-driven pump at another collier’s.

Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future
by Robert B. Reich
Published 21 Sep 2010

American culture sent an increasingly mixed message: Work like mad but enjoy life to the fullest. Doing both proved impossible. Sociologist Daniel Bell identified this cultural contradiction years ago, but it became more pronounced in the years preceding the Great Recession. The Protestant virtues of hard work and deferred gratification were at increasing odds with a market that instructed us to fulfill our dreams instantly and indulge our every want. As those wants continuously ratcheted upward—fueled by our anxieties over aging, relative status, and personal attractiveness—we worked even harder. The argument on behalf of hard work has always been premised on something of a lie.

How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement
by Fredrik Deboer
Published 4 Sep 2023

They write the editorials that appear in the newspapers and do more than their fair share of arguing and complaining in the public sphere. Core to this class of people is the strange tension between their beliefs in the predominance of structural factors and systems when speaking about political issues and their tendency toward delayed gratification in their own lives. One element of modern liberalism that Brooks gets very right is the modern liberal’s attachment to discipline and self-improvement. Brooks describes a species of person who has been raised to see self-denial and hard work as essential, even as they espouse a politics that places less emphasis on personal responsibility and more on social.

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Contemporary liberals, like the bobos before them, act like they can determine the course of their own lives through smart choices and through the practice of personal discipline, their secular sacrament. The tension here is obvious. The selfsame helicopter parents who insist that their children delay gratification and make smart, forward-thinking choices evince political opinions that minimize the importance of those same decisions. After all, it’s liberals who fixate relentlessly on privilege, defined as unearned (and uncontrollable) advantage that accrues to some by dint of an identity category. It’s liberals who—accurately and humanely, in my view—look at the working poor and the homeless and see the hand of forces they can’t control.

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But liberals are bent on seeing their own affluent status in contrast with the financial struggles of those they see, correctly, as suffering due at least in part to structural factors beyond their control. Perversely, this sense of ambient guilt over success seems to compel them to double down on their self-conception as people of discipline who delay gratification and work hard for what they achieve, even in the shadow of their own understanding that the life outcomes of any given person lie significantly outside of their own control. These are not just idle musings about the psychic pathologies of a certain species of affluent person. Locus of control stands as a major, frequently undiscussed element of contemporary politics.

The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime
by Mj Demarco
Published 8 Nov 2010

Wealth, like health, isn't easy and is cut from the same fabric. Their processes are identical. They require discipline, sacrifice, persistence, commitment, and yes, delayed gratification. If you can't immunize yourself from the temptations of instant gratification, you'll be hard pressed to find success in either health or wealth. Both demand a lifestyle shift from short-term thinking (instant gratification) to long-term thinking (delayed gratification). This is the only defense to Lifestyle Servitude. Look for the Hook! Instant gratification is the bait and Lifestyle Servitude is the hook. The advertising industry is on a great fishing expedition, and their goal is to hook you.

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As a Slowlane traveler, you're deluged with a series of doctrines that plead discipline to the trade-off. Get a job and waste five days a week toiling at the office. Bag a lunch and stop drinking $10 coffee. Faithfully entrust 10% of your paycheck to the stock market and your 401(k). Quit dreaming about that sports car in the window because you can't buy it! Delay gratification until you're 65 years old. Save, save, save because compound interest is powerful: $10,000 invested today will be with 10 gazillion in 50 years! Surprisingly, the Slowlane is the first convenient exit off the Sidewalk and evolves with maturity and increased adult responsibilities. Most college graduates begin their post-schooling life on the Sidewalk.

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When the torque of you're financial plan resides with others, you're likely to lose control. 5) The Danger of Your Lifestyle The Slowlane begs you to settle and become a miser. Want to own an exotic car? Forget it. Want to live on a beach? Wishful thinking. If you cannot control your temptations of lifestyle improvement (a nicer home, a nicer car, a nicer meal out), the Slowlane becomes slower and reverses course. The Slowlane HOPES your “delayed gratification” moves to “no gratification.” 6) The Danger of the Economy The Slowlane HOPES that your investments will yield a predictable 8% return year after year. You must believe the theory that “buy and hold” works. It doesn't, because economic busts, recessions, and depressions happen. For example, in 2008–2009, the equity markets lost nearly 60%.

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
by Daniel J. Levitin
Published 18 Aug 2014

That’s because one of the great achievements of the human prefrontal cortex is that it provides us with impulse control and, consequently, the ability to delay gratification, something that most animals lack. Try dangling a string in front of a cat or throwing a ball in front of a retriever and see if they can sit still. Because the prefrontal cortex doesn’t fully develop in humans until after age twenty, impulse control isn’t fully developed in adolescents (as many parents of teenagers have observed). It’s also why children and adolescents are not especially good at planning or delaying gratification. When the prefrontal cortex becomes damaged (such as from disease, injury, or a tumor), it leads to a specific medical condition called dysexecutive syndrome.

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In this respect, the two types differ in activity level: The rest-seeking procrastinators would generally rather not be exerting themselves at all, while the fun-task procrastinators enjoy being busy and active all the time but just have a hard time starting things that are not so fun. An additional factor has to do with delayed gratification, and individual differences in how people tolerate that. Many people work on projects that have a long event horizon—for example, academics, businesspeople, engineers, writers, housing contractors, and artists. That is, the thing they’re working on can take weeks or months (or even years) to complete, and after completion, there can be a very long period of time before they get any reward, praise, or gratification.

…

Both regions run on dopamine, but the dopamine has different actions in each. Dopamine in the prefrontal cortex causes us to focus and stay on task; dopamine in the limbic system, along with the brain’s own endogenous opioids, causes us to feel pleasure. We put things off whenever the desire for immediate pleasure wins out over our ability to delay gratification, depending on which dopamine system is in control. Steel identifies what he calls two faulty beliefs: first, that life should be easy, and second, that our self-worth is dependent on our success. He goes further, to build an equation that quantifies the likelihood that we’ll procrastinate.

Money, Real Quick: The Story of M-PESA
by Tonny K. Omwansa , Nicholas P. Sullivan and The Guardian
Published 28 Feb 2012

.”- Stephen Mwuara Nduati, Head of National Payments Systems, Central Bank of Kenya People like cash. They can touch it, feel it and see it. Cash equals stature. The bigger the wad, the better. There’s nothing like the immediate transfer of ******ebook converter DEMO Watermarks******* paper and coin from hand to hand. No deferred gratification, no signature needed, no question of trust. Cash used to be teeth and shells, then metal and paper. In whatever form, it is tactile and elemental, almost a part of our earth and certainly a glue to our social structure. In the West, where plastic has taken reign, cash is dying off. In Africa, it’s impossible to get by without it.

Melting Pot or Civil War?: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders
by Reihan Salam
Published 24 Sep 2018

Medicaid aimed to provide medical care to the poor, a responsibility that had traditionally been met by a patchwork of local charities and governments. Yet even as families have seen some of these burdens eased, their ability to meet other responsibilities, like instilling the value of discipline and deferred gratification in young children, appears to have eroded. The goal of universal early education, for example, has gained momentum because of the perception that many children are raised in chaotic environments and thus lack the non-cognitive skills that are necessary to persevere through high school and meet professional obligations.

Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food
by Chris van Tulleken
Published 26 Jun 2023

It’s a simple enough idea: leave a child alone in a room with a marshmallow for fifteen minutes and tell them that, if they can resist eating it, you’ll come back with another one. The child has a choice: enjoy the treat now, or delay gratification for double the reward. Mischel followed ninety of the test participants for the next two decades, and found that those who had been able to delay gratification had lower BMIs and higher educational attainment.17, 18 But the study has since been repeated with a much larger number of subjects – 918 children from a range of backgrounds.19 And this new analysis seemed to show that the biggest predictor of whether a child could delay gratification was socioeconomic background: the children were more likely to take the instant reward if they came from disadvantaged households.

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Abbott, 65, 179, 201, 296 ABC News, 101n Aboriginal Australians, 175 Accum, Frederick, 46 acetate, 88 Ad Hoc Joint Task Force, 65 Adane, Christina, 142–3 Addicted to Food (podcast), 168 Addicted to Food (Smith), 304 addiction, 9, 106, 151–68, 179, 206–7, 271, 303–4 additives, 208–21, 271, 272 regulation of, 225–33 ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), 209 Advertising Association, 205n Advertising Standards Agency, 209 advertising, see marketing Africa, 246–7, 286 agriculture antibiotic resistance and, 266 meat production, 259–63 oil production, 258–9 Agyemang, Charles, 247 AIBMR Life Sciences, 233 Air Canada, 151 airline food, 151 alcohol, 9, 128n, 164, 166, 199 Aldi, 159, 160, 264 Algeria, 25 alginate, 22 allergic diseases, 216 Alliance for Potato Research and Education (APRE), 101n Alliance to Save our Antibiotics, 266 Allison, David, 100n Alpen, 52 Alzheimer’s disease, 62 Amazon, 264 Amazon region, 238–43, 248–9, 262, 263 American Academy of Paediatrics, 292 American Beverage Association, 101n American College of Sports Medicine, 133 American Journal of Clinical Nutrition,202 American Society for Nutrition, 65 Angola, 246, 286 anti-fat bias, 6 antibiotics, 216, 226, 230, 255, 266–7 antioxidant supplements, 47 anxiety, 156, 233 appetite regulation, 31, 34, 37, 41, 56–9, 104, 106–8, 160, 173 Apple, 140 Applebaum, Rhona, 133 apples, 171–2 Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM), 240, 272, 277 Argentina, 262, 263 arms races, 1–4, 47, 74, 84, 86 arrowroot starch, 21 artificial colours, 205n artificial sweeteners, 5, 23, 90–91, 194n, 200–206, 209, 272 Asda, 159, 205n, 296 asthma, 214n, 216 astrology, 49–50 Atkins, Robert, 111, 116 atoms, 81 ATP (adenosine triphosphate), 82 Attia, Peter, 112 Auschwitz concentration camp, 73 Australasian Guideline, 292 Australia, 6, 80, 84, 140–41, 256 autoimmune diseases, 216 Avena, Nicole, 153–5, 167n, 168, 189 Awesome Chips, 140 baby food/formula, 93, 172n, 236, 274, 288–90 bacteria, 3, 4 butter and, 24 exudate, 22 first age of eating, 80–83 microbiome, 87–8, 155, 204, 213–21, 271, 272–3, 289 baked beans, 157–8 Ballarin, Oswaldo, 288, 289–90 Bank of England, 282 Barabási, Albert-László, 189 Barbosa, Felipe, 237 Barcarena, Brazil, 239–40, 265 BASF, 73 Batterham, Rachel, 35–7, 59, 61, 66, 145–6, 152 Bayer, 73 beef, 141–2, 189 farming of, 85–8, 92, 99, 190, 215, 260–61, 267, 274 protein isolates, 154 Belém, Brazil, 238, 248 Bellini, Alessandra, 297 BENEO, 65 Benin, 286 beriberi, 42 Berridge, Kent, 156n Bert, Paul, 103 beta-carotene, 47, 71 Bethesda, Maryland, 53 Better Food Index, 298 Biggest Loser, The, 54 Bilott, Rob, 212 Binley, Gary, 275 bisphenol A, 227 Bite Back, 297–8 bitter tastes, 194, 195, 196, 198–9 Black communities, 245–6 BlackRock, 282 bladder, 194n Blair, Steven, 122, 133, 134 blood fat profiles, 62 blood pressure, 109 blue whales, 102 Bluebell Capital, 282 BMI (body mass index), 50, 54, 138n, 242 body fat, 100–104 Bolton, Lizzie, 31 bones, 72, 85, 95–7, 175, 271 bonobos, 100 Boots, 296 Borneo, 259 Boston, Massachusetts, 139, 143 Boyland, Emma, 141 Boyle, Bob, 292 Bozer, Ahmet, 283 Brabeck-Letmathe, Peter, 284 Brazil, 6, 32, 41–5, 60, 75, 118, 157, 159, 236–43, 248–9 meat production in, 262, 263 plastic waste in, 268 soy industry, 239–40 traditional diet, displacement of, 43–4, 197–8, 236–49 bread, 173–4, 208–9 Break Free From Plastic, 267 breast cancer, 60, 62 breastfeeding, 42, 94–6, 130, 185, 187, 195, 214, 288–94 Brecon Beacons, Wales, 52 Bristol University, 25 British and Irish Legal Information Institute, 250 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 53, 125, 139, 168 British Dietetic Association, 296 British Heart Foundation, 128, 296 British Journal of Nutrition, 75 British Medical Journal, 49, 60, 236 British Museum, London, 180 British Nutrition Foundation, 295 Broad Leib, Emily, 231, 233, 234, 243 Brochet, Frédéric, 182n Brown, Alan, 93 Brown, Amy, 293 Bunge Limited, 277 Burger King, 140, 173 Burkina Faso, 286 Burmese pythons, 88 butter, 24–7, 28n, 70–75 butyrate, 88 buy-one-get-one-free deals, 283 C-reactive protein, 160 Cabo Verde, 286 caesarean delivery, 214n caffeine, 198, 199 calcium, 85, 120, 191, 195 Caldwell, Carlyle ‘Corky’, 21 calories, 4–5, 38, 40, 92 artificial sweeteners, 23 energy-dense foods, 66, 176–7, 271, 301 exercise and, 122–36 regulation system, 102–8 restriction of, 54 UPF, 10, 11, 32, 36, 45, 48, 57, 58, 65–6, 72, 90 Cambridge University, 59, 107, 125, 252, 291 Cameroon, 286 Campbell Soup Company, 65 Canada, 6, 80, 106, 151 Cancer Research UK, 296 cancer, 6, 9, 45, 60, 189, 216, 218, 227, 232, 267 Cannon, Geoffrey, 119n canola oil, 28 Cant, Alasdair, 148, 167 Carb Killa, 154, 155 carbohydrates, 43, 109, 111–17 carbon dioxide, 80, 81, 260, 263, 272 carbon, 80, 81–2, 85 carbon-chain saturation, 24 carboxymethylcellulose, 211, 217–19, 302 cardiovascular disease, 61, 62, 137, 189, 231 Cargill, 142, 277, 295 Carmody, Rachel, 88–9 Carney, Mark, 282, 283 carnivores, 85 carotenoids, 188 Carr, Allen, 11, 153 carrageenan, 15, 22 cattle, 85–8, 92, 99, 190, 215, 274 Cell Metabolism, 34 cells, 1–3 cellulose, 87 Center for Science in the Public Interest, 112 Central African Republic, 286 Centre for Industrial Rheology, 23 Centre for Social Justice, 296 Centre for the Study of the Senses, 180 Cereal Partners Worldwide, 64 Chad, 286 Change4 Life, 205 Channel 4 News, 125 Chauvin, Derek, 245 cheese, 46 Cheeselets, 254 Cheetos, 299 chemotherapy, 267 chewing, 174–5, 177, 183, 272 chewing gum, 212 Chi-Med, 285 Chicago, Illinois, 93, 130 chicken, 261–2, 264 chicken nuggets, 159 Chile, 299 chimpanzees, 3, 46, 89n, 100 China, 61, 247, 268, 291 chlorine, 81n, 85 chlorine dioxide, 229 cholecystokinin, 105n Christianity, 101 Chukotka, Russia, 186n cigarettes, see smoking CIMMYT, 65 cinnamon, 185n Citigroup, 276 climate change, 6, 255–68, 272 Clooney, George, 290 Clostridium difficile, 221 coal, 69–75, 90 cobalt, 85 Coca-Cola, 101n, 120, 121, 158, 187, 198–202, 283–4 cocaine and, 198 plastic waste, 267–8 research funding, 133–6, 295, 296 sugar in, 198–202 cocaine, 164, 166, 198, 199 Coco Pops, 30–31, 37, 38–40, 48, 172, 173 cocoa mass, 31 coconut fat, 29 coconut palms, 258 cod liver oil, 97 Code, The, 290 Colloid and Polymer Science, 71 Columbian exchange, 255n Compass Group/Chartwells UK, 297 Compass, 296 Conagra, 295 conflicts of interest, 64, 132–6, 178–9 Congo region, 118, 286 constipation, 157 Co-operative Group, 159, 205n, 264 copper, 85 Cordara, Roderick, 252, 254 corn, 21, 118, 225–6, 228, 229–30, 273 Corn Oil ONE, 225–6, 228, 229–30 coronary thrombosis, 45 cortisol, 143 cost-of-living crisis (2022–), 17–18 Costa Coffee, 140, 217, 297, 301 Costa Ferreira, Paula, 241, 243 Costcutter, 205n Côte d’Ivoire, 286 cottonseed oil, 27, 28 Covid-19 pandemic, 147 cows, see cattle COZ corn oil, 225–6, 228, 229–30 Cranswick’s, Hull, 264 Crawley, Helen, 295 Cream o’ Galloway, 19 Creed, Greg, 247 Crisco, 28 Crohn’s disease, 62, 216, 219 Crunchy Nut Clusters, 52 cyclamate, 201 Da Costa Louzada, Maria, 159–60, 301, 303 damascenone, 188 dandruff, 90 Danone, 65, 179, 201, 281, 282, 286, 292, 295, 296, 297 DATEM, 208, 211–13, 302 Davis, Clara, 46, 93–9 De Graaf, Kees, 178 Death in the Pot (Accum), 46 death, 6, 7, 47, 62, 189 Degesch, 73 dehydration, 198 delayed gratification, 148–9 Deliveroo, 297 Deltas, 254 dementia, 7, 62, 189 Democratic Republic of the Congo, 286 Denmark, 191 Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (UK), 124, 132 Department of Agriculture (US), 112, 189 depression, 62, 132, 227, 233 Deutsche Fettsäure Werke, 70 diabetes, 35, 62, 110, 198, 201–4, 216, 218, 220, 227, 241 Diabetes UK, 296 diacetyl, 70–71 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 164 diamorphine, 164 Dicken, Sam, 59–64, 66, 152 Dickinsonia costata, 83–4 diet experiments Hall, 55–9, 66, 175–6 Taubes, 112–15 van Tulleken, 35–7, 66, 102, 152–63 digestion ponds, 212 dimethylpolysiloxane, 244 diphosphates, 151 DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), 2–3, 85 dogs, 184–5 dolphins, 197 Domino’s Pizza, 247n dopamine, 105n, 156n Dorito Effect, The (Schatzker), 187 Doritos, 52, 251, 254 dose-dependent effects, 60 doubly labelled water sub-studies, 126–7, 129–30 Dr Pepper, 299 dreams, 156 dryness, 176 Duke University, 129 DuPont, 212–13, 229 Dusty Knuckle Potato Sourdough, 174 dysbiosis, 216–17, 234 dyspepsia, 62 E numbers, 210, 211, 244 Easy Way to Stop Smoking, The (Carr), 11, 153 eating, 4, 76, 79–99 first age of, 76, 79–83 second age of, 83–90, 100 third age of, 90–99, 108 emotional problems and, 147 instinct, 92–99 speed of, 177–8 Ebersole, Kara, 130 ecstasy, 68 edamame, 240, 261 Ediacara Hills, South Australia, 84 Edmonton, Alberta, 106 Egypt, ancient, 101 electrons, 82 elephants, 100 emulsifiers, 15, 17, 18, 19, 36, 154, 155, 160, 211 microbiome and, 217–19, 271, 272–3 endocrine system, 104, 108, 131, 272 Endres, John, 233 energy density, 66, 176–7, 271, 301 Eno, 285 Environmental Protection Agency (US), 212 environmental, social and governance (ESG), 278, 282 enzymes, 25, 26, 27n, 81n, 85, 86, 89 epilepsy, 116 Equatorial Guinea, 286 European Food Information Council, 66 European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 113 European Union (EU), 210, 233–4 Evonik Industries, 73 exercise, 122–36 Exercise is Medicine campaign, 133, 134, 136 Faber, Emmanuel, 282 Fahlberg, Constantin, 90 Fanta, 299 Fardet, Anthony, 171 Farooqi, Sadaf, 107 fats, 24–9, 43 hydrogenation, 26–7, 33, 231, 246 RBD (Refined, Bleached & Deodorized), 28–9 weight gain and, 110 fatty acids, 188–9 fatty liver disease, 62 feedback systems, 104, 108 Feingold, Ben, 209 FermaSure XL, 229 fertilisers, 257 fertility, 27, 131, 155, 227, 230, 233, 272 fibre, 55, 57, 60, 87, 155, 157, 171, 189, 215 Fidelity, 281 Finland, 175 First Steps Nutrition, 205, 295 fish oil, 47 Fisher, Franz, 69 Fitness Industry Association, 205n Five Guys, 140 fizzy drinks, 120–21 Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association (FEMA) 232 flavour; flavouring, 180–92, 193–207 enhancers, 193–4, 209–10 Fletcher, Paul, 163 Flössner, Otto, 71–2, 75 Floyd, George, 245 fluorine, 81n, 85 Food Additives Amendment (US, 1958), 227 Food and Drug Administration (US), 210, 225–32 food deserts/swamps, 139–40, 142–4 Food Foundation, 17–18 food matrix, 171, 191, 271 Food Standards Agency (UK), 40n, 210, 292 food waste, 128 FooDB database, 189 Forde, Ciarán, 64–5, 178–9 ‘forever chemicals’, 212 frailty, 62 France, 17, 60 free school meals, 142 Freeze Pops, 15 fried chicken, 245 Friedman, Milton, 282 Froneri, 279–81 Frosties, 299–300 fruit, 183 concentrate, 157 Gabon, 286 Galilei, Galileo, 109, 117 Gambia, 286 garlic, 189 Gearhardt, Ashley, 165 General Mills, 65 generally recognized as safe (GRAS), 228, 229, 230, 232 genes; genome, 1–3, 126, 138, 144–5, 147, 148, 177 Germany, 17, 68–75, 90–91 Ghana, 246–7, 286 ghrelin, 105n Gibney, Mike, 64 gingerbread men, 251 Global Energy Balance Network, 123, 133 glucose, 15, 31 glutamate, 193, 195 glycerine, 17, 18 ‘Good Cook, The’ (Olney), 44 Google, 140 Gordon, Aubrey, 50n Göring, Hermann, 71 gossypol, 27 Greece, ancient, 101 Greenland, 80 Greenpeace, 298 Greggs, 140, 302 Grenade, 154, 155 Grocer, The, 151 Growing Up in Singapore, 177 GSK, 285 Gü, 156n guanylate, 193, 195, 196 guar gum, 15, 17, 19, 22 Guardian, 245 Guinea, 286 Guinea Bissau, 286 gums, 15, 17, 18, 19, 22, 23, 220, 272 Hackney Gelato, 15, 16 Hadean period, 79–80 Hadza people, 129–32 haem iron, 192 Haleon, 285 Hall, Kevin, 32, 34, 35, 51, 53–9, 60, 63, 106–7, 113, 168, 172 diet experiments, 55–9, 66, 175–6 Haribo, 52 Harper’s Weekly, 28n Hart, Paul, 16–29, 33, 66–7, 154, 188, 189, 206, 275–6 Harvard University, 88, 109, 114, 116, 159, 175, 231 Harvest Frost, MV, 240 heart disease, see cardiovascular disease Heath, Allister, 125 heavy water, 127 hedonic overdrive, 107 height, 8, 191 Heinz, 23, 158 Helicobacter pylori, 218 Hellmann’s, 23, 36 Henderson, Earl, 94–8 Henkel, Hugo, 70 herbicides, 257 herbivores, 85–8 heroin, 164, 199 Hershey, 295 Hervey, G.

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community
by Marc J. Dunkelman
Published 3 Aug 2014

Some kids rang the bell the moment the researcher left the room. Others held out. The strategies the strong-willed kids employed to resist temptation were remarkable. Some covered the marshmallow up with a napkin, while others sang songs. What was on display, Mischel concluded, were the various strategies that humans of all ages use to delay gratification—strategies that, among adults, tend to be masked by other behaviors.3 Even more illuminating was what happened next. Curious about how early childhood self-control corresponded to an individual’s behavior in adolescence, Mischel contacted the same kids who had taken the first marshmallow tests roughly a decade later.

…

This is not a situation where, as in Field of Dreams, “if you build it, [they] will come.”18 Figuring out a way to augment American grit will not magically reconstitute the middle-ring-rich communities of generations past. Nevertheless a grittier America would, at least, make it more likely that we’d each connect with a wider range of neighbors. We’d have greater wherewithal to maintain the dynamism of previous eras. And so we have to ask: What can be done to imbue future generations with the propensity to delay gratification? What might we do to compel our children not to forsake the sort of relationships that, for decades, fueled American ingenuity, collaboration, and mutual concern? Late in the fall of 1993, my high school biology teacher presented a lesson on the complicated molecular process by which cells generate energy.

…

But we have to wonder whether there are things that could be included more proactively in our school curricula to prompt a grittier America. And fortunately, we’re in the midst of an educational revolution that sheds light on that very challenge. Galvanized by the research derived from the marshmallow test, a field of research has emerged more recently on the causes and effects of delayed gratification. Some scholars have come to wonder whether impulse control might offer insights into why certain individuals are able to escape dysfunction while others are mired in counterproductive patterns. At the vanguard of the campaign to instill more grit in students are widely acclaimed efforts like Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), and charter-school organizations led by the likes of the “Knowledge Is Power Program” (KIPP) in cities throughout the United States.

The Tyranny of Metrics
by Jerry Z. Muller
Published 23 Jan 2018

Among economists, the significance of these qualities has been emphasized by James Heckman, “Schools, Skills, and Synapses,” Economic Inquiry 46, no. 3 (July 2008), pp. 289–324. Of course, their importance has long been taken for granted by those not wedded to metric fixation. Character qualities of self-control and the ability to defer gratification, however, are themselves linked to cognitive ability, see Richard E. Nisbett et al., “Intelligence: New Findings and Theoretical Developments,” American Psychologist 67, no. 2 (2012), pp. 130–59, esp. p. 151. 29. Alexandria Neason, “Welcome to Kindergarten. Take This Test. And This One.” Slate, March 4, 2015. 30.

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought
by Andrew W. Lo
Published 3 Apr 2017

And while similar structures do exist in other mammals, Homo sapiens has the largest and most highly interconnected version.24 The capacity to create complex hypothetical narratives, pure figments of our substantial imaginations, is one of the most important advantages we’ve developed as a species, and as far as we can tell, it seems to be unique to us. Neuroscientists have shown that many of the uniquely human traits such as language, mathematical reasoning, complex planning, self-control, and delayed gratification also originate in the prefrontal cortex. For this reason, this region is sometimes referred to as the “executive brain.” Like the CEO of a well-run company, the prefrontal cortex is responsible for developing a vision for the organization, monitoring the performance of the various divisions and subordinates, and making resource allocation decisions that weigh the costs and benefits of each competing division’s goals.

…

As the years passed, Mischel informally noticed a pattern between the children who immediately took their marshmallows and poor academic performance, and the children who waited longer, delaying their gratification, and good academic performance. Follow-up studies showed that the more impulsive children did more poorly on their SAT scores, while the delayers tended to do better. Surprisingly, these same people showed the same relative ability or inability to delay gratification well into their adulthood, forty years later.27 By this time, modern brain imaging techniques had been invented, showing that the prefrontal cortex was more active in those people who were able to resist the call of the marshmallow forty years before. Among the more impulsive people, on the other hand, a different, more primitive region of the brain was activated: the ventral striatum, where the nucleus accumbens is located, strongly associated with addictive behavior.

…

But how much more difficult it is to convince skeptics when they make their money directly from the market. The collective rush to the market’s nucleus accumbens overwhelmed the fear response generated by its amygdala, and induced its left hemispheres to come up with a justification. Apparently, the entire market wanted its marshmallows immediately rather than delaying gratification. This was risk on an economywide scale: systemic risk. But why didn’t we fear enough? Let’s return to the Jackson Hole meeting in late August of 2005. Larry Summers, in his response to Raghuram Rajan, compared the financial system to the transportation system: Over time, people became almost entirely complacent about the safety of the transportation arrangements on which they relied.

The Fast Diet: Revised and Updated: Lose Weight, Stay Healthy, Live Longer
by Mimi Spencer
Published 18 Dec 2014

Bear in mind that fasting subjects regularly report that the food with which they ‘break their fast’ tastes glorious. Flavours sing. Mouthfuls dance. If you’ve ever felt a lazy disregard for the food you consume without thinking, then things are about to change. There’s nothing like a bit of delayed gratification to make things taste good. Flexibility: your key to success Your body is not my body. Mine is not yours. So it’s worth carving out your plan according to your needs, the shape of your day, your family, your commitments, your preferences. We none of us live cookie-cutter lives, and no single diet plan fits all.

…

Index 4:3 pattern 1, 2 6:1 maintenance 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 adaptation 1 adherence 1, 2 agave 1 age to start fasting 1, 2 ageing Byetta 1 cognitive ability 1, 2, 3 research 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 alcohol 1, 2 allergies 1 almonds 1, 2 alternate day fasting (ADF) as booster method 1 problems 1, 2 research 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Alzheimer’s disease 1, 2 see also carbo hydrates; dementia amputation 1 amyloid 1 anabolic response 1 animal research Alzheimer’s disease 1 brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) 1 cancer 1 eating patterns 1 fasting 1, 2, 3 fertility 1 longevity 1 animals, wild 1 antidepressants, natural 1 antioxidants 1, 2, 3, 4 appetite excess 1, 2 regulation 1, 2, 3, 4 apples 1, 2, 3, 4 apps 1 aromas 1 arthritis 1 Asian coleslaw 1 asparagus, stir fry with prawns 1 asthma 1, 2, 3, 4 athletes 1, 2 Atkins diet 1, 2 attention see mindfulness attitude changes 1, 2, 3 aubergines calorie content 1 Goan curry 1 warm salad with chickpeas and Halloumi 1 autoimmune diseases 1 autophagy 1, 2 awareness 1, 2, 3 Babraj, Dr John 1 bacon and butterbean soup 1 bananas 1, 2 BBC 1 BDNF see brain derived neurotrophic factor beauty industry 1 bedtime 1 beef calorie content 1 Madras beef with a tomato and red onion salad 1 skinny spag bol 1 steak and Asian coleslaw 1 Thai steak salad 1 beer 1 benefits, generally 1, 2 see also health improvements berries 1, 2 betacarotene 1 bingeing 1, 2, 3 bitterness 1 blindness 1 blood pressure see also hypertension alternate day fasting 1 four day fast 1 monitoring 1 personal experiences 1 blood sugar 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 see also insulin blood tests 1, 2 blueberries 1 BMI see body mass index body-consciousness 1 body fat percentage 1, 2 body image 1 body mass index (BMI) calculation 1, 2 initial level 1 Mosley, Dr Michael 1 reduction 1 boiling vegetables 1 bolognese, skinny 1 boredom 1 bouillon 1 brain ageing 1, 2, 3 energy sources 1 research 1, 2, 3, 4 brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) 1, 2, 3, 4 brassicas 1 bread 1, 2 breakfast cereals 1, 2, 3 eggs 1 Fast Days 1, 2 glycaemic index (GI) 1 importance 1 low GI 1 protein-rich 1 breaking the fast 1 breast cancer 1, 2, 3 breast feeding 1 broccoli 1, 2, 3 bulgar 1, 2 busyness 1, 2, 3 butter 1, 2, 3 butterbean and chorizo hotpot 1 butternut squash, baked with courgette and tomato 1 Byetta 1 cabbage 1 Caesar salad 1 caffeine 1, 2 Calabrese, Edward 1 calcium 1 calorie content chart 1 drinks 1 labels 1, 2 portion sizes 1, 2, 3 calorie intake Fast Days 1, 2, 3 worldwide trend 1 calorie restriction (CR) 1, 2 Cambridge Diet 1 cancer development 1 fasting 1, 2, 3, 4 growth factors 1 human research 1 insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) 1, 2, 3, 4 insulin resistance 1 Laron syndrome 1 risk reduction 1, 2 stem cells 1 tumours 1 vitamin supplements 1 car analogy 1, 2 carbohydrates blood sugar 1, 2, 3 Fast Days 1 glycaemic index (GI) 1 reduction 1 cardiovascular disease see heart disease carotenoids 1 carrots 1, 2, 3, 4 cashews 1 catecholamines 1 cell mutation 1 cellular repair 1, 2 cereals 1, 2, 3 cerebrospinal fluid 1 challenges 1, 2 chat rooms 1, 2 cheating 1 cheese 1, 2, 3 mushrooms with mozzarella, Pecorino and spinach 1 warm aubergine salad with chickpeas and Halloumi 1 chemotherapy 1, 2, 3, 4 chicken 1, 2 Dijon chicken dippers with peas 1 spiced chicken with warm lentils and roasted garlic 1 stir fry 1 super-fast Thai green curry 1 chickpeas calorie content 1 curry 1 warm aubergine salad with chickpeas and Halloumi 1 children 1, 2, 3 chilli flakes 1 chilli, vegetarian 1 chocolate 1 cholesterol alternate day fasting 1, 2 blood levels 1, 2, 3 eggs 1 grazing 1 personal experiences 1 reduction 1 tests 1 chorizo, hotpot with butterbeans 1 CHRONies (Calorie Restrictors on Optimal Nutrition) 1 citrus fruit 1, 2, 3 coconut 1 coffee 1, 2 cognitive ability 1, 2, 3, 4 Cohen, Leonard 1 coldness 1 coleslaw, Asian 1 comfort foods 1, 2, 3 compliance alternate day fasting 1 conventional diets 1 first weeks 1 practicality 1 snacks 1 compulsive eating 1 concentration 1, 2 confectionary 1, 2 consecutive day fasting 1 see also four day fast constipation 1 consumption levels, non-Fast Days 1 cooking tips 1 cordials 1 courgettes, baked butternut with courgette and tomato 1 couscous 1, 2, 3 curry chickpea 1 Goan aubergine 1 Madras beef with a tomato and red onion salad 1 red lentil tikka masala 1 super-fast Thai green chicken 1 dairy products 1, 2, 3, 4 Dart, Kate 1 dates 1, 2 dehydration 1, 2, 3 delayed gratification 1 dementia see also Alzheimer’s disease brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) 1 diabetes 1 drug therapies 1 fasting 1, 2, 3 risk factors 1 walking 1, 2 denial 1 see also willpower dermatitis 1 dhal 1 diabetes Byetta 1 complications 1 doctor consultation 1 family history 1 Laron syndrome 1 meal pattern research 1 risk factors 1, 2, 3 risk reduction 1, 2 Type 1 1 worldwide trend 1 diaries 1, 2 diet drinks 1 diets current standard advice 1 fads 1, 2 failure 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 high-fat 1, 2, 3 high-fructose 1 high-protein 1 low-carbohydrate 1 low-fat 1 Mediterranean 1 digestion 1, 2, 3 Dijon chicken dippers with peas 1 diseases, risk reduction 1, 2 disinhibition effect 1 dissatisfaction 1 distraction 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 doctor consultation diabetes 1 obesity 1 statins 1 warfarin 1 doctors’ viewpoints 1 dressings 1 The Drinking Man’s Diet 1 drinks 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 drug therapies 1 Dublin study, fast diet 1 DXA scan (dual energy X-ray absorptiometry) 1, 2 Eat Fast, Live Longer 1, 2 eating disorders 1 eating patterns 4:3 1, 2 breakfast 1 evolutionary 1, 2, 3 Fast Days 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 habit 1, 2, 3 non-Fast Days 1 normal expectation 1 personal experiences 1, 2, 3 recent changes 1 research evidence 1, 2 Ecuador 1 eczema 1, 2 edamame 1 eggs 1, 2, 3 huevos rancheros 1 mushroom and spinach frittata 1 scrambled 1, 2 electric shock therapy 1 emotion confusion 1 endurance training 1 energy levels 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 English breakfast, Fast Day 1 evolution fasting 1, 2, 3 hippocampus 1 memory 1 natural eating pattern 1, 2 repair genes 1 excess appetite 1, 2 exercise see also high intensity training benefits 1 Fast Days 1, 2, 3, 4 pedometer 1 personal experiences 1 physical response 1 with prolonged fasting 1 research evidence 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 strength training 1 time required 1 external cues 1 Facebook 1 faintness 1, 2 faith 1 family support 1, 2 famine 1 fashion industry 1 Fast Days busyness 1, 2, 3 calorie level 1, 2, 3 hours 1 meal pattern 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 weekly patterns 1, 2 Fast Diet potential 1 Fast Exercise 1 see also high intensity training fasting alternate day 1, 2, 3 animal research 1, 2, 3 definition 1 evolution 1, 2 four-day 1, 2 health benefits 1 hippocampus 1 IGF-1 1 prolonged 1, 2 research evidence 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 two-day 1, 2 fasting glucose levels 1, 2, 3 fasting window 1, 2 fat burning exercise 1 fasting 1, 2 gender differences 1 iFast 1 meal pattern 1 naringenin 1 noradrenaline 1 process 1, 2 fat intake 1 fat levels on Fast Days 1 fat-soluble vitamins 1 fat storing gender differences 1 insulin 1, 2 triglycerides 1 fat, visceral 1, 2 fatigue 1 fats, calorie content 1 fatty acids 1 fear 1 fennel 1 fertility 1 ferulic acid 1 fibre 1, 2, 3, 4 first day 1, 2, 3 fish 1 calorie content 1 mackerel 1 masala salmon with spiced spinach 1 pesto salmon 1 smoked haddock 1 tuna 1, 2 flavour boosts 1, 2 flavour improvement 1 flexibility 1, 2, 3, 4 focus 1, 2 food fixation 1 food industry marketing 1, 2 food preference changes 1, 2, 3, 4 food preparation 1 food weighing 1 four day fast 1, 2 free radicals 1 friend not foe 1 friends 1, 2, 3 frittata, mushroom and spinach 1 fruit antioxidants 1 benefits 1 calorie content 1 glycaemic index (GI) 1 research evidence 1, 2 skins 1 fruit bars 1 fruit juice 1 fullness 1, 2 game meat 1 garlic 1, 2 gastric reflux 1 gender differences 1 genes 1, 2, 3 Genesis Breast Cancer Prevention Centre, Wythenshawe 1, 2 Germans 1 glucose levels carbohydrates 1, 2 fasting test 1, 2, 3 four day fast 1, 2 grazing 1 intermittent fasting (IF) 1 monitoring 1 normal levels 1 glucose metabolism 1 gluttony 1 glycaemic index (GI) 1, 2 glycaemic load (GL) 1 glycogen 1, 2 goals 1, 2 Goan aubergine curry 1 gout 1 grains 1 grapefruit 1, 2 grapes 1, 2 grazing 1, 2, 3, 4 see also snacks green beans 1 green tea 1 green vegetables 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 growth factors 1 see also insulin-like growth factor 1 growth hormone receptor 1 guilt 1, 2 habit 1, 2, 3, 4 habituation 1 haddock, smoked 1 hair 1 Harvie, Dr Michelle 1, 2, 3, 4 HDL (high density lipoprotein) 1, 2 headaches 1, 2 health improvements fasting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 maintenance model 1 Mosley, Dr Michael 1 motivation 1 personal experiences 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 heart disease risk factors 1, 2, 3, 4 risk reduction 1, 2, 3 hedonic eating 1 herbal teas 1 herbs 1, 2, 3 high-fat diet 1, 2, 3 high-fructose diet 1 high intensity training (HIT) 1, 2, 3 hippocampus 1, 2 history 1 HIT see high intensity training Horizon, BBC 1, 2, 3 hormesis 1, 2 hormones 1, 2, 3 Horne, Dr Benjamin 1 hot chocolate 1 hotpot, butterbean and chorizo 1 Howell, Prof Tony 1 huevos rancheros 1 human research alternate day fasting 1, 2 cancer 1 intermittent fasting (IF) 1 Laron syndrome 1 two day fast 1 hummus 1, 2 hunger pangs adaptation 1, 2 decreasing levels 1 distraction 1, 2, 3, 4 emotion confusion 1 fear 1 learned reactions 1 mood 1 passing 1, 2 personal experiences 1, 2 waiting 1 hydration 1, 2, 3 hyperphagia 1 hypertension 1 see also blood pressure iFast 1, 2 IGF-1 see insulin-like growth factor 1 immune system 1 impotence 1 impulsive snacking 1 inflammation gout 1 high protein diets 1 research evidence 1, 2, 3 skin conditions 1, 2 visceral fat 1 initial health measuring 1, 2 Mosley, Dr Michael 1, 2, 3, 4 Spencer, Mimi 1 insalata caprese 1 instinct 1, 2, 3 insulin 1, 2, 3 see also blood sugar insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) four day fast 1, 2 function in the body 1 healthy range 1 high-protein diet 1 protein 1 reduction 1, 2 tests 1 insulin resistance 1, 2, 3, 4 insulin sensitivity 1, 2, 3, 4 Intermountain Heart Institute, Utah 1 iron 1, 2 Italian diet 1 juice 1 junk food 1, 2 Kahleova, Dr. 1 kale 1 ketchup 1 ketone bodies 1 Laron mice 1 Laron syndrome 1 lattes 1, 2, 3, 4 Laverty, Aidan 1 LDL (low density lipoprotein) 1, 2, 3, 4 learned reactions 1 legumes 1, 2, 3 lemons 1 lentils 1 red lentil tikka masala 1 spiced chicken with warm lentils and roasted garlic 1 spiced dhal 1 life extension see longevity lifestyle choices 1 liminoids 1 lipolysis 1, 2 liver 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 long term plan 1 longevity animal models 1 benefits 1 diabetes effect 1 research evidence 1, 2 start of fasting 1 Longevity Institute, University of Southern California 1 Longo, Professor Valter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 low-fat diet 1 low-fat foods 1 lunar fasting 1 lung function 1 lycopene 1, 2, 3 mackerel 1, 2 maintenance model 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 mandolin 1 marketing pressure 1, 2 Mars bars 1 masala salmon with spiced spinach 1 Mattson, Professor Mark 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 meal patterns see eating patterns meal-replacement shakes 1 meals daily number 1 focus 1, 2 frequency 1, 2 intermittent fasting 1 size 1 meat 1, 2, 3 media interest 1 medical conditions 1, 2, 3 medication interference 1 Mediterranean diet 1 memory hippocampus 1, 2 junk food 1 online tests 1 men body fat percentage 1 exercise 1 fasting 1 fasting day calories 1 menstrual cycle 1 mental attitude see mood metabolic changes food choices 1 HIT exercise 1 mood 1 research evidence 1, 2, 3, 4 metabolic syndrome 1 mice 1, 2 milk calorie content 1, 2 Fast Days 1 fat content 1 glycaemic index (GI) 1 protein levels 1 mindfulness 1, 2 miso soup 1, 2 mitochondria 1 Mohammed 1 mood brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) 1 difficulties 1, 2 HIT exercise 1 hunger pangs 1 improvement 1, 2, 3 Mosley, Dr Michael background 1, 2 Fast Days 1, 2 father 1, 2 health improvements 1, 2, 3 HIT exercise 1 initial health 1, 2, 3, 4 motivation 1, 2, 3, 4 MRI scans 1, 2, 3 multivitamins 1, 2 muscles exercise 1, 2 fasting 1, 2 fat burning 1 glycogen storage 1 HIT exercise 1 protein synthesis 1 strength training 1 mushrooms 1, 2 frittata with spinach 1 with mozzarella, Pecorino and spinach 1 mussels, Thai mussels 1 naringenin 1 National Institute on Aging, USA 1, 2, 3, 4 neck size 1 nerve cells 1, 2 New Scientist 1 newspapers 1 NHS website 1 Nikolai of Zicha, Saint 1 no-carb Caesar salad 1 nobiletin 1 non-Fast Days 1, 2, 3, 4 non-stick pans 1 noodles 1 noradrenaline 1 nutritional requirements 1 nuts benefits 1 calorie content 1 Fast Days 1, 2 glycaemic index (GI) 1, 2 oats 1, 2, 3, 4 obesity breast cancer 1 fast diet benefits 1 grazing 1 worldwide trend 1 oils 1, 2 omega 3 fatty acids 1, 2 oranges 1, 2, 3 overeating 1, 2, 3 pancreas 1, 2 parental advice 1 pasta 1, 2 patience 1, 2 pears, spiced porridge 1 peas, Dijon chicken dippers with peas 1 pectin 1 pedometer 1 pesticides, natural 1 pho, Vietnamese prawn 1 phytochemicals 1, 2, 3, 4 pickles 1 Pilon, Brad 1 pineapple 1 pistachios 1 pizza, tortilla 1 PKA gene 1 planning 1, 2 poisons 1 polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) 1 polyphenols 1 popcorn 1 pork, Fast Day roast 1 porridge 1, 2 spiced pear 1 portion sizes 1, 2, 3, 4 positivity 1 potatoes 1, 2, 3 potential benefits 1, 2 see also health improvements Power, Dr Ray 1 praise 1, 2 prawns calorie content 1 stir-fry with asparagus 1 Vietnamese pho 1 pregnancy 1, 2, 3 preparation 1, 2 probiotics 1 processed foods 1 prostate cancer 1, 2 protective genes 1 protein calorie content 1 Fast Days 1, 2, 3, 4 function in the body 1, 2 ‘good’ 1 high-protein diets 1 insulin-like growth factor 1 1 recommended quantity 1, 2 ‘proximity principle’ 1 psoriasis 1, 2 psychology 1, 2 pulses 1, 2 quick no-cook meals 1 Quinn, Nora 1 quinoa 1, 2, 3 radiotherapy 1, 2 raisins 1, 2 Ramadan 1 rapamycin 1 raw food 1, 2 ready meals 1 realism 1 refined sugars 1, 2 religion 1, 2 repair genes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 research evidence alternate day fasting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Alzheimer’s disease 1 asthma 1 brain effects 1, 2, 3, 4 breakfast 1 calorie restriction (CR) 1 cancer 1, 2, 3 conventional diets 1, 2 diaries 1 diet drinks 1 Dublin study 1 exercise 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 fruit 1, 2 HIT exercise 1 immune system 1 inflammation 1, 2, 3 Laron syndrome 1 longevity 1, 2 meal patterns 1 metabolic changes 1, 2, 3, 4 mood 1 ‘proximity principle’ 1 soups 1 ‘starvation mode’ 1 two day fast 1 weight loss 1, 2 resentment 1 restrained eating 1, 2 reward 1 rheumatoid arthritis 1 rice 1, 2, 3 rice cakes 1 Russians 1 salad dressing 1 salads Fast Days 1, 2, 3 flavour boosts 1 insalata caprese 1 Madras beef with a tomato and red onion salad 1 no-carb Caesar 1 steak and Asian coleslaw 1 Thai 1 Thai steak 1 tuna, bean and garlic 1 warm aubergine with chickpeas and Halloumi 1 warm vegetable 1 Salk Institute for Biological Studies 1 salmon calorie content 1 masala salmon with spiced spinach 1 with pesto 1 Samarasinghe, Roshan 1 sandwiches 1 sashimi 1 satisfaction 1, 2, 3, 4 saucepans 1 scales 1 Scarsdale diet 1 scientific research see research evidence seafood prawn and asparagus stir fry 1 Thai mussels 1 Vietnamese prawn pho 1 seeds 1 self-awareness 1 ‘self eat’ 1 self praise 1, 2 shock 1 shopping list 1 Sikhism 1 single meal 1, 2 skin 1, 2, 3 skinny spag bol 1 sleep caffeine 1 Fast Days 1, 2, 3 four-day fast 1 personal experiences 1, 2 slim individuals 1 smells 1 smoothies 1, 2, 3 snacks see also grazing as eating pattern 1 Fast Days 1, 2, 3, 4 glycaemic index (GI) 1 habit 1, 2, 3 habitual 1 manufacturers 1 typical pattern 1 women 1 snoring 1, 2 social demands 1, 2, 3, 4 Somatomedin-C see insulin-like growth factor 1 soups appetite suppressant 1 bacon and butterbean 1 Fast Days 1, 2 miso 1 ready meals 1 research evidence 1 Vietnamese prawn pho 1 soy milk 1 Spencer, Mimi Fast Days 1 father 1 health improvements 1 initial BMI 1 previous diets 1 spiced dhal 1 spices 1, 2 spinach 1 masala salmon with spiced spinach 1 mushrooms with mozzarella, Pecorino and spinach 1 spiritual benefits 1 staples 1 start day 1, 2, 3 ‘starvation mode’ 1 statins 1 steak with Asian coleslaw 1 Thai salad 1 steaming 1, 2 stem cells 1, 2, 3 Stevia 1 stir-fry 1 stomach size 1 straight-to-the-plate ideas 1 strawberries 1, 2, 3, 4 strawberry smoothie 1 strength training 1 stress responses 1, 2 stroke 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 sugar 1, 2, 3, 4 super-foods 1 supplements 1, 2 support network 1, 2, 3 sustainability 1, 2 sweeteners 1 sweets 1, 2 tangerines 1, 2 targets 1, 2 teas 1 teeth 1 temptation 1, 2, 3, 4 Thai green chicken curry 1 Thai mussels 1 Thai salad 1 Thai steak salad 1 thirst 1, 2 thrifty hypothesis 1 time of fasts 1, 2 The Times 1 timetables 1 Timmons, Professor Jamie 1, 2 tiredness 1 TOFI (Thin on the Outside and Fat Inside) 1 tomatoes 1, 2, 3 baked butternut with courgette and tomato 1 butterbean and chorizo hotpot 1 huevos rancheros 1 Madras beef with a tomato and red onion salad 1 tortilla pizza 1 training research 1, 2 transit time, digestion 1 treats 1, 2 triggers, personal 1 triglycerides 1, 2, 3 tumour necrosis factor 1 tumours 1 tuna bean and garlic salad 1 seared 1 turkey 1 cumin-turkey burgers with corn on the cob 1 Twitter 1, 2 two day fast 1, 2 underweight individuals 1 urine 1 Varady, Dr Krista 1, 2, 3, 4 variety 1, 2, 3 vegetable bouillon 1 vegetables antioxidants 1 bitterness 1 calorie content 1 consumption levels 1 glycaemic index (GI) 1 leafy greens 1, 2, 3 ‘noodles’ 1 quantities 1 raw 1, 2 skins 1 starchy 1 steaming 1, 2 variety 1 warm salad 1 vegetarian chilli 1 venison 1 Vietnamese prawn pho 1 vinegar 1, 2 visceral fat 1, 2 vitamins 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 waist measurement alternate day fasting 1 Fast Diet plus HIT 1, 2 healthy range 1 initial level 1, 2 method 1 personal experiences 1 reduction 1 research evidence 1 two-day fast 1 waist to height ratio 1 walking 1, 2, 3 warfarin 1 water 1, 2, 3 watercress 1 watermelon 1, 2 websites Fast Diet 1, 2, 3, 4 glycaemic index (GI) 1 NHS 1 weekends 1 weekly patterns 1, 2 weight loss eating patterns research 1 fast diet 1, 2, 3 fixation 1 personal experiences 1, 2 prolonged fasting 1 research evidence 1, 2, 3 stalling 1 targets 1 two-day fast 1 weekly variation 1 weight measurements 1, 2, 3, 4 weight training 1 wild animals 1 willpower 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 wine 1 withdrawal symptoms 1 women body fat percentage 1, 2 exercise 1 fasting 1 fasting day calories 1 yoghurt 1, 2, 3 YouTube 1 To find out more, and for the latest science updates and tools to help you through your Fast Days, go to fastdiet.co.uk.

Taming the To-Do List: How to Choose Your Best Work Every Day
by Glynnis Whitwer
Published 10 Aug 2015

Ebbesen at Stanford University in 1970, researchers studied how children responded when offered a treat. The children were set in a room with a treat of some kind, often a marshmallow, and told if they waited to eat it, they could have a second treat. Out of the over six hundred children who took the test, one-third delayed gratification long enough to get a second treat.[2] The promise of a second marshmallow wasn’t enough to deter the other two-thirds from immediately enjoying the single treat. Researchers then followed up with these children through the years, and the results were consistent. The children with higher willpower in the first test continued to show greater self-control through the years, resulting in higher educational achievements and better overall health.

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Creating a Mental Image Another tool to strengthen your willpower is to create an unpleasant association with what you want to avoid. Walter Mischel, the founder of the original marshmallow test, continued to study the idea of willpower and those who seemed to have more of it. As Mischel interviewed the test’s children throughout the years, he learned that a consistent and crucial factor in delaying gratification involves changing your perception of the object you want to resist. By creating a mental image that distances us from what we want, we are learning to mentally “cool” what Mischel calls the “hot” aspects of our environment, or those things that pull us away from our goals. Mischel himself struggled with smoking and tried for years to stop.

Affluenza: When Too Much Is Never Enough
by Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss
Published 31 May 2005

Households in the lowest income group (less than $20 000 a year) have the fewest debts and are much more likely than higher income households to have no debts at all.7 Households with incomes of $40 000 to $60 000 are most likely to run up credit card debts,8 which have been growing at an astonishing 20 per cent annually in recent years.9 In the 1950s and 1960s it was sometimes said that middleclass people saved because they embodied the values of thrift and prudence, while the working class was unable to delay gratification and spent as if there was no tomorrow. Whether that was true or not, the middle class today is no longer delaying gratification. They seem to want it all now and are willing to go into debt to get it. Lowincome households, on the other hand, are less likely to carry large credit card debts. In part, this is because banks are less willing to extend them credit, but it is also because low-income earners tend to be more aware of the consequences of poor budgeting.

Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry
by Helaine Olen
Published 27 Dec 2012

Eventually over the course of the sixteen-minute segment, the beloved Muppet earns and saves up enough money to purchase the “fantastic” ball. Other segments in For Me, For You feature personal finance guru Beth Kobliner, talking to Elmo about setting up jars with money divided into saving, spending, and charity categories. The segments are all about the benefits of planning and delayed gratification. This is one of the other newest ideas in the world of financial literacy and it is based, at least in part, on the infamous marshmallow experiment. Way back in the 1970s, a researcher at Stanford University decided to test the willpower of a bunch of preschoolers. He recruited several hundred four- to six-year-olds (or, more likely, their parents) and, one by one, put them in a room with a marshmallow, cookie, or pretzel.

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See financial therapy Coates, John, 169 commission fees on annuities, 111, 114, 115 fee-only advisers, 104–5 fiduciary standard, 105, 107, 110–11 fixed fees, 104 on 401(k) plans, 85–87, 91–92, 234 on options trading, 131 recommended products and, 105–6 Community Reinvestment Act (1977), 203 compounded interest, 96–97 Courage to Be Rich, The (Orman), 30, 35, 53 Covey, Stephen, 34 Cramer, Jim, 143–44, 145–47 credit, access to, 22, 175, 231–32 credit score, 41, 42 Critser, Greg, 231 Cronqvist, Henrik, 212 Cruz, Humberto, 119 Curtis, Kelly, 38 Danko, William D., 54, 69 Dave Ramsey Show, 61, 71. See also Ramsey, Dave Davidson, Liz, 168–69 day trading, 130–32 Deal, Nathan, 56 delayed gratification, 211–12 Delott, Steve, 125–26 De Neve, Jan-Emmanuel, 212 Dent, Harry, Jr., 140–42 Descano, Linda, 156, 157–58 DeWall, C. Nathan, 228 Difference, The (Chatzky), 54–55 dinner seminars, 102–3, 118–26 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, 110, 198, 218 Dominus, Susan, 27 Donoghue, Bill, 21 doomsday scenarios, 138–43 Drew, Ina, 170 Drucker, Peter, 225 Duckworth, Angela, 212 education.

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See personal finance; specific issues Finance Park theme park, 203–4 financial education. See also seminars as academic field, 198 banks’ education requirement, 203 Capital One programs, 196–97, 198, 199, 203–4 consumer lack of interest in, 210 creation of brand loyalty, 204–7 criticism of, 215–18 delayed gratification, 211–12 by financial services sector, 196–97, 198, 199, 202–7, 214, 217–18 government initiatives, 197–98 ineffectiveness of, 199, 207–9 Jump$tart Coalition for Financial Literacy, 200–202, 206–7 literacy versus capability, 209 Money Island game, 205–6 origin of financial education movement, 196, 200–202 Sesame Workshop, 211–15 Spent role-playing game, 229 timing of sessions, 209–10 for wealthy consumers, 203 financial services industry.

Sex, Time, and Power: How Women's Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution
by Leonard Shlain
Published 2 Aug 2004

Nevertheless, we can surmise that Response W most likely prodded members of the new species to acquire novel modes of behavior. We can deduce this from the fact that the human brain’s major design modification occurred primarily in the frontal lobes—the part of the brain that controls such uniquely human behaviors as speech, long-range planning, delayed gratification, and complex puzzle solving. The behaviors of all organisms can be divided into two basic kinds. The first are those that promote the survival of the individual in response to the dangers and opportunities presented by its surroundings, particularly those concerning feeding, fighting, and fleeing.

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We enter convents and monasteries pledging to live a celibate life. We can work hours without sleep. We can control (up to a point) our bladder and bowels. Yogi adepts can regulate their heart rate and breathing to a remarkable degree. We admire heroes and heroines who control their destinies through their forceful characters, delaying gratification to achieve majestic goals. We marvel at the discipline and willpower necessary to become a virtuoso pianist, an Olympic gold medalist, or a Nobel Prize winner. We are exceptionally proud that we can rein in the part of us that we consider our “creatureliness.” However, one bodily function resisting volitional control, except under the most extreme circumstances, is the timing of a woman’s menstrual cycle.* It is for naught that a woman brings to bear mental fortitude and concentration determined to change the appointed day.

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Composed of the neocortex, it is the thin rind covering the brain’s outermost wrinkled layer. Two features that distinguish Homo sapiens from other animals are the extent of the neocortex and the brain’s outsized frontal lobes. Together, they are primarily responsible for language, foresight, reason, judgment, and delayed gratification. Again, myelination begins from the bottom up, coating first the neurons of the reptilian brain, essentially completing this phase within the first months of life. The spinal cord and brain stem are the first parts of the brain to receive their coats, beginning at twenty-two weeks in utero.

Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture
by Designing The Mind and Ryan A Bush
Published 10 Jan 2021

Desire for wealth may pull an individual in one direction, and the desire for social status may pull in another. Bodily impulses for food and sex may pull in other directions still. It was the role of reason to keep them in check and guide them in the right direction.10 And it has been found that those who are capable of resisting the temptation of desire and delaying gratification in favor of a more rational choice are more successful and happy in life, suggesting that Plato may be right.11 But there were those who disagreed as well. David Hume argued that reason could not possibly be a motive for action, and that every act is ultimately motivated by emotion. He famously claimed that "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions."12 What he meant by this is that reason can be used to determine the best means to a desired end, but cannot generate an end or motivate a person to action by itself.

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Just as we established in the emotional section, our external experiences are generally filtered through our thoughts before they trigger behaviors. This means our thoughts and focus play a powerful role in the actions we take. Most people are familiar with the marshmallow test - Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel’s classic experiment which linked self-control and delayed gratification to nearly every important metric of the good life. It asked children to resist the urge to eat a marshmallow for as long as they could. They did not have the option of changing their environment because they were asked to sit right in front of the marshmallow. But the kids who did this successfully were not gritting their teeth and fighting back their urges, suppressing their cravings, or trying to power through them.

Safe Haven: Investing for Financial Storms
by Mark Spitznagel
Published 9 Aug 2021

But this is not at all what Spitz's idea is about, since you do not know whether there might be a payoff at the end of the line, and, furthermore, psychologists are shoddy scientists, wrong almost all the time about almost all the things they discuss. The idea that delayed gratification confers some socioeconomic advantage to those who defer was eventually debunked. The real world is a bit different. Under uncertainty, you must consider taking what you can now, since the person offering you two dollars in one year versus one today might be bankrupt then (or serving a jail sentence). So what this idea is about isn't delayed gratification, but the ability to operate without external gratification—or rather, with random gratification. Have the fortitude to live without promises.

Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids
by Meghan Daum
Published 29 Mar 2015

She also knew what Hugh Laurie’s character had said in nearly every episode of House: “Everybody lies.” And addicts lie the most. Some people are energized by risk. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t be. But in a relationship, the risk tolerance of partners should match. To draw upon the wisdom of Aesop, ants should not marry grasshoppers. I am an unglamorous ant—deferring gratification, socking away money religiously and investing it prudently. My partner was a grasshopper—seeking what she wants when she wants it, unconcerned by the threat of a rainy day. I suspect that when she flew from Los Angeles to meet the pregnant woman, she was fueled as much by risk as by her urge to be a mother.

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology
by Kentaro Toyama
Published 25 May 2015

His birth family might have been cursed with drug abuse, alcoholism, homelessness, illiteracy, insolvency, emotional turmoil, or just garden-variety bad luck or bad judgment. You can’t blame a child for not developing good study habits under constant distress. Yet Walter Mischel’s famous “marshmallow study” showed that the capacity to delay gratification – a kind of self-control – expressed at ages four to six is among the strongest predictors of achievement and social adjustment in young adults.2 It doesn’t make much sense to hold six-year-olds accountable for their personalities – it’s obviously not up to them. But what Mischel’s research further implies is that the responsibility for an adult’s degree of self-control isn’t black or white, either.3 A person’s intrinsic growth is never wholly of his own making.

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Academic experts sometimes make fine distinctions between these terms, but the concepts are closely related. Among those who champion the primacy of willpower are Walter Mischel, George Ainslie, and Roy Baumeister. Mischel is best known for his “marshmallow experiment” which demonstrated that young children who were able to delay gratification by giving up an immediate reward for a larger reward later grew up to be more successful in school and life than their peers who were not. See Shoda et al. (1990) and Mischel and Shoda (1995). Baumeister and his colleagues confirm that self-control is a predictor for better health, education, and employment, and further find that greater amounts of it as a character trait appear to confer a consistent advantage in life.

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See also Group intrinsic growth Socioeconomic status Ashesi student success, 127 compassionate class, 188–191 creative class, 186–187 digital divide, ix, 47–49, 234(n24) Maslovian growth, 270(n43) microcredit beneficiaries, 61 obesity and, 235(n32) Shanti Bhavan student success, 141 two-tiered education system, 94 See also Economics; Education and training; Inequality; Social change Soronko, 151–152, 154, 157 South Africa: microcredit programs, 59–60 Space programs, 177–178, 266(n9) Spandana organization, 236–237(n14) Spinoza, Baruch, 96 Sreenivasa, Tara, 139–141, 147–149, 254(n32) Standardized tests, 13, 94–95, 117, 229(n29), 240(n8), 248(n23) Star Trek, 21, 22, 24, 33 Stereotype threat, 264–265(n1), 271(n7) Stiglitz, Joseph, 98 Stree Jagruti Samiti (Society for Women’s Empowerment), 17–18 Student achievement delayed gratification and, 173 digital technology enhancing, 15–16 digital technology failing to improve, 8–13 Hole-in-the-Wall project, 228(n24) Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), 13, 117, 229(n29), 248(n23) randomized controlled trials, 8, 12, 31, 77–82 parents’ education and, 251(n13) teachers’ commitment to education, 78–80 video games, 228(n20) See also Children; Education and training Subprime home mortgages, 61 Suicide bombings, 50–51 Surveillance, digital, 52 Sustainability education, 146–149 environmental, 134, 207, 215–216 health care, 137–138 intrinsic growth and, 214 nonprofits, 86–87 public sector programs, 86–87 social enterprise, 82–87 See also Scale Swaminathan, M.W., 104 Syria: Arab Spring, 33–34 Systematic corruption, 266(n10).

Who Owns the Future?
by Jaron Lanier
Published 6 May 2013

We become obsessively engaged in interactions with approximately, but not fully predictable, results. The intrinsic challenge of computation—and of economics in the information age—is finding a way to not be overly drawn into dazzlingly designed forms of cognitive waste. The naïve experience of simulation is the opposite of delayed gratification. Competence depends on delayed gratification. This book has proposed an approach to an information economy based more on the craft of usability than on the thrill of gaming, though it doesn’t reject that thrill. Know Your Poison To paraphrase what Einstein might or might not have said, user interface should be made as easy as possible, but not easier.

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Therefore, the primary enemy of a fresh server is not competing wannabe servers, but rather “friction.” Friction is what it feels like to be on the bad side of a network effect. Even the slightest expense or risk might slow the initial growth spurt, so every possible effort is made to pretend there are no costs, risks, or even delayed gratifications. This can never really be true. Yet it feels true as you sign up for a social network or an app store for the first time. Since You Asked Here’s typical advice I’d give to someone who wants to try the Silicon Valley startup game: Obviously you have to get someone else to do something on your server.

Respectable: The Experience of Class
by Lynsey Hanley
Published 20 Apr 2016

Richard responded by poking me in the ribs and singing the chorus to ‘Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown’ while eating a bag of crisps, which luckily for him I found quite funny. I realized that to make friends properly you have to tell them significant things about yourself, something I feel grateful to have realized at seventeen and no later. But what did the experience of sixth-form college itself teach me? Mainly, that middle-class ideals of self-denial, deferred gratification and restraint work only in a context of existential comfort and security. If you know your place in the world is reasonably secure and can be relied upon as a source of internal comfort, external or material comforts take on less importance. One of my favourite scenes of class-bound horror at the practices of other social groups comes in Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth, in which the upper-working- going on lower-middle-class protagonist, Irie Jones, starts to visit an upper-middle-class household on a regular basis.9 She can’t get over the amount of cheese they have in their house.

Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes
by Mark Skousen
Published 22 Dec 2006

Indeed, he firmly asserted that a free commercial society functioning within the legal restraints he outlined would moderate the passions and prevent a descent into a Hobbesian jungle, a theme he inherits from Montesquieu (see pages 40-41) and later Senior Nassau.10 He taught that commerce encourages people to become educated, industrious, and self-disciplined, and to defer gratification. It is the fe^r of losing customers "which restrains his [the seller's] frauds and corrects his negligence" (1965 [1776], 129). All legitimate exchanges must benefit both the buyer and the seller, not one at the expense of the other. Smith's invisible hand only works if businessmen have an enlightened long-term view of competition, where they recognize the value of reputation and repeat business.

Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking
by Matthew Syed
Published 9 Sep 2019

Just a 10 per cent bias against black people in each of ten evaluations reduces their probability of getting to the top by a massive 90 per cent, a point made by Scott Page. Consider, too, how this creates perverse incentives. For in order to attain credentials in the first place requires hard work and sacrifice, not just at school and university but beyond. Success requires a willingness to defer gratification in myriad ways.4 And yet if the pay-off associated with these credentials is so grievously diluted, why would one bother to put in the hard yards? Roland Fryer, the Harvard economist, has shown just how distorted the pay-offs to education can become for minority groups. And this hints at what has become known as structural bias: the way that the legacy of historical injustice, unconscious discrimination and skewed incentives can harden into concrete barriers for certain sections of the population.

On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense
by David Brooks
Published 2 Jun 2004

Still, shoppers are bathed in hope. The products they confront might be trivial baubles or shams, but shoppers get caught up in the romance and spend optimistically if not always wisely. Campbell argues that shopping is not the opposite of working. Shopping is not about instant gratification while work is about deferred gratification. Both activities are part of the same process of pursuing satisfaction. The magazine stand, the department store, and the mall are all arenas for fantasy. The more upscale you go, the more imaginatively evocative the stores become. Cartier is less utilitarian than Dollar General. Lamborghini is more fantasy-oriented than Ford.

The Zero-Waste Lifestyle: Live Well by Throwing Away Less
by Amy Korst
Published 26 Dec 2012

This became much worse when she stopped buying instant oatmeal and started preparing it on the stove top. The screaming worsened while she cooked and tried to explain that we don’t always get what we want when we want it. Eventually April wore him down, and she taught her son the value of delayed gratification. Now he plays with his toys while she prepares meals, and she’s proud of the lesson he’s learned. The First “R”: Reduce Prior to the Green Garbage Project, Adam and I considered ourselves conscientious consumers, but we were consumers nonetheless. Our shopping habits never centered around reduction of purchasing, but rather around an attempt to purchase products claiming to be environmentally friendly.

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Although it would be nearly impossible to shield children from all forms of advertising—not to mention it would be naïve to expect to be able to—it is fair to say that the more advertising kids take in, the more they desire to participate in our consumer culture, regardless of family values like thrift, conservation, and contentment with what we already have. Instead, try to limit the amount of advertising children are exposed to. When your kids do see something on TV they “have to have,” this becomes a teachable moment. I find that one trait high schoolers totally lack is the ability to delay gratification. Our kids are truly a “gotta have it now” generation. Although there’s arguably nothing wrong with getting your children the latest, greatest toy on the market, there’s also nothing wrong with talking to them about the environmental impact of the toy they want. Finally, when acquiring new items, help children anticipate the eventual disposal of that product.

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent
by Ben Shapiro
Published 26 Jul 2021

Other irrevocably white ideas included an “emphasis on scientific method,” complete with “cause and effect relationships”; a focus on history, including “the primacy of Western (Greek, Roman) and Judeo-Christian tradition”; a belief that “hard work is the key to success” and encouragement of “work before play”; monotheism; placing emphasis on “delayed gratification” and following “rigid time schedules”; justice rooted in English common law and intent and private property; “decision-making” and “action orientation”; and, of course, “be[ing] polite.”54 One moment’s thought would betray the fact that assuming that such commonsense pathways to success as delayed gratification, being on time, being polite, and forming stable family structures has nothing to do with racism—and that to call such excellent notions “white” actually degrades nonwhite Americans by assuming them incapable of making decent life decisions.

The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World
by David Eagleman and Anthony Brandt
Published 30 Sep 2017

The bet of his life had paid off: undaunted by his mistakes, Wiles had crossed the finish line. So far as we can tell, this kind of endeavor would not be possible anywhere else in the animal kingdom: sharks, egrets, and armadillos don’t launch themselves into long, risky projects. The character of Wiles’ enterprise is only seen among humans. It requires delayed gratification on a scale of decades: an abstract, imagined reward that drives behavior forward. CODA: EXERCISING THE CREATIVE MENTALITY The software of creativity comes preinstalled on the human hard drive, ready to bend, break and blend the world around us. The brain spits out a stream of new possibilities, most of which won’t work, but some of which do.

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“An Expedition to Heal the Wounds of War.” Isis 94, no. 1 (2003): 57–89. Steinitz, Richard. György Ligeti: Music of the Imagination. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003. Stevens, Jeffrey R., Alaxandra G. Rosati, Sarah R. Heilbronner, and Nelly Mühlhoff. “Waiting for Grapes: Expectancy and Delayed Gratification in Bonobos.” International Journal of Comparative Psychology 24 (2011): 99–111. Strom, Stephanie. “TV Dinners in a Netflix World.” New York Times. November 5, 2015. Stross, Randall E. The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World. New York: Crown Publishers, 2007.

A Life Less Throwaway: The Lost Art of Buying for Life
by Tara Button
Published 8 Feb 2018

Purchase with patience Of everything I’ve found hard to conquer on my mindful curation journey, impatience has been the hardest. Once I’ve decided that I want something, I find it very hard not to get it immediately. This can lead to buying ‘not quite the right thing’, just because it’s available right away. Impatience is a virtue from the point of view of people trying to sell us stuff. But learning to delay gratification is necessary if we want to practise mindful curation. Set yourself a rule that for any purchase over a certain amount, you have to wait twenty-four hours to ‘authorise it’ to yourself. Put it on your wish list, but don’t buy it until the next day. This should leave you enough time to raise any objections in your mind, and it helps break the addictive cycle of impulse shopping.

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What’s interesting (and slightly ironic) is that this ad was based on a real Sixties experiment about willpower. It is now commonly known as the ‘Marshmallow Test’. It found that the kids who resisted the marshmallow in order to win another ended up with better SAT scores, were slimmer and had more self-worth in the future.2 Being able to delay gratification for a bigger prize in the future seems to be the key to many of the things we want – so all those Haribo kids failed! I don’t believe we are born with a certain amount of willpower. The kids who did well in the original test all had strategies to make the temptation easier to bear. Some turned the chair around and sat with their back to the sweet, some sang songs to themselves and some pushed the sweet away.

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions
by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
Published 4 Apr 2016

Our judgments betray our expectations, and our expectations betray our experience. What we project about the future reveals a lot—about the world we live in, and about our own past. What Our Predictions Tell Us About Ourselves When Walter Mischel ran his famous “marshmallow test” in the early 1970s, he was trying to understand how the ability to delay gratification develops with age. At a nursery school on the Stanford campus, a series of three-, four-, and five-year-olds had their willpower tested. Each child would be shown a delicious treat, such as a marshmallow, and told that the adult running the experiment was about to leave the room for a while.

…

famous “marshmallow test”: Mischel, Ebbesen, and Raskoff Zeiss, “Cognitive and Attentional Mechanisms in Delay of Gratification.” all depends on what kind of situation: McGuire and Kable, “Decision Makers Calibrate Behavioral Persistence on the Basis of Time-Interval Experience,” and McGuire and Kable, “Rational Temporal Predictions Can Underlie Apparent Failures to Delay Gratification.” grew into young adults who were more successful: Mischel, Shoda, and Rodriguez, “Delay of Gratification in Children.” how prior experiences might affect behavior: Kidd, Palmeri, and Aslin, “Rational Snacking.” Carnegie Hall even half full: According to figures from the Aviation Safety Network (personal correspondence), the number of fatalities “on board US-owned aircraft that are capable of carrying 12+ passengers, also including corporate jets and military transport planes” during the period 2000–2014 was 1,369, and adding the 2014 figure again to estimate deaths in 2015 yields a total estimate of 1,393 through the end of 2015.

…

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. McGuire, Joseph T., and Joseph W. Kable. “Decision Makers Calibrate Behavioral Persistence on the Basis of Time-Interval Experience.” Cognition 124, no. 2 (2012): 216–226. ______. “Rational Temporal Predictions Can Underlie Apparent Failures to Delay Gratification.” Psychological Review 120, no. 2 (2013): 395. Megiddo, Nimrod, and Dharmendra S. Modha. “Outperforming LRU with an Adaptive Replacement Cache Algorithm.” Computer 37, no. 4 (2004): 58–65. Mellen, Andrew. Unstuff Your Life! Kick the Clutter Habit and Completely Organize Your Life for Good.

I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict
by Kenneth Payne
Published 16 Jun 2021

I could be out with friends instead or doing a thousand other things that would be more immediately rewarding. DeepMind’s Atari conquering AI was relentlessly focused on the scoreboard. But it struggled at one game in particular, Montezuma’s Revenge, precisely because there was no immediate payoff. For humans, patience, or ‘delayed gratification’, is a useful trait. So too are traits like curiosity or playfulness—a willingness to experiment, sometimes with no particular goal in mind and no immediate sign of reward. These attributes play important roles in human development, as children learn to apply the basic conceptual building blocks of cognition to a wide variety of challenges.

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A-10 Warthog abacuses Abbottabad, Pakistan Able Archer (1983) acoustic decoys acoustic torpedoes Adams, Douglas Aegis combat system Aerostatic Corps affective empathy Affecto Afghanistan agency aircraft see also dogfighting; drones aircraft carriers algorithms algorithm creation Alpha biases choreography deep fakes DeepMind, see DeepMind emotion recognition F-117 Nighthawk facial recognition genetic selection imagery analysis meta-learning natural language processing object recognition predictive policing alien hand syndrome Aliens (1986 film) Alpha AlphaGo Altered Carbon (television series) Amazon Amnesty International amygdala Andropov, Yuri Anduril Ghost anti-personnel mines ants Apple Aristotle armour arms races Army Research Lab Army Signal Corps Arnalds, Ólafur ARPA Art of War, The (Sun Tzu) art Artificial Intelligence agency and architecture autonomy and as ‘brittle’ connectionism definition of decision-making technology expert systems and feedback loops fuzzy logic innateness intelligence analysis meta-learning as ‘narrow’ needle-in-a-haystack problems neural networks reinforcement learning ‘strong AI’ symbolic logic and unsupervised learning ‘winters’ artificial neural networks Ashby, William Ross Asimov, Isaac Asperger syndrome Astute class boats Atari Breakout (1976) Montezuma’s Revenge (1984) Space Invaders (1978) Athens ATLAS robots augmented intelligence Austin Powers (1997 film) Australia authoritarianism autonomous vehicles see also drones autonomy B-21 Raider B-52 Stratofortress B2 Spirit Baby X BAE Systems Baghdad, Iraq Baidu balloons ban, campaigns for Banks, Iain Battle of Britain (1940) Battle of Fleurus (1794) Battle of Midway (1942) Battle of Sedan (1940) batwing design BBN Beautiful Mind, A (2001 film) beetles Bell Laboratories Bengio, Yoshua Berlin Crisis (1961) biases big data Bin Laden, Osama binary code biological weapons biotechnology bipolarity bits Black Lives Matter Black Mirror (television series) Blade Runner (1982 film) Blade Runner 2049 (2017 film) Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire blindness Blunt, Emily board games, see under games boats Boden, Margaret bodies Boeing MQ-25 Stingray Orca submarines Boolean logic Boston Dynamics Bostrom, Nick Boyd, John brain amygdala bodies and chunking dopamine emotion and genetic engineering and language and mind merge and morality and plasticity prediction and subroutines umwelts and Breakout (1976 game) breathing control brittleness brute force Buck Rogers (television series) Campaign against Killer Robots Carlsen, Magnus Carnegie Mellon University Casino Royale (2006 film) Castro, Fidel cat detector centaur combination Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) centre of gravity chaff Challenger Space Shuttle disaster (1986) Chauvet cave, France chemical weapons Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986) chess centaur teams combinatorial explosion and creativity in Deep Blue game theory and MuZero as toy universe chicken (game) chimeras chimpanzees China aircraft carriers Baidu COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) D-21 in genetic engineering in GJ-11 Sharp Sword nuclear weapons surveillance in Thucydides trap and US Navy drone seizure (2016) China Lake, California Chomsky, Noam choreography chunking Cicero civilians Clarke, Arthur Charles von Clausewitz, Carl on character on culmination on defence on genius on grammar of war on materiel on nature on poker on willpower on wrestling codebreaking cognitive empathy Cold War (1947–9) arms race Berlin Crisis (1961) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) F-117 Nighthawk Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) joint action Korean War (1950–53) nuclear weapons research and SR-71 Blackbird U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) VRYAN Cole, August combinatorial creativity combinatorial explosion combined arms common sense computers creativity cyber security games graphics processing unit (GPU) mice Moore’s Law symbolic logic viruses VRYAN confirmation bias connectionism consequentialism conservatism Convention on Conventional Weapons ConvNets copying Cormorant cortical interfaces cost-benefit analysis counterfactual regret minimization counterinsurgency doctrine courageous restraint COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) creativity combinatorial exploratory genetic engineering and mental disorders and transformational criminal law CRISPR, crows Cruise, Thomas Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) culmination Culture novels (Banks) cyber security cybernetics cyborgs Cyc cystic fibrosis D-21 drones Damasio, Antonio dance DARPA autonomous vehicle research battlespace manager codebreaking research cortical interface research cyborg beetle Deep Green expert system programme funding game theory research LongShot programme Mayhem Ng’s helicopter Shakey understanding and reason research unmanned aerial combat research Dartmouth workshop (1956) Dassault data DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) dead hand system decision-making technology Deep Blue deep fakes Deep Green DeepMind AlphaGo Atari playing meta-learning research MuZero object recognition research Quake III competition (2019) deep networks defence industrial complex Defence Innovation Unit Defence Science and Technology Laboratory defence delayed gratification demons deontological approach depth charges Dionysus DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) dodos dogfighting Alpha domains dot-matrix tongue Dota II (2013 game) double effect drones Cormorant D-21 GJ-11 Sharp Sword Global Hawk Gorgon Stare kamikaze loitering munitions nEUROn operators Predator Reaper reconnaissance RQ-170 Sentinel S-70 Okhotnik surveillance swarms Taranis wingman role X-37 X-47b dual use technology Eagleman, David early warning systems Echelon economics Edge of Tomorrow (2014 film) Eisenhower, Dwight Ellsberg, Daniel embodied cognition emotion empathy encryption entropy environmental niches epilepsy epistemic community escalation ethics Asimov’s rules brain and consequentialism deep brain stimulation and deontological approach facial recognition and genetic engineering and golden rule honour hunter-gatherer bands and identity just war post-conflict reciprocity regulation surveillance and European Union (EU) Ex Machina (2014 film) expert systems exploratory creativity extra limbs Eye in the Sky (2015 film) F-105 Thunderchief F-117 Nighthawk F-16 Fighting Falcon F-22 Raptor F-35 Lightning F/A-18 Hornet Facebook facial recognition feedback loops fighting power fire and forget firmware 5G cellular networks flow fog of war Ford forever wars FOXP2 gene Frahm, Nils frame problem France Fukushima nuclear disaster (2011) Future of Life Institute fuzzy logic gait recognition game theory games Breakout (1976) chess, see chess chicken Dota II (2013) Go, see Go Montezuma’s Revenge (1984) poker Quake III (1999) Space Invaders (1978) StarCraft II (2010) toy universes zero sum games gannets ‘garbage in, garbage out’ Garland, Alexander Gates, William ‘Bill’ Gattaca (1997 film) Gavotti, Giulio Geertz, Clifford generalised intelligence measure Generative Adversarial Networks genetic engineering genetic selection algorithms genetically modified crops genius Germany Berlin Crisis (1961) Nuremburg Trials (1945–6) Russian hacking operation (2015) World War I (1914–18) World War II (1939–45) Ghost in the Shell (comic book) GJ-11 Sharp Sword Gladwell, Malcolm Global Hawk drone global positioning system (GPS) global workspace Go (game) AlphaGo Gödel, Kurt von Goethe, Johann golden rule golf Good Judgment Project Google BERT Brain codebreaking research DeepMind, see DeepMind Project Maven (2017–) Gordievsky, Oleg Gorgon Stare GPT series grammar of war Grand Challenge aerial combat autonomous vehicles codebreaking graphics processing unit (GPU) Greece, ancient grooming standard Groundhog Day (1993 film) groupthink guerilla warfare Gulf War First (1990–91) Second (2003–11) hacking hallucinogenic drugs handwriting recognition haptic vest hardware Harpy Hawke, Ethan Hawking, Stephen heat-seeking missiles Hebrew Testament helicopters Hellfire missiles Her (2013 film) Hero-30 loitering munitions Heron Systems Hinton, Geoffrey Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The (Adams) HIV (human immunodeficiency viruses) Hoffman, Frank ‘Holeshot’ (Cole) Hollywood homeostasis Homer homosexuality Hongdu GJ-11 Sharp Sword honour Hughes human in the loop human resources human-machine teaming art cyborgs emotion games King Midas problem prediction strategy hunter-gatherer bands Huntingdon’s disease Hurricane fighter aircraft hydraulics hypersonic engines I Robot (Asimov) IARPA IBM identity Iliad (Homer) image analysis image recognition cat detector imagination Improbotics nformation dominance information warfare innateness intelligence analysts International Atomic Energy Agency International Criminal Court international humanitarian law internet of things Internet IQ (intelligence quotient) Iran Aegis attack (1988) Iraq War (1980–88) nuclear weapons Stuxnet attack (2010) Iraq Gulf War I (1990–91) Gulf War II (2003–11) Iran War (1980–88) Iron Dome Israel Italo-Turkish War (1911–12) Jaguar Land Rover Japan jazz JDAM (joint directed attack munition) Jeopardy Jobs, Steven Johansson, Scarlett Johnson, Lyndon Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) de Jomini, Antoine jus ad bellum jus in bello jus post bellum just war Kalibr cruise missiles kamikaze drones Kasparov, Garry Kellogg Briand Pact (1928) Kennedy, John Fitzgerald KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti) Khrushchev, Nikita kill chain King Midas problem Kissinger, Henry Kittyhawk Knight Rider (television series) know your enemy know yourself Korean War (1950–53) Kratos XQ-58 Valkyrie Kubrick, Stanley Kumar, Vijay Kuwait language connectionism and genetic engineering and natural language processing pattern recognition and semantic webs translation universal grammar Law, Jude LeCun, Yann Lenat, Douglas Les, Jason Libratus lip reading Litvinenko, Alexander locked-in patients Lockheed dogfighting trials F-117 Nighthawk F-22 Raptor F-35 Lightning SR-71 Blackbird logic loitering munitions LongShot programme Lord of the Rings (2001–3 film trilogy) LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) Luftwaffe madman theory Main Battle Tanks malum in se Manhattan Project (1942–6) Marcus, Gary Maslow, Abraham Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Matrix, The (1999 film) Mayhem McCulloch, Warren McGregor, Wayne McNamara, Robert McNaughton, John Me109 fighter aircraft medical field memory Merkel, Angela Microsoft military industrial complex Mill, John Stuart Milrem mimicry mind merge mind-shifting minimax regret strategy Minority Report (2002 film) Minsky, Marvin Miramar air base, San Diego missiles Aegis combat system agency and anti-missile gunnery heat-seeking Hellfire missiles intercontinental Kalibr cruise missiles nuclear warheads Patriot missile interceptor Pershing II missiles Scud missiles Tomahawk cruise missiles V1 rockets V2 rockets mission command mixed strategy Montezuma’s Revenge (1984 game) Moore’s Law mosaic warfare Mueller inquiry (2017–19) music Musk, Elon Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) MuZero Nagel, Thomas Napoleon I, Emperor of the French Napoleonic France (1804–15) narrowness Nash equilibrium Nash, John National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) National Security Agency (NSA) National War College natural language processing natural selection Nature navigation computers Nazi Germany (1933–45) needle-in-a-haystack problems Netflix network enabled warfare von Neumann, John neural networks neurodiversity nEUROn drone neuroplasticity Ng, Andrew Nixon, Richard normal accident theory North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) North Korea nuclear weapons Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) dead hand system early warning systems F-105 Thunderchief and game theory and Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (1945) Manhattan Project (1942–6) missiles Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) second strike capability submarines and VRYAN and in WarGames (1983 film) Nuremburg Trials (1945–6) Obama, Barack object recognition Observe Orient Decide and Act (OODA) offence-defence balance Office for Naval Research Olympic Games On War (Clausewitz), see Clausewitz, Carl OpenAI optogenetics Orca submarines Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) pain Pakistan Palantir Palmer, Arnold Pandemonium Panoramic Research Papert, Seymour Parkinson’s disease Patriot missile interceptors pattern recognition Pearl Harbor attack (1941) Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) Pentagon autonomous vehicle research codebreaking research computer mouse development Deep Green Defence Innovation Unit Ellsberg leaks (1971) expert system programme funding ‘garbage in, garbage out’ story intelligence analysts Project Maven (2017–) Shakey unmanned aerial combat research Vietnam War (1955–75) perceptrons Perdix Pershing II missiles Petrov, Stanislav Phalanx system phrenology pilot’s associate Pitts, Walter platform neutrality Pluribus poker policing polygeneity Portsmouth, Hampshire Portuguese Man o’ War post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) Predator drones prediction centaur teams ‘garbage in, garbage out’ story policing toy universes VRYAN Prescience principles of war prisoners Project Improbable Project Maven (2017–) prosthetic arms proximity fuses Prussia (1701–1918) psychology psychopathy punishment Putin, Vladimir Pyeongchang Olympics (2018) Qinetiq Quake III (1999 game) radar Rafael RAND Corporation rational actor model Rawls, John Re:member (Arnalds) Ready Player One (Cline) Reagan, Ronald Reaper drones reciprocal punishment reciprocity reconnaissance regulation ban, campaigns for defection self-regulation reinforcement learning remotely piloted air vehicles (RPAVs) revenge porn revolution in military affairs Rid, Thomas Robinson, William Heath Robocop (1987 film) Robotics Challenge robots Asimov’s rules ATLAS Boston Dynamics homeostatic Shakey symbolic logic and Rome Air Defense Center Rome, ancient Rosenblatt, Frank Royal Air Force (RAF) Royal Navy RQ-170 Sentinel Russell, Stuart Russian Federation German hacking operation (2015) Litvinenko murder (2006) S-70 Okhotnik Skripal poisoning (2018) Ukraine War (2014–) US election interference (2016) S-70 Okhotnik SAGE Said and Done’ (Frahm) satellite navigation satellites Saudi Arabia Schelling, Thomas schizophrenia Schwartz, Jack Sea Hunter security dilemma Sedol, Lee self-actualisation self-awareness self-driving cars Selfridge, Oliver semantic webs Shakey Shanahan, Murray Shannon, Claude Shogi Silicon Valley Simon, Herbert Single Integrated Operations Plan (SIOP) singularity Siri situational awareness situationalist intelligence Skripal, Sergei and Yulia Slaughterbots (2017 video) Slovic, Paul smartphones Smith, Willard social environments software Sophia Sorcerer’s Apprentice, The (Goethe) South China Sea Soviet Union (1922–91) aircraft Berlin Crisis (1961) Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986) Cold War (1947–9), see Cold War collapse (1991) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) early warning systems Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) Korean War (1950–53) nuclear weapons radar technology U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) VRYAN World War II (1939–45) Space Invaders (1978 game) SpaceX Sparta Spike Firefly loitering munitions Spitfire fighter aircraft Spotify Stanford University Stanley Star Trek (television series) StarCraft II (2010 game) stealth strategic bombing strategic computing programme strategic culture Strategy Robot strategy Strava Stuxnet sub-units submarines acoustic decoys nuclear Orca South China Sea incident (2016) subroutines Sukhoi Sun Tzu superforecasting surveillance swarms symbolic logic synaesthesia synthetic operation environment Syria Taliban tanks Taranis drone technological determinism Tempest Terminator franchise Tesla Tetlock, Philip theory of mind Threshold Logic Unit Thucydides TikTok Tomahawk cruise missiles tongue Top Gun (1986 film) Top Gun: Maverick (2021 film) torpedoes toy universes trade-offs transformational creativity translation Trivers, Robert Trump, Donald tumours Turing, Alan Twitter 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968 film) Type-X Robotic Combat Vehicle U2 incident (1960) Uber Uexküll, Jacob Ukraine ultraviolet light spectrum umwelts uncanny valley unidentified flying objects (UFOs) United Kingdom AI weapons policy armed force, size of Battle of Britain (1940) Bletchley Park codebreaking Blitz (1940–41) Cold War (1947–9) COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) DeepMind, see DeepMind F-35 programme fighting power human rights legislation in Litvinenko murder (2006) nuclear weapons principles of war Project Improbable Qinetiq radar technology Royal Air Force Royal Navy Skripal poisoning (2018) swarm research wingman concept World War I (1914–18) United Nations United States Afghanistan War (2001–14) Air Force Army Research Lab Army Signal Corps Battle of Midway (1942) Berlin Crisis (1961) Bin Laden assassination (2011) Black Lives Matter protests (2020) centaur team research Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Challenger Space Shuttle disaster (1986) Cold War (1947–9), see Cold War COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) culture cyber security DARPA, see DARPA Defense Department drones early warning systems F-35 programme Gulf War I (1990–91) Gulf War II (2003–11) IARPA Iran Air shoot-down (1988) Korean War (1950–53) Manhattan Project (1942–6) Marines Mueller inquiry (2017–19) National Security Agency National War College Navy nuclear weapons Office for Naval Research Patriot missile interceptor Pearl Harbor attack (1941) Pentagon, see Pentagon Project Maven (2017–) Rome Air Defense Center Silicon Valley strategic computing programme U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) universal grammar Universal Schelling Machine (USM) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), see drones unsupervised learning utilitarianism UVision V1 rockets V2 rockets Vacanti mouse Valkyries Van Gogh, Vincent Vietnam War (1955–75) Vigen, Tyler Vincennes, USS voice assistants VRYAN Wall-e (2008 film) WannaCry ransomware War College, see National War College WarGames (1983 film) warrior ethos Watson weapon systems WhatsApp Wiener, Norbert Wikipedia wingman role Wittgenstein, Ludwig World War I (1914–18) World War II (1939–45) Battle of Britain (1940) Battle of Midway (1942) Battle of Sedan (1940) Bletchley Park codebreaking Blitz (1940–41) Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (1945) Pearl Harbor attack (1941) radar technology V1 rockets V2 rockets VRYAN and Wrangham, Richard Wright brothers WS-43 loitering munitions Wuhan, China X-37 drone X-drone X-rays YouTube zero sum games

Daughter Detox: Recovering From an Unloving Mother and Reclaiming Your Life
by Peg Streep
Published 14 May 2017

TURN DOWN THE HEAT: DEALING WITH REJECTION SENSITIVITY One of the best discussions of rejection sensitivity I’ve read describes it as “hot” reactivity, which is completely emotionally fueled. (Yes, this is the same terminology used in the discussion on how to reframe memories using cool processing.) Ozlem Ayduk and a team that included Walter Mischel (who ran the famous delayed gratification “Marshmallow Test” described on page 103 ) wanted to know if children who had successfully been able to delay gratification would actually be more skilled at managing rejection sensitivity. You may remember that the children who managed to resist the marshmallow did so by distracting themselves—looking away, singing, staring into the distance, whatever worked.

Shortchanged: Life and Debt in the Fringe Economy
by Howard Karger
Published 9 Sep 2005

As such, zero balances on credit cards are becoming increasingly rare as consumers rack up credit card purchases and play a shell game of shifting balances from one card to another. Although stagnant wages coupled with increases in the cost of necessities drives the fringe economy, it is also driven by overconsumption, conspicuous consumption, status consumption, the inability to defer gratification, and impulse buying. Hence, it’s not surprising that in surveys of children age 10 to 13, Juliet Schor found that their overriding goal was to get rich. In response to the statement, “I want to make a lot of money when I grow up,” 63% agreed, and only 7% disagreed.29 But even if most don’t get rich, the fringe economy still allows them to live as if they were, albeit temporarily.

Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain
by Lisa McKenzie
Published 14 Jan 2015

He also noted that violence and abandonment of women and children were common and, as a result, mother-centred families and communities that had greater knowledge and ties to maternal relatives became the ‘norm’. Lewis also argued that, within the ‘culture of poverty’, other traits developed: … a strong present time orientation with relatively little ability to defer gratification and plan for the future, a sense of resignation and fatalism based upon the realities of their difficult life situation, a belief in male superiority which reaches its crystallization in machismo or the cult of masculinity, a corresponding martyr complex among women, and finally, a high tolerance for psychological pathology of all sorts.

The New Economics: A Bigger Picture
by David Boyle and Andrew Simms
Published 14 Jun 2009

The difficulty was that, actually, this undermined its ability to describe the world, and the behaviour of human beings, very accurately. It assumed that people always maximize their broad wealth in any given situation – which is, almost by definition, true (though there is some room for argument about deferred gratification). But economics then defined wealth so narrowly, as little more than money, when everyone knows – at least outside the economics lecture room – that this is nonsense. Human beings constantly accept something that is both less and more than money, from quiet or calmness or good relationships, to any other aspect of life that brings them fulfilment and excitement.

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
by Malcolm Gladwell
Published 30 Sep 2013

This was in the 1950s. That would be the equivalent today of five thousand dollars. “I didn’t have money for where I wanted to go,” he said with a shrug, as if it was obvious that an eleven-year-old would have a sense of where he wanted to go. “Any fool can spend money. But to earn it and save it and defer gratification—then you learn to value it differently.” His family lived in what people euphemistically called a “mixed neighborhood.” He went to public schools and wore hand-me-downs. His father was a product of the Depression, and talked plainly about money. The man from Hollywood said that if he wanted something—a new pair of running shoes, say, or a bicycle—his father would tell him he had to pay half.

Lurking: How a Person Became a User
by Joanne McNeil
Published 25 Feb 2020

Terri Senft, in her book Camgirls: Celebrity & Community in the Age of Social Networks, details how she got hooked on watching something that to anyone else must have sounded dull: I typed the URL and watched a webcammed image of a living room refreshing every few minutes. Jennifer wasn’t even home. The whole thing came across as an exercise in deferred gratification, with an endless expectation that something might happen. Waiting for the webcam to display something besides her empty couch, I browsed the JenniCam’s archived photos and online journals. The moment I figured out that I could match the date and time stamps on the photos to the journal entries, I was hooked.

Early Retirement Extreme
by Jacob Lund Fisker
Published 30 Sep 2010

In general, the avoided complexities are the tightly coupled complexities.42 They will gladly borrow those, but they won't own them. To wit, they use a modularity strategy with loose couplings to avoid many problems. Slowness can be achieved through delayed gratification. In a world of scarcity, instant gratification is the optimal strategy. In a world of abundance, delayed gratification is the optimal strategy. Genetically, there's a preference for the former, which means that a mature person with a measure of self-control has an advantage, being able to wait for bargains. It also means if you have patience and don't depend on speed, there are fewer costs to be paid for the additional power that speed otherwise requires.

Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It's Changing the World
by Bethany McLean
Published 10 Sep 2018

“Every barrel that you use up that comes from somebody else is a barrel of your precious oil which you’re going to need to feed your people and maintain your civilization. You want to produce just enough so that you keep up on all of the technology. And you shouldn’t mind at all paying prices that look high for foreign oil.” He adds, “You will be better off because you delayed gratification, instead of grabbing for it like a child.” Another way to think about this is that America is the only country in the world to have made the switch to unconventional oil and gas—America is the only country to have exhausted its supplies of conventional oil and gas. And other countries have shale, too.

Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation
by Anne Helen Petersen
Published 14 Jan 2021

The renowned neoconservative sociologist Edward Shils called student protesters of this era “a uniquely indulged generation”; in a passage that should sound familiar to any millennial, another sociologist, Robert Nisbet, placed the blame on “massive doses of affection, adulation, devotion, permissiveness, incessant and infant recognition of youthful ‘brightness’ by parents.”10 To these critics, whose generation had weathered the deprivations of the Great Depression and World War II, these boomers were simply ungrateful. They’d been given the keys to the American Dream but failed to cultivate any sort of work ethic, or the sort of deferred gratification that would allow them to pass their middle-class status down to the next generation. Instead, boomers “dropped out” of society in their early twenties. They opted for “occupations,” like cabdriver or house painter, instead of white-collar work. They ignored social mores, and stayed in seemingly endless graduate programs instead of pursuing honorable careers.

Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
by Rory Sutherland
Published 6 May 2019

Another company using a big data approach discovered a variable that was vastly more predictive of a good employee than any other: it wasn’t their level of educational attainment or a variable on a personality test – no, it turned out that the best employees had overwhelmingly made their online application using either Google Chrome or Firefox as their browser, rather than the standard one supplied on their computers. While I can see that replacing a browser on a laptop may be indicative of certain qualities – conscientiousness, technological competence and the willingness to defer gratification, to name just three – is it acceptable to use this information to discriminate between employees? The company decided that it wasn’t, in part because it would have been unfair to less privileged applicants, who may have had to use a library computer to apply. Illustration by Greg Stevenson The confounding variable here, missing from the data, is the weather, which explains the spurious correlation.

The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations
by Christopher Lasch
Published 1 Jan 1978

In 1960, David Riesman complained that young people no longer had much social " " presence, their education having provided them a polished personality but [with] an affable, casual, adaptable one, suitable to the loose-jointed articulation and heavy job turnover in the expanding organizations of an affluent soci- not with " It is true that "a present-oriented hedonism," as Riesman went on to argue, has replaced the work ethic among the very classes which in the earlier stages of industrialization were oriented toward the future, toward distant goals and delayed gratification. But this hedonism is a fraud; the pursuit of pleasure disguises a struggle for power. Americans have not really become more sociable and cooperative, as the theorists of otherdirection and conformity would like us to believe; they have merely become more adept at exploiting the conventions of interpersonal relations for their own benefit.

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In 1960, David Riesman complained that young people no longer had their education having provided them a polished personality but [with] an affable, casual, much social not with " " presence, " adaptable one, suitable to the loose-jointed articulation and heavy job turnover in the expanding organizations of an affluent society. It is true that "a present-oriented hedonism," as Riesman " " went on to argue, has replaced the work ethic among the very classes which in the earlier stages of industrialization were oriented toward the future, toward distant goals and delayed gratification. But this hedonism is a fraud; the pursuit of pleasure disguises a struggle for power. Americans have not really become more sociable and cooperative, as the theorists of otherdirection and conformity would like us to believe; they have merely become more adept at exploiting the conventions of interpersonal relations for their own benefit.

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking
by John Brockman
Published 14 Feb 2012

Mischel then made the four-year-olds an offer: They could either eat one treat right away or, if they were willing to wait while he stepped out for a few minutes, they could have two treats when he returned. Not surprisingly, nearly every kid chose to wait. At the time, psychologists assumed that the ability to delay gratification in order to get that second marshmallow or cookie depended on willpower. Some people simply had more willpower than others, which allowed them to resist tempting sweets and save money for retirement. However, after watching hundreds of kids participate in the marshmallow experiment, Mischel concluded that this standard model was wrong.

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absence and evidence, 281, 282–84 abstractions, shorthand, see SHAs Adaptation and Natural Selection (Williams), 196 adoptions, 194 Aether, 338–39 Afghanistan, 19 agreeableness, 232–33 Aguirre, Anthony, 301–2 Alexander, Richard, 321 Alexander, Stephon H., xxvii, 296–98 algebra, 6, 24 Alter, Adam, 150–53 altruism, 194, 196–97 aluminum refining, 110 Amazon, 25 Anasazi, 361 Anderson, Alun, 209–10 Anderson, Ross, 262–63 anecdotalism, 278–80 anomalies, 242–45 Anthropocene thinking, 206–8 anthropologists, 361 anthropophilia, 386–88 anyons, 191 apophenia, 394 Arbesman, Samuel, 11–12 archaeology, 282–84, 361 architecture, 246–49 ARISE (Adaptive Regression In the Service of the Ego), 235–36 Aristotle, 9, 28–29, 35 art: bricolage in, 271–72 parallelism in commerce and, 307–9 recursive structures in, 146–49 Arthur, Brian, 223 Ascent of Man, The, 340 Asimov, Isaac, 324–25 assertions, 267 assumptions, 218–19 atoms, 128 attention, 130, 211 focusing illusion an, 49–50 spotlight of, 46–48 attractiveness, 136, 137 authority and experts, 18, 20, 34 Avery, Oswald, 244 Avicenna, 9 Aztecs, 361 Bacon, Francis, 395 bacteria, 15–16, 89, 97, 166, 290–91, 292–93, 338 transformation of, 243, 244, 245 Baldwin, Mark, 152 Banaji, Mahzarin R., 389–93 banking crisis, 259, 261, 307, 309, 322, 386 Barondes, Samuel, 32 Barton, Robert, 150–51 base rate, 264–65 Bass, Thomas A., 86–87 Bayesian inference, 70 behavior, ignorance of causes of, 349–52 behavioral sciences, 365–66 belief, 336–37 proof, 355–57 Bell, Alexander Graham, 110 bell curve (Gaussian distribution), 199, 200 benchmarks, 186 bias, 18, 43–45 confirmation, 40, 134 self-serving, 37–38, 40 in technologies, 41–42 biochemical cycles, 170–71 bioengineering, 16 biological ecosystems, 312–14 biological teleology, 4 biology, 234, 312 biophilia, 386 Bird, Sheila, 274 birds, 155, 359 chickens, 62–63, 155 herring gulls, 160 songbirds, 154–55 black box, 303 Blackmore, Sue, 215–17 Black Swan, The (Taleb), 315 black-swan technologies, 314–17 Blake, William, 44 blame, 35–36, 106, 386 blindness, 144 Bloch waves, 297 Boccaletti, Giulio, 184–87 body, life-forms in, 13, 290–91, 292 Boeri, Stefano, 78 Bohr, Niels, 28 Bolyai, János, 109 Bony, Jean, 247–48 Bostrom, Nick, 275–77 bottom-up thinking, 157–59 Boyer, Pascal, 182–83 bradykinesia, 63 brain, 48, 129–30, 148, 149, 150, 158, 172, 346, 347, 389, 394 consciousness and, 217 evolution of, 10, 207, 257 mind and, 364, 366 neurons in, see neurons plasticity of, 250–51 predictive coding and, 132–34 self and, 212 size of, 257 of split-brain patients, 349–50 synapses in, 164 temperament traits and, 229–30 white and gray matter in, 162–63 Bramante, Donato, 248–49 Brand, Stewart, 15–16 Bray, Dennis, 171–72 bricolage, 271–72 Brin, Sergey, xxv Bronowski, Jacob, 340, 341–42 Brooks, David, xxv–xxviii Brown, Louise, 165 Bryson, Bill, 387 Buddha, 373 business planning, 186 Buss, David M., 353–54 Byars, James Lee, xxix–xxx Cabot, John, 90 calculus, 34, 109 Calvin, William, 201–2 cancer, 390 body scans and, 69, 259–60, 264, 265 tests for, 264–65 cannibalism, 361–62 carbon, 81, 82 carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, 202, 207, 217, 262 car insurance, 66–67 Carr, Nicholas, 116–17 Carroll, Sean, 9–10 Cartesian science, 82–83 Caspi, Avshalom, 279 cats, 286 causality, 34–36, 58–61, 396 blame, 35–36, 106, 386 confabulation, 349–52 correlation and, 215–17, 219 of diseases, 59, 303–4 entanglement and, 331 information flow and, 218–20 nexus, 34–35 root-cause analysis, 303–4 in universe, 9–10 web of causation, 59–60, 61 central-limit theorem, 107–8 certainty, 73, 260 proof, 355–57 uselessness of, 51–52 see also uncertainty Challenger, 236 chance, 7, 18 change, 127–28, 290 fixation on, 373 chaos theory, 103, 202 character traits, 229 charitable activities, 194 cheating, 351 chess, 343 chickens, 62–63, 155 children, 148, 155, 252 chocolate, 140 cholera, 338 Chomsky, Noam, xxv Christakis, Nicholas A., xxvii, 81–83, 306 Church, George, 88–89 CINAC (“correlation is not a cause”), 215–17 civil rights movement, 370 Clark, Andy, 132–34 Clarke, Arthur C., 61 climate change, 51, 53, 99, 178, 201–2, 204, 268, 309, 315, 335, 386, 390 CO2 levels and, 202, 207, 217, 262 cultural differences in view of, 387–88 global economy and, 238–39 procrastination in dealing with, 209, 210 clinical trials, 26, 44, 56 cloning, 56, 165 coastlines, xxvi, 246 Cochran, Gregory, 360–62 coffee, 140, 152, 351 cognition, 172 perception and, 133–34 cognitive humility, 39–40 cognitive load, 116–17 cognitive toolkit, 333 Cohen, Daniel, 254 Cohen, Joel, 65 Cohen, Steven, 307–8 cold fusion, 243, 244 Coleman, Ornette, 254, 255 collective intelligence, 257–58 Colombia, 345 color, 150–51 color-blindness, 144 Coltrane, John, 254–55 communication, 250, 358, 372 depth in, 227 temperament and, 231 companionship, 328–29 comparative advantage, law of, 100 comparison, 201 competition, 98 complexity, 184–85, 226–27, 326, 327 emergent, 275 computation, 227, 372 computers, 74, 103–4, 146–47, 172 cloud and, 74 graphical desktops on, 135 memory in, 39–40 open standards and, 86–87 computer software, 80, 246 concept formation, 276 conduction, 297 confabulation, 349–52 confirmation bias, 40, 134 Conner, Alana, 367–70 Conrad, Klaus, 394 conscientiousness, 232 consciousness, 217 conservatism, 347, 351 consistency, 128 conspicuous consumption, 228, 308 constraint satisfaction, 167–69 consumers, keystone, 174–76 context, sensitivity to, 40 continental drift, 244–45 conversation, 268 Conway, John Horton, 275, 277 cooperation, 98–99 Copernicanism, 3 Copernican Principle, 11–12, 25 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 11, 294 correlation, and causation, 215–17, 219 creationism, 268–69 creativity, 152, 395 constraint satisfaction and, 167–69 failure and, 79, 225 negative capability and, 225 serendipity and, 101–2 Crick, Francis, 165, 244 criminal justice, 26, 274 Croak, James, 271–72 crude look at the whole (CLAW), 388 Crutzen, Paul, 208 CT scans, 259–60 cultural anthropologists, 361 cultural attractors, 180–83 culture, 154, 156, 395 change and, 373 globalization and, see globalization culture cycle, 367–70 cumulative error, 177–79 curating, 118–19 currency, central, 41 Cushman, Fiery, 349–52 cycles, 170–73 Dalrymple, David, 218–20 DALYs (disability-adjusted life years), 206 danger, proving, 281 Darwin, Charles, 2, 44, 89, 98, 109, 156, 165, 258, 294, 359 Das, Satyajit, 307–9 data, 303, 394 personal, 303–4, 305–6 security of, 76 signal detection theory and, 389–93 Dawkins, Richard, 17–18, 180, 183 daydreaming, 235–36 DDT, 125 De Bono, Edward, 240 dece(i)bo effect, 381–85 deception, 321–23 decision making, 52, 305, 393 constraint satisfaction and, 167–69 controlled experiments and, 25–27 risk and, 56–57, 68–71 skeptical empiricism and, 85 deduction, 113 defeasibility, 336–37 De Grey, Aubrey, 55–57 delaying gratification, 46 democracy, 157–58, 237 Democritus, 9 Demon-Haunted World, The (Sagan), 273 Dennett, Daniel C., 170–73, 212, 275 depth, 226–28 Derman, Emanuel, 115 Descent of Man, The (Darwin), 156 design: mind and, 250–53 recursive structures in, 246–49 determinism, 103 Devlin, Keith, 264–65 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), 233–34 “Dial F for Frankenstein” (Clarke), 61 Diesel, Rudolf, 170 diseases, 93, 128, 174 causes of, 59, 303–4 distributed systems, 74–77 DNA, 89, 165, 223, 244, 260, 292, 303, 306 Huntington’s disease and, 59 sequencing of, 15 see also genes dopamine, 230 doughnuts, 68–69, 70 drug trade, 345 dualities, 296–98, 299–300 wave-particle, 28, 296–98 dual view of ourselves, 32 dynamics, 276 Eagleman, David, 143–45 Earth, 294, 360 climate change on, see climate change distance between sun and, 53–54 life on, 3–5, 10, 15 earthquakes, 387 ecology, 294–95 economics, 100, 186, 208, 339 economy(ies), 157, 158, 159 global, 163–64, 238–39 Pareto distributions in, 198, 199, 200 and thinking outside of time, 223 ecosystems, 312–14 Edge, xxv, xxvi, xxix–xxx education, 50, 274 applying to real-world situations, 40 as income determinant, 49 policies on, controlled experiments in, 26 scientific lifestyle and, 20–21 efficiency, 182 ego: ARISE and, 235–36 see also self 80/20 rule, 198, 199 Einstein, Albert, 28, 55, 169, 301, 335, 342 on entanglement, 330 general relativity theory of, 25, 64, 72, 234, 297 memory law of, 252 on simplicity, 326–27 Einstellung effect, 343–44 electrons, 296–97 Elliott, Andrew, 150 Eliot, T.

The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations
by Jacob Soll
Published 28 Apr 2014

The details mattered.11 To see all of Datini’s books together is to see the birth of modern finance and the information age. Datini’s books make him familiar: a businessman of numbers, data, and paperwork. Max Weber is famous for claiming that capitalism grew out of the Protestant work ethic, based on self-discipline and what Sigmund Freud called delayed gratification, the control of the pleasure principle. But Datini shows that, in spite of his taste for slave girls, partridges, and fine clothes, the original capitalist work ethic of Western Europe grew from this disciplined, fearful, saint-loving, Catholic, Italian world of trade, with its connections to Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire.

…

Franklin was not only making the post office work in the colonies but also spreading his vision of how to order and manage the world.12 For all Franklin’s espoused work ethic (early to bed, early to rise, etc.), he may have had ulterior motives in some of his accounting projects. His enthusiasm for teaching women accounting had an outcome not necessarily in line with the ethic of delayed gratification. In the early years, his wife, Deborah Read Franklin, kept books at the counter of their Philadelphia shop, recording sales transactions. Franklin took Deborah’s shop book and his own transaction journal and transferred the entries into his main ledger in classic form. He kept debit and credit columns, numbered pages, and, as he noted later, before leaving on a political mission to England in 1757, “I have drawn a red Line over all such Accounts in this book, as are either Settled or not likely to be recovered.”

The Bridge: The Building of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge
by Gay Talese and Bruce Davidson
Published 1 Jan 2003

Margaret and Gerard had been classmates in parochial school and had dated during and after their years in high school, although "dating" in those days in that neighborhood hardly connoted sexual permissiveness. Had Gerard not fallen off the bridge, Margaret would have been his virgin bride, perhaps among the last women of her generation in Red Hook to be so determinedly inclined regarding premarital chastity; and yet along with her firmly held opinions on delayed gratification and the sanctity of marriage, and her feelings of appreciation and tenderness toward Gerard for supporting and respecting her views, she doubted that she would have been very happy as Gerard's wife. She told me this during an interview in her home seven weeks after Gerard's funeral, which had been attended by hundreds of fellow bridge workers.

The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts
by Shane Parrish
Published 22 Nov 2019

In winning the civil war Caesar got rid of all major opposition to Cleopatra and firmly aligned himself with her reign. Being aware of second-order consequences and using them to guide your decision-making may mean the short term is less spectacular, but the payoffs for the long term can be enormous. By delaying gratification now, you will save time in the future. You won’t have to clean up the mess you made on account of not thinking through the effects of your short-term desires. — Sidebar: Developing Trust for Future Success Constructing an effective argument: Second-order thinking can help you avert problems and anticipate challenges that you can then address in advance.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Published 28 Jan 2020

If there was any long-term thinking, it was of the how do I find someplace warm to winter variety. In other words, evolution shaped our time horizons to see about six months into the future. Of course, we evolved ways to extend this perspective. Delayed gratification is the psychological term, and one distinguishing characteristic of our species is the ability to delay gratification beyond the limits of lifespan. Religions that shape behavior today by promising an afterlife tomorrow rely on this mechanism. No other animal can do this. But we seem to be losing this talent. “Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span,” writes Stewart Brand in an essay for the Long Now Foundation.

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models
by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann
Published 17 Jun 2019

On the other hand, many actual lottery winners regret taking the lump-sum payment because they end up spending too much initially. In personal situations, most people discount the future implicitly at relatively high discount rates. And they do so in a manner that is not actually fixed over time, which is called hyperbolic discounting. In other words, people really, really value instant gratification over delayed gratification, and this preference plays a central role in procrastination, along with other areas of life where people struggle with self-control, such as dieting, addiction, etc. When you’re on a diet, it’s hard to avoid the pull of that donut in the office. That’s because you get the short-term donut payoff right now, whereas the long-term dieting payoff, being so far in the future, is discounted in your mind close to zero (like company earnings fifty years in the future).

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W., 104 business case, 207 butterfly effect, 121, 122, 125, 201 Butterfly Effect, The, 121 Butterworth, Brian, x buyout, leveraged, 79 bystander effect, 259 cable television, 69, 100, 106 Caesar, Julius, 244 calculus, 291 call your bluff, 238 cameras, 302–3, 308–10 campaign finance reform, 110 Campbell, Donald T., 49–50 Campbell’s law, 49–50 cancer: breast, 156–57, 160–61 clusters of, 145 lung, 133–34, 137 cap-and-trade systems, 42–43 capital, cost of, 76, 77, 179, 182 careers, 300–301 decisions about, 5–6, 57, 175–77, 201, 207, 296 design patterns and, 93 entry barriers and, 305 licensing and, 306–7 Carfax, 46 Cargill, Tom, 89 cargo cults, 315–16 caring personally, 263–64 car market, 46–47 Carrey, Jim, 229 carrot-and-stick model, 232 cascading failures, 120, 192 casinos, 220, 226 cast a wide net, 122 catalyst, 112–13, 115, 119 Catherine II, Empress, 228 causal loop diagrams, 192–93 causation, correlation and, 134, 135 cellphones, 116–17 center of gravity, 112 central limit theorem, 152–53, 163 central tendency, 147 chain reaction, viii, 114, 120 Challenger, 31–33 challenging directly, 263–64 change, 100–101, 112–13, 129 resistance to, 110–11 chaos, 124 balance between order and, 128 chaos theory, 121 chaotic systems, 120–21, 124, 125 Chatelier’s principle, 193–94 cheating, 50 Chekhov, Anton, 124 chess, 242 chilling effect, 52–54 China, 231, 276 choice, 62 paradox of, 62–63 Christensen, Clayton, 296, 297, 310 Cialdini, Robert, 215–17, 219–21 circle of competence, 317–18 climate change, 42, 55, 56, 104, 105, 183, 192 Clinton, Hillary, 70, 97 clustering illusion, 144–45 CNN, 220 Coase, Ronald, 42 Coase theorem, 42–43 cobra effect, 50–52 Coca-Cola, 305 cognitive dissonance, 27–29, 216 coin flips, 143–44, 154–55, 158–59 Cold War, 209, 235 collateral damage, 53–54, 231 collective intelligence, 205 collectivist versus individualist, in organizational culture, 274 college, 209–10 choice of, 58–60 rankings of, 50, 137 Collins, Jim, 109, 254 commandos, in organizations and projects, 253–54 commitment, 87–88 escalation of, 91 influence model of, 216, 220 commodities, 283 commons, 36–38, 43 Common Sense (Paine), 221–22 communication, high-context and low-context, 273–74 competence, circle of, 317–18 competition: and crossing the chasm, 312 moats and, 302–5 perfect, 283 regulatory capture and, 305 sustainable competitive advantage, 283, 285 complexity, complex systems, 185–86, 192, 194 diagrams and, 192–93 simulations and, 192–94 compound interest, 69, 85 Concorde fallacy, 91 conditional probability, 156 Confederate leaders, 113 confidence intervals, 154–56, 159 confidence level, 154, 155, 161 confirmation bias, 26–28, 33, 103, 159 conflict, 209, 226 arms races, 209–12, 214 game theory and, see game theory confounding factor, 134–35, 139 conjunction fallacy, 9–10 conscientiousness, 250 consensus, 202 consensus-contrarian matrix, 285–86, 290 consequence-conviction matrix, 265–66 consequences, 35 unintended, 35–36, 53–55, 57, 64–65, 192, 232 containment, 233, 237 contests, 35–36 context-switching, 71, 74 continental drift, 24–25, 289 contrarian-consensus matrix, 285–86, 290 Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership, The (Sample), 28 control group, 136 conventional wisdom, 5 convergent thinking, 203 conviction-consequence matrix, 265–66 cooperation, 215, 226 tit-for-tat, 214–15 correlations, 134, 135, 139 corruption, 307 Cortés, Hernán, 243–44 cost-benefit analysis, 177–86, 189, 194 Costco, 70 cost of capital, 76, 77, 179, 182 cost of doing business, 232 counterfactual thinking, 201, 272, 309–10 cramming, 83, 262 credible intervals, 159 crime, 16, 161, 231, 232 broken windows theory and, 235–36 Cringley, Robert X., 253 critical mass, viii–x, 114–15, 117, 119, 120, 129, 194, 308 critical thinking, 201 crossing the chasm, 311–12 crossing the Rubicon, 244 crowdsourcing, 203–6, 286 culture, 113, 273 organizational, 107–8, 113, 273–80, 293 customers, 300 development of, 294 personas for, 300 types of, 298–300 winner-take-most markets and, 308 Cutco, 217 Danziger, Shai, 63 dark patterns, 226–29 Potemkin villages, 228–29 Darley, John, 259 Darwin, Charles, 100, 101, 291 data, 130–31, 143, 146, 301 binary, 152 dredging of, 169–70 in graphs, see graphs mean in, 146, 149, 151 meta-analysis of, 172–73 outliers in, 148 streaks and clusters in, 144 variance in, 149 see also experiments; statistics dating, 8–10, 95 daycare center, 222–23 deadlines, 89 death, causes of, 17 death by a thousand cuts, 38 debate, 225 decisions, 1–2, 11, 31, 127, 129, 131–33, 175, 209 business case and, 207 choices and, 62–63 cost-benefit analysis in, 177–86, 189, 194 decision fatigue and, 63–64 decision tree in, 186–90, 194, 215 Eisenhower Decision Matrix, 72–74, 89, 124, 125 irreversible, 61–62, 223–24 opportunity cost and, 76–77, 80, 83, 179, 182, 188, 305 past, analyzing, 201, 271–72 pro-con list in, 175–78, 185, 189 reversible, 61–62 sequences of, 144 small, tyranny of, 38, 55 utilitarianism and, 189–90 Declaration of Independence, 222 deep work, 72, 76, 88, 278 default effect, 87–88 Defense, U.S. Department of, 267–68 delayed gratification, 87 deleveraging, 78–79 deliberate practice, 260–62, 264, 266 Democratic National Committee, 97 de-risking, 6–7, 10, 294 design debt, 56–57 design patterns, 92–93, 97, 226, 317 Detecting Lies and Deceit (Vrij), 13–14 deterrence, 231–32, 237, 238 Detroit, Mich., 41 Devil’s advocate position, 28–30, 202 diagrams, 192–93 dice, 170 Dick, Philip K., 201 diet, 1, 87, 102, 103, 130 Difficult Conversations (Stone, Patton, and Heen), 19 Diffusion of Innovation (Rogers), 116 diffusion of responsibility, 259 digital photography, 308–10 Dilbert, 140 diminishing returns, 81–83 diminishing utility, 81–82 dinosaurs, 103 diplomacy, 231 directly responsible individual (DRI), 258–59 disclosure law, 45 disconfirmation bias, 27 discounted cash flow, 85 discounting, hyperbolic, 87 discounting the future, 85–87 discount rate, 85–87, 180–82, 184, 185 discoveries, multiple, 291–92 Disney World, 96–97 dispersion, 147 disruptive innovations, 308, 310–11 distribution, see probability distributions distributive justice versus procedural justice, 224–25 divergent thinking, 203 diversity debt, 57 diversity of opinion, 205, 206, 255 divide and conquer, 96 divorce, 231, 305 Dollar Shave Club, 240 domino effect, 234–35, 237 done, calling something, 89–90 Donne, John, 209 don’t bring a knife to a gunfight, 241 drinking, 217, 218 drunk drivers, 157–58 drugs, 236 DuckDuckGo, 18, 32, 68, 258, 278 Dubner, Stephen, 44–45 Dunbar, Robin, 278 Dunbar’s number, 278 Dunning, David, 269 Dunning-Kruger effect, 268–70, 317 Dweck, Carol, 266, 267 early adopters, 116–17, 289, 290, 311–12 early majority, 116–17, 312 Eastman Kodak Company, 302–3, 308–10, 312 eBay, 119, 281, 282, 290 echo chambers, 18, 120 Ecker, Ullrich, 13 economies of scale, 95 Economist, 14–15 economy, 122, 125 inflation in, 179–80, 182–83 financial crisis of 2007/2008, 79, 120, 192, 271, 288 recessions in, 121–22 Edison, Thomas, 289, 292 education and schools, 224–25, 241, 296 expectations and, 267–68 mindsets and, 267 school ranking, 137 school start times, 110, 111, 130 selection bias and, 140 textbooks in, 262 see also college effective altruism, 80 egalitarian versus hierarchical, in organizational culture, 274 80/20 arrangements, 80–81, 83 Einstein, Albert, 8, 11 Eisenhower, Dwight, 72 Eisenhower Decision Matrix, 72–74, 89, 124, 125 elections, 206, 218, 233, 241, 271, 293, 299 Ellsberg, Michael, 220 email spam, 161, 192–93, 234 Emanuel, Rahm, 291 emotion, appeal to, 225, 226 emotional quotient (EQ), 250–52 empathy, 19, 21, 23 ruinous, 264 employee engagement survey, 140, 142 endgame, 242, 244 endorsements, 112, 220, 229 endpoints, 137 ends justify the means, 229 energy: activation, 112–13 potential, 111–12 engineering, 247 Enron, 228 entrepreneurs, 301 cargo cult, 316 entropy, 122–24 entry, barriers to, 305 environmental issues, 38 climate change, 42, 55, 56, 104, 105, 183, 192 EpiPen, 283 EQ (emotional quotient), 250–52 equilibrium, 193 Ericsson, K.

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life
by Ozan Varol
Published 13 Apr 2020

If you solve enough problems, you get to land your rovers on Mars. If you solve enough problems, you get to build the Roman Empire. If you solve enough problems, you get to land on the Moon. That’s how you change the world. One problem at a time. Changing the world one problem at a time requires delaying gratification. Most things in life are “first-order positive, second-order negative,” as Shane Parrish writes on his website Farnam Street.37 They give us pleasure in the short term but pain in the long. Spending money now instead of saving for retirement, using fossil fuels instead of renewable energy, guzzling sugar-laden beverages instead of water are all in that category.

…

As a result, failure hits us hard. To boost our short-term pleasure, we avoid doing things that might fail. Those who get ahead in life flip this perspective. “A real advantage is conferred on people who can do things that are first-order negative, second-order positive,” Parrish writes.39 These people delay gratification in a world that has become obsessed with it. They don’t quit simply because their rocket blew up on the launch pad, they had a bad quarter, or their audition fell flat. They reorient their calibration for the long term, not for the short. When it comes to creating long-lasting change, there are no hacks or silver bullets, as venture capitalist Ben Horowitz says.

Work Less, Live More: The Way to Semi-Retirement
by Robert Clyatt
Published 28 Sep 2007

Those earnings will be shielded from income tax, due to the child’s standard deduction. These earnings, essentially all after-tax earned income, can then be used for an annual contribution to a Roth IRA. Not only does this arrangement allow you to teach your children the values of hard work and deferred gratification, it can help you plant the seeds for their retirement. And if they feel the need for some spending money after all that work and forced saving, you can always give them a little extra allowance to make up for it. 254 | Work Less, Live More Comparing Taxes: Salary Earners and Semi-Retirees This section looks at the taxes for a traditional salary-earning couple and a semi-retired couple.

Oryx and Crake
by Margaret Atwood
Published 5 May 2003

In short, there had been errors, false directions taken, but they were getting very close to a solution. Needless to say, Crake continued, the thing would become a huge money-spinner. It would be the must-have pill, in every country, in every society in the world. Of course the crank religions wouldn’t like it, in view of the fact that their raison d’être was based on misery, indefinitely deferred gratification, and sexual frustration, but they wouldn’t be able to hold out long. The tide of human desire, the desire for more and better, would overwhelm them. It would take control and drive events, as it had in every large change throughout history. Jimmy said the thing sounded very interesting. Provided its shortcomings could be remedied, that is.

Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection
by John T. Cacioppo
Published 9 Aug 2009

Combined with ever more sophisticated mental capacities—the ability to maintain the image of a prey animal when it is no longer in sight, the ability to continue to focus persistently on a certain goal for days or even years—running allowed us to move from scavenging on the savannahs to becoming competent hunters.2 With the expansion of our brain and our field of vision came an even wider expansion—not just of our range of habitation, but of our range in terms of the global and temporal nature of our concerns. It is this expansion that lies at the heart of the Third Adaptation. We became creatures not just of the moment, but of the future and the past. We could internalize lessons from experience, learn from our mistakes, and also plan ahead. We could defer gratification and we could keep mental accounts of treachery and of kindness extending back for generations, even centuries. With highly sophisticated and fully functional executive control, we could much more precisely sort out what served our own interests, while also taking into consideration our membership in various wider communities of interest, extending all over the world and into the future our great-grandchildren will inhabit.

Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician
by Sandeep Jauhar
Published 18 Aug 2014

Burnout is associated with excessive workload, difficulty balancing one’s personal and professional lives, and loss of work control, autonomy, and meaning. It has been described as “an erosion of the soul caused by a deterioration of one’s values, dignity, spirit and will.” The practice of medicine today almost seems to promote burnout. Doctors are working harder and harder, and many continue to demand perfection of themselves. We defer gratification, sometimes for many years. We no longer feel in charge of our professional destiny. A physician recently wrote online: “The reason we are feeling ‘burnout’ is that there does not seem to be any hope for things to get better.” Another said, speaking for many in private practice who stand to lose the most from policy proposals to restrict fee-for-service and encourage greater use of nurse practitioners and physician’s assistants to do what was formerly doctors’ work, “We look forward to a future of a fully implemented Obamacare where physicians are but meaningless pawns in the hands of those who are pushing this absurd social experiment.”

The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
by Matthew B. Crawford
Published 29 Mar 2015

Ebbesen gave children the option of having one marshmallow immediately or, if they were able to wait fifteen minutes, two marshmallows.10 Left alone with the marshmallow at hand, some broke down and gobbled it immediately, others after a brief struggle. But about a third of the children succeeded in deferring gratification and getting the bigger payoff. Those who did so were those who distracted themselves from the marshmallow by playing games under the table, singing songs, or imagining the marshmallow as a cloud, for example. In a follow-up study of the same children a dozen years later, their initial performance on the self-regulation task was more predictive of life success than any other measure, including IQ and socioeconomic status.

The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us
by Robert H. Frank, Philip J. Cook
Published 2 May 2011

And, as in the case of the experimental cats, deficits with which children emerge from childhood often cannot be over­ come by training later in life. In addition to social and problem-solving skills, one of the most im­ portant capacities for a child to develop on the way to adulthood is pa­ tience-the ability to defer gratification. This is important because the alternatives that look most attractive in the short run are often dis­ tinctly inferior in the long run. A job flipping hamburgers after school, for example, holds the immediate attraction of providing money to buy a car, but it also entails having less time to qualify for admission to a good university, and hence a lifetime of diminished opportunity.

The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality
by Kathryn Paige Harden
Published 20 Sep 2021

Genetic correlation analysis uses results from GWAS of two different traits to estimate the strength of the relationship between the genes influencing each trait.25 We found that the genetics of non-cognitive skills related to greater educational attainment were associated with a wide variety of different types of things.26 In the domain of personality, non-cognitive genetics were most strongly related to a trait called Openness to Experience, which captures being curious, eager to learn, and open to novel experiences. The genetics of non-cognitive skills were also correlated with the ability to defer gratification, as measured by people’s preferences for larger, later rewards over smaller, immediate rewards; with later childbearing; and with less risk-taking behavior generally. Overall, our results suggest that non-cognitive skills really are skills, plural—many different genetically associated traits and behaviors contribute to going further in school.

Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets From Inside Amazon
by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr
Published 9 Feb 2021

In recognizing the potential of this little seed to become the mighty oak of AWS, Jeff and others at Amazon embodied the Amazonian principles of Ownership, Invent and Simplify, and Think Big. Conclusion Being Amazonian Beyond Amazon Being Amazonian in your business. Being Amazonian means having to change habits and ways of doing things, deferring gratification, and persisting through challenging times, but also reaping distinct rewards. How to start being Amazonian wherever you are. * * * Both of us learned a great deal at Amazon. It was a defining period in our careers. And we’ve both since moved on to other ventures. But being Amazonian remains part of our DNA, and it always will.

The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom
by Jonathan Haidt
Published 26 Dec 2005

Mischel has mailed your parents a questionnaire asking them to report on your personality, your ability to delay gratification and deal with frustration, and your performance on your college entrance exams (the Scholastic Aptitude Test). Your parents return the questionnaire. Mischel discovers that the number of s e c o n d s you waited to ring the bell in 1970 predicts not only what your parents say about you as a teenager but also the likelihood that you were admitted to a top university. Children who were able to overcome stimulus control and delay gratification for a few extra minutes in 1970 were better able to resist temptation as teenagers, to focus on their studies, and to control themselves when things didn't go the way they wanted.27 What was their secret?

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities
by Michael Shellenberger
Published 11 Oct 2021

And patients who did not become addicted themselves sometimes stored their medications in places where those more vulnerable to addiction, particularly teens, could find them.53 The problem is that creating a good life for one’s self, one’s family, and one’s community requires denying or delaying gratification. Getting an education and maintaining a job mean setting aside pursuing immediate happiness in favor of investing in satisfaction later. Raising children, particularly for parents who attempt to establish discipline, is hard. Somewhere along the way, many parents and the wider society stopped passing this message on to their children. Lack of discipline to delay gratification makes people fragile. The social workers told Vicki, “We don’t want to push them too much and then they fail.

Buy Now, Pay Later: The Extraordinary Story of Afterpay
by Jonathan Shapiro and James Eyers
Published 2 Aug 2021

Anderson (curator), ‘Buy now, pay later: A history of personal credit’, Harvard Business School Historical Collections, <www.library.hbs.edu/hc/credit/credit4b.html>. 4 Beverley Kingston, Basket, Bag and Trolley: A History of Shopping in Australia, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994. 5 Beverley Kingston, Basket, Bag and Trolley. 6 James Surowiecki, ‘Delayed Gratification’, The New Yorker, 25 December 2011. 7 Cara Waters, ‘Afterpay “brain bubble” came from jeweller Ice Online’. Chapter 4 1 XTCL was shorthand for ex-Touch Corp Limited, the remnants of the original Touchcorp. Chapter 5 1 ‘Crutching’ refers to the removal of wool from around the tail and between the rear legs of a sheep for hygiene purposes. 2 Damon Kitney, ‘Broker says small best in hard times’, The Australian, 13 March 2012. 3 Kitney, ‘Broker says small best in hard times’. 4 Jessica Gardner, ‘Inside the booming baby business’, The Australian Financial Review, 6 September 2014. 5 ‘Tips from a (newly engaged) jeweller on choosing the perfect engagement ring’, Easy Weddings, <www.easyweddings.com.au/articles/tips-newly-engaged-jeweller-choosing-perfect-engagement-ring/>.

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Anderson (curator), ‘Buy now, pay later: A history of personal credit’, Harvard Business School Historical Collections, <www.library.hbs.edu/hc/credit/credit4b.html> Beverley Kingston, Basket, Bag and Trolley: A History of Shopping in Australia, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994 James Surowiecki, ‘Delayed gratification’, The New Yorker, 25 December 2011 Live Differently Productions, ‘Afterpay commercial—Try before you pay—Master’, <https://vimeo.com/136589621> Chapter 4 Court documents filed in the Supreme Court of Victoria, Cleevecorp Pty Cleeve Group v Wendy Sze Teng Ng, S CI 2018 00897. Writ filed (13 March 2018), Amended Statement of Claim (21 June 2019), Defence (9 July 2019), Summons (1 November 2019), Affidavit (10 March 2020), Judge Signed Order (11 March 2020) Takeovers Panel, ‘Reasons for Decision: Touch Holdings Limited [2013] ATP 3’, Australian Government, 15 May 2013 Touchcorp Limited, Prospectus: Initial Public Offering, 2015 Jonathan Shapiro, ‘The secret battle for a billion-dollar Afterpay fortune’, The Australian Financial Review, 23 December 2020 Chapter 5 Damon Kitney, ‘Broker says small best in hard times’, The Australian, 13 March 2012 Afterpay fundraising presentation, June 2015 ‘Tips from a (newly engaged) jeweller on choosing the perfect engagement ring’, Easy Weddings, <www.easyweddings.com.au/articles/tips-newly-engaged-jeweller-choosing-perfect-engagement-ring> Gabby Leibovich & Hezi Leibovich, Catch of the Decade: How to Launch, Build and Sell a Digital Business, Milton: Wiley, 2020 Jessica Gardner, ‘Inside the booming baby business’, The Australian Financial Review, 6 September 2014 Chapter 6 Glennon Capital, Quarterly webinar slide presentation, 2018 Philippa Coates, ‘Showpo’s Jane Lu debuts on Young Rich List after leaving accountancy for fashion’, The Australian Financial Review, 20 October 2017 David Winton Harding & James William Holmes, The Pit & The Pendulum: A Menagerie of Speculative Follies, London: Winton Capital Management, 2012 Nick Molnar, Speech to graduating class at Sydney University Business School, 2018, <www.sydney.edu.au/content/dam/corporate/documents/business-school/industry-and-community/alumni/nicholas-molnar-graduation-speech-2018.pdf> James Eyers, ‘To $3b and beyond.

When Breath Becomes Air
by Paul Kalanithi and Abraham Verghese
Published 12 Jan 2016

There’s a feeling of openness. As a surgeon, focused on a patient in the OR, I might have found the position of the clock’s hands arbitrary, but I never thought them meaningless. Now the time of day means nothing, the day of the week scarcely more. Medical training is relentlessly future-oriented, all about delayed gratification; you’re always thinking about what you’ll be doing five years down the line. But now I don’t know what I’ll be doing five years down the line. I may be dead. I may not be. I may be healthy. I may be writing. I don’t know. And so it’s not all that useful to spend time thinking about the future—that is, beyond lunch.

Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing
by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
Published 19 Feb 2013

It’s the ability to feel genuine satisfaction at having put in a worthy effort, even if you lose. People with adaptive competitiveness don’t have to be the best at everything—they only strive to be the best in the domain they train for. They might be perfectionists at work, but they don’t care if they’re the worst at tennis and shuffleboard. They are able to defer gratification, meaning they accept that it can take a long time to improve. Healthy competitiveness is marked by constant striving for excellence, but not desperate concerns over rank. It’s adaptive competitiveness that leads to the great, heroic performances that inspire us all. The maladaptive variety is what gives competitiveness its bad name.

Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition
by Charles Eisenstein
Published 11 Jul 2011

The Austrian School of economics especially, but more generally neoclassical economics as well, extrapolates from such examples to claim that it is human nature to want to consume as much as possible right now. In their view, interest is a kind of compensation for deferring consumption, a reward for delayed gratification. In other words, you, dear reader, would love to maximize your utility by spending all your money right now, but are induced not to because you know that you’ll be able to have even more later, thanks to interest. This is known in economics as the time preference postulate. Time preference—our supposed preference for immediate consumption—is crucial to the discounted utility model developed by Paul Samuelson in the 1930s that lies at the foundation of most mainstream economic theory today.

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Karl Marx put it thus: The cult of money has its asceticism, its self-denial, its self-sacrifice—economy and frugality, contempt for mundane, temporal, and fleeting pleasures; the chase after the eternal treasure. Hence the connection between English Puritanism, or also Dutch Protestantism, and money-making.39 This mentality pervades our culture. You must delay gratification. You must restrain your desires with the thought of future rewards. Pain now is gain later. Do your homework for the grade. Go to work for the salary. Do the workout to be healthy. Go on a diet to be thin. Devote your life to something that pays well, even if it isn’t your passion, so that you can have an enjoyable retirement.

How to Hygge: The Secrets of Nordic Living
by Signe Johansen
Published 19 Oct 2016

Plus these days we all have maps on our smartphones, and in relying on those plus GPS we’re losing our ability to navigate our way around by observing landmarks, or particular trees, stones and other physical clues. Empathy, patience, conscious listening, communicating well and learning/practising delayed gratification all make eminent sense in our wired times, when everything is available at the tap or swipe of a digital device. Courtesy towards other cultures, to which I would add that learning another language is crucial—although I’m biased, being a ‘third-culture kid’ with three nationalities (Norwegian, British and American, plus a sprinkling of about seventeen others).

Remix
by John Courtenay Grimwood
Published 15 Nov 2001

LizAlec felt vice-like fingers tighten on her shoulders and pull her upright. It hurt, but LizAlec reckoned it was still an improvement on the tall man’s method. For a second, it looked as if the suit was going to punch her again, but he didn’t, which was interesting in itself. LizAlec knew all about deferred gratification. Instead the man dipped his fingers into the side pocket of his immaculate jacket and pulled out a smallish silver ball. “Do you know what this is?” LizAlec didn’t, but she had a nasty feeling she was about to find out. “Should I?” she said coldly. Fingers brushed her cheek making her shiver, and the man smiled.

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect
by David Goodhart
Published 7 Sep 2020

The American intelligence researcher Christopher Chabris argues that “there are neural systems which evolved for relating to other people which are distinct from the neural systems for more abstract reasoning.”7 Then there are also the personality traits that contribute both to intelligence and to the broader notion of being an effective or successful person: energy, drive, conscientiousness, leadership qualities, the wisdom to draw the right lessons from one’s experiences, and the ability to defer gratification. People who might excel in some of these latter qualities could have average IQs. One American psychologist, Angela Duckworth, who has written extensively about the concept of “grit,” even claims that it is often a better predictor of success than IQ. Most such challenges to the standard psychometric analysis of intelligence—James Flynn’s observations about rising IQ scores around the world; Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences; Daniel Goleman’s notion of emotional intelligence; Robert Sternberg’s concepts of practical, analytical, and creative intelligence; and Carol Dweck’s ideas about mindsets—focus on widening the meaning of intelligence rather than on assaulting the idea of IQ.

Ego Is the Enemy
by Ryan Holiday
Published 13 Jun 2016

When it is difficult to tell a real producer from an adept self-promoter, of course some people will roll the dice and manage to play the confidence game. Make it so you don’t have to fake it—that’s they key. Can you imagine a doctor trying to get by with anything less? Or a quarterback, or a bull rider? More to the point, would you want them to? So why would you try otherwise? Every time you sit down to work, remind yourself: I am delaying gratification by doing this. I am passing the marshmallow test. I am earning what my ambition burns for. I am making an investment in myself instead of in my ego. Give yourself a little credit for this choice, but not so much, because you’ve got to get back to the task at hand: practicing, working, improving.

Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency
by Tom Demarco
Published 15 Nov 2001

The truth is exactly the opposite: The country had the wallet (in spades) but not the will. Creating the will was his job. What Is Leadership Anyway? Leadership is the ability to enroll other people in your agenda. Meaningful acts of leadership usually cause people to accept some short-term pain (extra cost or effort, delayed gratification) in order to increase the long-term benefit. We need leadership for this, because we all tend to be short-term thinkers. There is no easy formula for real leadership (if there were, we’d see a lot more of it), but it seems clear that the following elements always need to be present: Clear articulation of a direction Frank admission of the short-term pain Follow-up Follow-up Follow-up When we’re presented with the first of these and none of the others, it’s not leadership at all.

Cryptoeconomics: Fundamental Principles of Bitcoin
by Eric Voskuil , James Chiang and Amir Taaki
Published 28 Feb 2020

It matters not whether the person anticipates a net gain or realizes one, the hoard necessarily represents an expense – because time has value. However, time preference is sometimes misinterpreted as a relation between consumption and saving. This is often loosely described as “deferred consumption” or “delayed gratification”. Yet as has been shown, hoarding is consumption. The consumption has not been deferred; the gratification has not been delayed. Offsetting uncertainty is gratification (peace of mind), entertainment is gratification (leisure activity), the potential gain on successful market timing is gratification (anticipation of better price).

Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education
by Mike Rose
Published 17 Sep 2012

Yet what I’ve seen with some frequency is that people will leave once they develop sufficient skill to get a job. This has a positive economic impact, but in many analyses would register as a program failure. One more thing: This behavior— going for the short-term payoff—is often cited as an illustration of poor people’s inability to delay gratification and form long-term goals. That’s possible—people in all income brackets have problems with long-term goals—but in my experience, most of the people taking those immediate jobs do so because the rent is due, children need to be fed, members of the family are sick. They are quite aware of the trade-off and say they want to return to finish the program, for they could improve their long-term job prospects with more education.

Trend Commandments: Trading for Exceptional Returns
by Michael W. Covel
Published 14 Jun 2011

There is no way to escape that fact, but you can learn to self-regulate your feelings and, in so doing, manage situations where emotions can interfere with sound decision-making—like in the markets. Self-regulation is the ongoing inner conversation that emotionally intelligent people engage in to not be a prisoner to their feelings.6 The ability to delay gratification, stifle impulsiveness, and shake off the inevitable setbacks and upsets is critical. Without emotional intelligence, you can have superior trend following training and systems, using an incisive and analytical mind with infinite creativity, and still fail.7 How can you start down that right path?

The Fire Starter Sessions: A Soulful + Practical Guide to Creating Success on Your Own Terms
by Danielle Laporte
Published 16 Apr 2012

What do you adore about the other person that you can focus on? The easy stuff is right in front of you and totally doable: simple kindnesses freely given day to day. Start there and you can approach the big hairy issues with some lightness. Instant gratification has gotten a bad rap. I’m all for it. Why would you want to delay gratification? Within the constraints of morality and maturity, you should do whatever you need to do to feel gratified in the moment. It may be as subtle as choosing a more positive thought or reminding yourself to smile. Maybe it’s taking two minutes in your car or at your desk to do nothing but just feel into the day.

Willful: How We Choose What We Do
by Richard Robb
Published 12 Nov 2019

It must not be the case, then, that each moment is tied to an optimal plan that we select and then execute. Neoclassical economic theory cannot account for planning through time; moreover, our sense of choosing in a purposeful way is often illusory. Whether you’re a hippie or Zen master professing to live in “the now” or a wealthy miser who takes pride in delaying gratification, each moment necessarily stands for itself. Choosing across Time Involves a Contradiction Is planning for the future, deciding when to do what, similar to selecting a consumer good? That is, do we mentally line up all available options and pick the one that’s best? In the case of a consumption plan—this much for today, this much for next week, next month, next year—that would mean picking the pattern that provides the best combination of current well-being and anticipated future well-being.

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
by Sarah Jaffe
Published 26 Jan 2021

You are, after all, reading this book because something told you that maybe, just maybe, the problem is not you, it’s work. But we don’t have to truly believe in order to consent. Many of us simply act as if we believe, and that is enough. 29 Max Weber famously wrote of the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism , the way that the rise of Protestantism lent a belief in hard work as a calling and deferred gratification (in Heaven) to the developing capitalism of the time. The first spirit of capitalism valued above all the accumulation of more and more money for its own sake, not for the sake of consumption. Consumption and other forms of pleasure were, in fact, to be avoided. One worked to be good , not to be happy.

The Irrational Bundle
by Dan Ariely
Published 3 Apr 2013

This approach might not be as effective as the dictatorial treatment, but it can help push us in the right direction (perhaps even more so if we train people to do it, and give them experience in setting their own deadlines). What’s the bottom line? We have problems with self-control, related to immediate and delayed gratification—no doubt there. But each of the problems we face has potential self-control mechanisms, as well. If we can’t save from our paycheck, we can take advantage of our employer’s automatic deduction option; if we don’t have the will to exercise regularly alone, we can make an appointment to exercise in the company of our friends.

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I kept a bucket within reach to catch the vomit that would inevitably come up, after which the fever, shivering, and headache would begin. At some point I would fall asleep and wake up aching with flulike symptoms. By noon I would be more or less OK and would go back to work. The difficulty that I, and the rest of the patients, had with the interferon was the basic problem of delayed gratification and self-control. On every injection day I was faced with a trade-off between giving myself an injection and feeling sick for the next 16 hours (a negative immediate effect), and the hope that the treatment would cure me in the long term (a positive long-term effect). At the end of the six-month trial the doctors told me that I was the only patient in the protocol who had followed the regimen in the way they designed it.

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THE LESSON I took away from my interferon treatment is a general one: if a particular desired behavior results in an immediate negative outcome (punishment), this behavior will be very difficult to promote, even if the ultimate outcome (in my case, improved health) is highly desirable. After all, that’s what the problem of delayed gratification is all about. Certainly, we know that exercising regularly and eating more vegetables will help us be healthier, even if we don’t live to be as old as the Delany sisters; but because it is very hard to hold a vivid image of our future health in our mind’s eye, we can’t keep from reaching for the doughnuts.

Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Popular Culture Is Making Us Smarter
by Steven Johnson
Published 5 Apr 2006

If you practically have to lock kids in their room to get them to do their math homework, and threaten to ground them to get them to take out the trash, then why are they willing to spend six months smithing i n Ultima ? You ' l l often hear video games included on the list of the debased instant gratifications that abound in our culture, right up there with raunchy music videos and fast food. But compa red to most forms of popular e ntertai nment, games turn out to be all about delayed gratification-sometimes so long delayed that you wo nder if the gratification is ever going to show. The clearest measure of the cognitive challenges posed by modern games is the sheer size of the cottage industry de­ voted to publishing game guides, sometimes called walk­ throughs, that give you detailed , step-by-step explanations of how to complete the game that is currently torturing you.

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth
by Margaret Atwood
Published 15 Mar 2007

Is it simply that we’re programmed to snatch the low-hanging fruit and gobble down as much of it as we can, without thinking ahead to the fruitless days that may then lie ahead of us? Well, partly: seventy-two hours without fluids or two weeks without food and you’re most likely dead, so if you don’t eat some of that lowhanging fruit right now you aren’t going to be around six months later to congratulate yourself on your capacity for self-restraint and delayed gratification. In that respect, credit cards are almost guaranteed to make money for the lender, since “grab it now” may be a variant of a behaviour selected for in hunter-gatherer days, long before anyone ever thought about saving up for their retirement. A bird in the hand really was worth two in the bush then, and a bird crammed into your mouth was worth even more.

The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume
by Josh Kaufman
Published 2 Feb 2011

Others made heroic efforts to distract themselves from temptation, forcing themselves to pay attention to something other than the marshmallow in an agonizing attempt to hold out long enough to get the bigger reward. Dr. Mischel found a correlation between Willpower and success: kids with a greater ability to “defer gratification” were more successful in school, as well as later on in life. Overriding our instincts can often make it possible to collect larger rewards later—spending is easy, but saving is not, even if the latter is more beneficial over time. Willpower can be thought of as instinctual override—it’s a way to interrupt our automatic processing in order to do something else.

Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines
by Richard Heinberg and James Howard (frw) Kunstler
Published 1 Sep 2007

Nature is merely a pile of resources, a segment of the economy, at best something to be preserved for aesthetic or sentimental reasons. But in domesticating plants and animals we also domesticated ourselves. Certain personalities were selected for, others discouraged. The abilities to conform and to delay gratification were selected for (at least among the producing and middle classes); the insistence on autonomy and freedom was discouraged. Meanwhile we domesticated other animals with similar objectives in mind: we wanted docile pets or willing field workers. Again: we are like caged birds — except that our captors are others like ourselves.

Inequality and the 1%
by Danny Dorling
Published 6 Oct 2014

The free market will continue but any respect for the idea of free money is all over.95 It takes a little time for everyone to get the message, but after the crash of 2008 it began to shine clearer than ever, at least to many of the 99 per cent. Some even began to pity the rich for how stupid they often appear, bereft of a plausible rationale for their riches. 4 Wealth The idea that capital income is ‘unearned’ is beneath contempt. You earn the returns on an investment by working, delaying gratification and saving. The argument that an inheritance is ‘unearned’ (so that we can take what we like in Inheritance Tax) is just as weak: someone earned the money. Mathew Sinclair, TaxPayers’ Alliance, 20131 Between 1 and 2 per cent of people are not naturally empathic.2 This small group find it enormously difficult to understand how other people feel or to appreciate a different point of view.

Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy
by Robert A. Sirico
Published 20 May 2012

Consumerism is wrong because it worships what is beneath us. Far from a synonym for capitalism, consumerism makes capitalism impossible over the long term, since it makes capital formation all but impossible. A consumer culture isn’t a saving culture, isn’t a thrift culture. It’s too fixated on buying the next toy to ever delay gratification, to ever save and invest for the future. The point is elementary: you can’t have sustainable capitalism without capital; you can’t have capital without savings; and you can’t save if you’re running around spending everything you’ve just earned. But the confusion has grown so deep that many people today do not have the ears to hear it.

The Other Side of Happiness: Embracing a More Fearless Approach to Living
by Brock Bastian
Published 25 Jan 2018

In a second study, the researchers had 102 university students either drink five cups of water (the high bladder-pressure condition) or just sip small amounts of water (the low bladder-pressure condition). Approximately 45 minutes later, the volunteers were asked to choose between receiving €16 tomorrow or €30 in 35 days’ time. Those who had drunk more water and needed to urinate more urgently were more likely to choose the delayed gratification option. This demonstrated that the inhibition of the need to urinate had spilled over to the inhibition of the desire for a more immediate but smaller reward over a longer-term but larger reward. Encouraged by these results, another group of researchers sought to extend these findings.19 In this study the researchers again asked half their volunteers to drink a large amount of water, and the other half a small amount.

A Wealth of Common Sense: Why Simplicity Trumps Complexity in Any Investment Plan
by Ben Carlson
Published 14 May 2015

Dunn and Norton found that donating money to charity had a comparable effect to doubling household income on levels of happiness.3 Building wealth through an investment portfolio is not about hoarding money, but about finding meaning for your money. Investing, in its most basic form, is about delaying gratification today, to experience gratification in the future. You have to think long and hard about the uses for your money when you begin the wealth-building process. Action Steps: Don't make it all about the money. Attach meaning to your portfolio to keep your eyes on the real prize. Figure out how your money can make you happier and find ways to enjoy it.

Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself
by Nedra Glover Tawwab
Published 16 Mar 2021

As long as he spent money right when he received it, he wouldn’t be able to move beyond living paycheck to paycheck. Knowing that he had goals to spend his money more wisely, we began to talk about useful boundaries that might help him achieve those goals, such as saving, spending less, and delaying gratification. The Significance of Having Boundaries with Yourself It’s hard to change your habits if you never change the underlying beliefs that led to your past behavior. You have a new goal and a new plan, but you haven’t changed who you are. —James Clear When we think about boundaries, we tend to think about what others need to do to make things better for us.

A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy
by Joel Mokyr
Published 8 Jan 2016

At the same time, it has become abundantly clear that scientists learned a great deal from craftsmen and practitioners and clearly realized it, as Hooke’s proposed catalog of all artisanal practices illustrates. In addition to cultural beliefs about cooperation and relations with the physical environment, what matters to economic growth are personal preferences. Individuals are not hard-wired with a particular rate of time preference, that is to say, a degree of patience and willingness-to-delay-gratification, or other attitudes toward time, and it is easy to document that these differ a great deal across societies.33 Such preferences are important, because they help determine not only the rate of savings and thus physical capital accumulation, but also of investment in human capital and skills.

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By way of comparison, an upper class that believes in human capital but teaches its youngsters fencing, poetry, hunting, and classical languages will create a different (if not necessarily “smaller”) stock of human capital than one that teaches accounting, chemistry, woodworking, and mechanics as well as a high valuation of patience capital, that is, the willingness to delay gratification and invest in one’s future (Doepke and Zilibotti, 2008). How much of the subsequent economic development in England may be attributed to the kind of phenomena that the Merton thesis is concerned with? Did it prompt a program of research in natural philosophy that led to important technological advances?

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
by Robert M. Sapolsky
Published 1 May 2017

In that scenario there is a secondary rise of dopamine, a gradual increase that fuels the sustained work; the extent of the dopamine ramp-up is a function of the length of the delay and the anticipated size of the reward: Visit bit.ly/2ngTC7V for a larger version of this graph. This reveals how dopamine fuels delayed gratification. If waiting X amount of time for a reward has value Z; waiting 2X should logically have value ½Z; instead we “temporally discount”—the value is smaller, e.g., ¼Z. We don’t like waiting. Dopamine and the frontal cortex are in the thick of this phenomenon. Discounting curves—a value of ¼Z instead of ½Z—are coded in the accumbens, while dlPFC and vmPFC neurons code for time delay.102 This generates some complex interactions.

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Similarly, addictive drugs bias the dopamine system toward impulsiveness. Phew. One more complication: These studies of temporal discounting typically involve delays on the order of seconds. Though the dopamine system is similar across numerous species, humans do something utterly novel: we delay gratification for insanely long times. No warthog restricts calories to look good in a bathing suit next summer. No gerbil works hard at school to get good SAT scores to get into a good college to get into a good grad school to get a good job to get into a good nursing home. We do something even beyond this unprecedented gratification delay: we use the dopaminergic power of the happiness of pursuit to motivate us to work for rewards that come after we are dead—depending on your culture, this can be knowing that your nation is closer to winning a war because you’ve sacrificed yourself in battle, that your kids will inherit money because of your financial sacrifices, or that you will spend eternity in paradise.

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In contrast, older kids use strategies of distraction—thinking about toys, pets, their birthday. This progresses to reappraisal strategies (“This isn’t about marshmallows. This is about the kind of person I am”). To Mischel, maturation of willpower is more about distraction and reappraisal strategies than about stoicism. So kids improve at delayed gratification. Mischel’s next step made his studies iconic—he tracked the kids afterward, seeing if marshmallow wait time predicted anything about their adulthoods. Did it ever. Five-year-old champs at marshmallow patience averaged higher SAT scores in high school (compared with those who couldn’t wait), with more social success and resilience and less aggressive* and oppositional behavior.

The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease
by Marc Lewis Phd
Published 13 Jul 2015

Brain systems responsible for anticipating rewards, motivating us to go after them, and evaluating and reevaluating the worth of those rewards are reshaped by the repeated use of drugs, including alcohol. Researchers have found additional brain changes in systems underlying cognitive control, delayed gratification, and abstract skills like comparing and predicting outcomes and selecting best choices. According to the disease model, all these changes are caused by exposure to drugs of abuse, and they are difficult if not impossible to reverse. Of course the disease model builds on a biological framework, and it does a good job of explaining why some individuals are more vulnerable to addiction than others, based on genetic differences and other dispositional factors.

Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us
by Robert D. Hare
Published 1 Nov 1993

• A biological theory that has been around for a long time is that, for reasons unknown, some of the psychopath’s brain structures mature at an abnormally slow rate.10 The basis for this theory is twofold: similarities between the EEGs (recorded brain waves) of adult psychopaths and those of normal adolescents; and similarities between some of the psychopath’s characteristics—including egocentricity, impulsivity, selfishness, and unwillingness to delay gratification—and those of children. To some investigators, this suggests that psychopathy reflects little more than a developmental delay. Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan, for example, has argued that behind Cleckley’s “mask of sanity” lies not insanity but a young child of nine or ten.11 These are interesting speculations, but the brain-wave characteristics in question are also associated with drowsiness or boredom in normal adults, and could as well result from the psychopath’s sleepy disinterest in the procedures used to measure them as from a delay in brain development.

Dangerous Personalities: An FBI Profiler Shows You How to Identify and Protect Yourself From Harmful People
by Joe Navarro and Toni Sciarra Poynter
Published 6 Oct 2014

If the checklists aren’t handy and you need to assess someone quickly, ask yourself the following five questions: Do they affect me emotionally in a negative way? Do they do things that are illegal, erratic, unethical, or defy social norms? Do they do things that are exploitative or manipulative? Do they do things that are dangerous? Do they do things impulsively with little control or with unwillingness to delay gratification? The more yes answers you have, the more likely it is that you’re dealing with someone who combines traits of more than one type of dangerous personality. The checklists will then help you pinpoint more specifically the type of person you’re dealing with and where this individual falls on the spectrum of severity.

The 80/20 Principle: The Secret of Achieving More With Less
by Richard Koch
Published 15 Dec 1999

We can intelligently change our exposure to events that make us either happy or unhappy. MAKING OURSELVES HAPPY BY STRENGTHENING EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE Daniel Goleman and other writers have contrasted academic intelligence or IQ with emotional intelligence: “abilities such as being able to motivate oneself and delay gratification; to regulate one’s moods and to keep distress from swamping the ability to think; to empathize and to hope.”5 Emotional intelligence is more crucial for happiness than intellectual intelligence, yet our society places little emphasis on the development of emotional intelligence. As Goleman aptly remarks: Even though a high IQ is no guarantee of prosperity, prestige, or happiness in life, our schools and our culture fixate on academic abilities, ignoring emotional intelligence, a set of traits—some might call it character—that also matters immensely for our personal destiny.6 The good news is that emotional intelligence can be cultivated and learned: certainly as a child, but also at any stage in life.

Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir
by Wednesday Martin Ph.d.
Published 1 Jun 2015

I will never forget the “playdate” where there was a single desirable toy—a brightly colored play oven with knobs and lights and buttons—surrounded by a few other, lesser toys. It was the center of a game of musical chairs rigged by admissions people who wanted to see how a bunch of tired toddlers would respond to the stress of confronting exactly what they were incapable of handling at that point in their development—the need to take turns and delay gratification and manage their own frustration under unusual circumstances. With no reward. After waiting and waiting, my son grew visibly upset. Other kids were shoving each other, and him. The “playdate” was devolving into chaos. I was disgusted and angry, and as my son burst into tears, I got up from my spot on the floor to comfort him (they never told you where to sit or how to be at these idiotic “playdates,” because watching you wonder and try to figure it out was part of their “assessment”).

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life
by Winifred Gallagher
Published 9 Mar 2009

Temperance and its habits of modesty, prudence, and avoidance of excess are difficult to develop because they counter stubborn flaws in human nature. As Peterson says, “We’re temperate because we’re tempted not to be. Are you in control of yourself or are you out of control? It’s all about ‘self-regulation,’ which is a trendy subject in psychology these days. And you become self-regulating by being self-regulating, by forgoing or delaying gratification.” Because temperance is difficult to develop and requires your deliberate action, he says, “attention plays a particularly important role. We need to concentrate on acquiring a trait such as modesty, because we all want to brag about ourselves.” Most parents draw their kids’ attention to the importance of developing honesty, fairness, and other virtues, but fewer follow through on the principle that actions speak louder than words.

The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation
by Cathy O'Neil
Published 15 Mar 2022

However, if they managed to resist the temptation and leave it intact, they would be awarded a second marshmallow later. A third of the children turned a deaf ear to these promises and ate the treat immediately. Another third tried to wait but didn’t make it to fifteen minutes. And the final group, young masters of delayed gratification, were waiting with marshmallows untouched when the researchers returned. For Mischel, the marshmallow study was about the ability to understand time and to plan. Some children appeared to be better at it than others. He had two daughters in the school, and he asked them, as the years passed, how their classmates were faring.

What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine
by Danielle Ofri
Published 3 Jun 2013

Hospital slang for such patients reflects not just disgust but also anger and resentment. It’s not uncommon to hear an obese patient referred to as a beached whale, or a homeless alcoholic called a shpoz or dirtbag. Physicians are the products of an educational system that demands years of self-discipline and delayed gratification. Despite the knowledge that addiction and obesity have at least some biological components, many doctors still unconsciously—and often consciously—view these conditions as purely a result of sloth, self-indulgence, greed, malingering, and apathy. Respect and appreciation for the ravages of these illnesses—especially when the patients themselves often appear not to—is more than some physicians can muster.

5 Day Weekend: Freedom to Make Your Life and Work Rich With Purpose
by Nik Halik and Garrett B. Gunderson
Published 5 Mar 2018

They have no goose that produces gold without their effort, and whatever gold they earn through personal effort is spent on depreciating liabilities, such as cars, furniture, and expensive vacations. Create a goose that lays golden eggs first and you’ll never run out of gold. Leveraging the 5 Day Weekend process to your advantage requires first and foremost the ability to manage and defer lifestyle. As Brian Tracy says, “The ability to discipline yourself to delay gratification in the short term in order to enjoy greater rewards in the long term is the indispensable prerequisite for success.” Avoid the trap of instant gratification and the desire to accumulate liabilities. The goal is to create a solid foundation of assets, and then the cash flow generated by your assets can be used to fund your lifestyle.

Civilization: The West and the Rest
by Niall Ferguson
Published 28 Feb 2011

With more than two-fifths of white Americans changing religion at some point in their lives, faith has become paradoxically fickle.48 The only problem with turning religion into just another leisure pursuit is that it means Americans have drifted a very long way from Max Weber’s version of the Protestant ethic, in which deferred gratification was the corollary of capital accumulation. In his words: Protestant asceticism works with all its force against the uninhibited enjoyment of possessions; it discourages consumption … And if that restraint on consumption is combined with the freedom to strive for profit, the result produced will inevitably be the creation of capital through the ascetic compulsion to save.49 By contrast, we have just lived through an experiment: capitalism without saving.

Why We Can't Afford the Rich
by Andrew Sayer
Published 6 Nov 2014

And ‘investors’ want to buy shares that are expected to rise in price, so the stock market is radically different from ordinary product markets. An early lesson: the Matthew principle When I was a boy I saved up most of my pocket money in the hope of being able to afford to buy a car when I got to 17. (Growing up in the 1950s and having parents from Yorkshire, thrift and deferred gratification were instilled into me.) By the time I reached my early teens, which was also the time when I learnt how to calculate interest in mathematics at school, I came to realise that I had no chance of achieving my goal. My Post Office savings account would never grow fast enough at the low rates of interest it offered, or even if I got more money by delivering newspapers before school.

The-General-Theory-of-Employment-Interest-and-Money
by John Maynard Keynes
Published 13 Jul 2018

I differ in this from the older view as expressed by Marshall with an unusual dogmatic force in his Principles of Economics, p. 581: Everyone is aware that the accumulation of wealth is held in check, and the rate of interest so far sustained, by the preference which the great mass of humanity have for present over deferred gratifications, or, in other words, by their unwillingness to ‘wait’. VI In my Treatise on Money I defined what purported to be a unique rate of interest, which I called the natural rate of interest—namely, the rate of interest which, in the terminology of my Treatise, preserved equality between the rate of saving (as there defined) and the rate of investment.

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism
by Ed West
Published 19 Mar 2020

It did not seem a coincidence that this emotional change took place while violent crime was reaching a peak, with violence that often seemed to be over the most childish of causes (one, I seemed to remember, started over a water-pistol fight which escalated into actual pistols). Rather than these kids growing up too soon, they weren’t growing up fast enough, never learning the concept of deferred gratification or self-control. People who favour visible displays of emotion forget that some people find it uncomfortable, even threatening. The Telegraph’s Mark Steyn – at the time King of the Jungle of Right-wing columnists – observed that there was something menacing in this very new British sort of public display of emotion.

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
by Atul Gawande
Published 6 Oct 2014

Fifteen years later, when she was a scholar, the experience led her to formulate a hypothesis: how we seek to spend our time may depend on how much time we perceive ourselves to have. When you are young and healthy, you believe you will live forever. You do not worry about losing any of your capabilities. People tell you “the world is your oyster,” “the sky is the limit,” and so on. And you are willing to delay gratification—to invest years, for example, in gaining skills and resources for a brighter future. You seek to plug into bigger streams of knowledge and information. You widen your networks of friends and connections, instead of hanging out with your mother. When horizons are measured in decades, which might as well be infinity to human beings, you most desire all that stuff at the top of Maslow’s pyramid—achievement, creativity, and other attributes of “self-actualization.”

The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed
by Carl Honore
Published 29 Jan 2013

After yielding to temptation and wolfing down that éclair, we convince ourselves that we deserved a treat, needed the energy boost or will burn off the extra calories in the gym. “The bottom line is that the primitive brain is wired for the quick fix; it always has been,” says Whybrow. “The delayed gratification that comes with taking the long view is hard work. The quick fix comes more naturally to us. That’s where we get our pleasure. We enjoy it and soon we want it quicker and quicker.” That is why our ancestors warned against quick fixes long before Toyota invented the Andon rope. In the Bible, Peter urges Christians to be patient: “The Lord is not slow to fulfil his promise as some count slowness, but is patient towards you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.”

The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties
by Paul Collier
Published 4 Dec 2018

The private monopoly gains economic rents; so, less obviously, do the largest firms in those industries in which being the biggest implies being exceptionally productive. The future of taxation is to do a better job in capturing these rents. Unlike other taxation, by definition this does not discourage productive activity; instead, it is capturing something that has not been earned by the effort of work, the delayed gratification of saving, or the courage required for risk-taking. In those industries where to be the biggest has come to imply the most productive, there is a case for differentiating rates of corporate taxation by size. The same data that academics have used to show that in some sectors big is more profitable could be used to design differential tax rates.

The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success
by Kevin Dutton
Published 15 Oct 2012

All of which begs the question: Where does the crucial difference lie? Does the fulcrum of disparity between successful and unsuccessful psychopaths, between presidents and pedophiles, pivot solely around self-discipline? Everything else being equal, such a possibility might actually hold some water. The ability to delay gratification, to put on hold the desire to cut and run (and also, needless to say, to run and cut), might well tip the balance away from criminal activity toward a more structured, less impulsive, less antisocial lifestyle. Except that the question of criminal activity raises issues of its own. In both the revised psychopathy checklist—the PCL-R—and the criteria for antisocial personality disorder set out in DSM, “criminal versatility” and “repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest” constitute, respectively, core diagnostic determinants of psychopathy.

Thinking in Bets
by Annie Duke
Published 6 Feb 2018

Mischel and his colleagues saw struggles that “could bring tears to your eyes, have you applauding their creativeness and cheering them on, and give you fresh hope” for the potential of young children. Subsequent studies following up on the marshmallow kids have shown that the ability to delay gratification is correlated with markers of success throughout adolescence and into adulthood: higher SAT scores, better social and cognitive functioning ratings, lower body mass index, lower likelihood of addiction, better sense of self-worth, and higher ability to pursue goals and adapt to frustration and stress

This Book Could Fix Your Life: The Science of Self Help
by New Scientist and Helen Thomson
Published 7 Jan 2021

More recently, psychologists who followed a thousand people in New Zealand for decades discovered that those with the least self-control as young children grew up to exert a significantly greater burden on society as adults, with higher rates of unemployment, poor health and criminality.3 While there is some debate about the strength of the findings, there is a consensus that willpower and ability to delay gratification are skills that can allow us to make good choices elsewhere in our life despite temptations to do otherwise. For instance, in one study, smokers who were able to give up sweets – a classic test of willpower – were also more likely to quit cigarettes. If you’re one of those who think your willpower is naturally in short supply, the good news is that you can increase it.

Why We Run: A Natural History
by Bernd Heinrich
Published 6 May 2002

Running, throwing, jumping, the repertoire of track events, are the basic body movements required for hunting 194 why we run and warfare, and they have been ritualized into games, dances, and initiation ceremonies. It is a small step from there to racing. To the Nandi, racing has replaced former activities that required the same individualism, fortitude, discipline, hard work, and ability to delay gratification. In former times the Nandi aspired to be barngétung, a name given to a member of the tribe who had succeeded in spearing a lion. Similarly, their success at cattle raiding from distant neighbors depended on days of trekking through hot arid country, which relied on physical stamina, hard work, sacrifice, and ability to endure hardship.

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work
by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal
Published 21 Feb 2017

Selflessness Despite all the recent talk about supercomputers and artificial intelligence, the human brain remains the most complex machine on the planet. At the center of this complexity lies the prefrontal cortex, our most sophisticated piece of neuronal hardware. With this relatively recent evolutionary adaptation came a heightened degree of self-awareness, an ability to delay gratification, plan for the long term, reason through complex logic, and think about our thinking. This hopped-up cogitation promoted us from slow, weak, hairless apes into tool-wielding apex predators, turning a life that was once nasty, brutish, and short into something decidedly more civilized. But all of this ingenuity came at a cost.

Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are Thekeys to Sustainability
by David Owen
Published 16 Sep 2009

The fact that the main likely beneficiaries have yet to be born makes it difficult not only to reckon the present value of actions taken in their behalf but also to assess the ultimate effectiveness of whatever actions might actually be taken, and it leads to the public-policy equivalent of playground arguments—“My father’s carbon footprint is smaller than your father’s”—and to politics-driven initiatives of questionable value. Actually, there’s a potentially productive way to think about carbon dioxide and climate change which doesn’t depend solely on civilization’s willingness to engage in global-scale delayed gratification, and doesn’t depend even on achieving a worldwide consensus about causes and effects. Almost all human activities with large carbon footprints are going to become increasingly expensive and untenable for reasons that have nothing to do with their likely impact on the earth’s climate fifty or a hundred years from now and can therefore be addressed with tools that don’t depend solely on hypothetical arguments about the future, or on moralizing by environmentalists.

The Narcissist Next Door
by Jeffrey Kluger
Published 25 Aug 2014

He affected a muttering brusqueness most of the time, but if you spotted him in an unguarded moment, speaking only to other adults, he had a winning smile and an easy way about him. He maintained order in a Lord of the Flies group of 250 boys living in cabins far away from their parents, and even the drilling—the cursed drilling—taught us a thing or two about teamwork, self-control, delayed gratification and the simple business of sucking it up and tolerating a little discomfort. And on two occasions—and only two occasions—I learned to love the otherwise pointless business. First, of course, were those rare days on which the girls would come by. On the same mountain as our all-boys camp—though separated by a lake and a ravine—was an all-girls camp of roughly the same size.

Scarcity: The True Cost of Not Having Enough
by Sendhil Mullainathan
Published 3 Sep 2014

Robinson, Nudging Farmers to Use Fertilizer: Theory and Experimental Evidence from Kenya (No. w15131, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2009). researchers created a simple and clever intervention: Ibid. cash and bandwidth rich: The researchers interpret this in the context of a hyperbolic discounting model, as a solution to our generic challenge of delaying gratification. Our data on bandwidth increasing around harvest suggest that more might be going on here, that the very act of making the decisions at the time when farmers have greatest bandwidth could also improve the quality of decisions. low-income high school graduates: K. Haycock, “Promise Abandoned: How Policy Choices and Institutional Practices Restrict College Opportunities” (Washington, D.C.: Education Trust, 2006).

The Post-American World: Release 2.0
by Fareed Zakaria
Published 1 Jan 2008

America’s Best Industry “Ah yes,” say those who are more worried, “but you’re looking at a snapshot of today. America’s advantages are rapidly eroding as the country loses its scientific and technological base.” For some, the decline of science is symptomatic of a larger cultural decay. A country that once adhered to a Puritan ethic of delayed gratification has become one that revels in instant pleasures. We’re losing interest in the basics—math, manufacturing, hard work, savings—and becoming a postindustrial society that specializes in consumption and leisure. “More people will graduate in the United States in 2006 with sports-exercise degrees than electrical-engineering degrees,” the CEO of General Electric, Jeffrey Immelt, said a few years ago.

Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto
by Alan Stern and David Grinspoon
Published 2 May 2018

Since none of the observations with that instrument could then be conducted, the Hubble project looked around to fill the newly opened observing time. Hal remembers: “Suddenly, I got a call, and it was Christmas in summertime: we’d been awarded those three hours of observing time on Hubble after all. We’d get to make the search!” Naturally, though, that good news came with the usual New Horizons dose of delayed gratification—the Hubble observations would not be possible until May of 2005, due to scheduling constraints. While they waited, Hal led the detailed planning for the Pluto satellite search observations. Then, once they got the data, he and one of Alan’s postdocs, Andrew Steffl, began careful analysis to see if they could find anything faint orbiting Pluto.

How to Do the Work: Recognize Your Patterns, Heal From Your Past, and Create Your Self
by Nicole Lepera
Published 9 Mar 2021

In addition to all the health issues associated with this chronic stress state, people who struggle with an overactive sympathetic response system (what is known as poor vagal tone) report hosts of troubling issues. Some of the most common emotional and relational patterns include: Lack of emotional resilience Inability to form meaningful connections Issues with concentration Difficulty performing higher-functioning cognitive tasks, such as planning for the future Trouble delaying gratification It’s important to note that we enter fight-or-flight mode entirely subconsciously. Our body’s reaction to threat is instinctual and involuntary; it is not a choice we make. We cannot blame someone who believes they are being attacked for lashing out any more than we can blame someone for sweating too much when they exercise.

How to Stand Up to a Dictator
by Maria Ressa
Published 19 Oct 2022

It was a quiet, modest middle-class neighborhood with houses set back from the road. My paternal grandmother, Rosario Sunico, was deeply religious and helped shape my values. She told me stories about my father: young, intelligent, a skilled pianist from a family of musicians. She taught me to work hard in school and instilled a mindset of delayed gratification: the coins I saved from my school allowance would go into a bottle we watched fill up. She attempted to shape my perceptions, too; she told me that my mother was no good and that she had gone to the United States to be a prostitute. That was confusing stuff for a daughter to process, especially during my mother’s periodic visits.

Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking
by Mehdi Hasan
Published 27 Feb 2023

That becomes “the right moment.” Žižek is a professional philosopher and a public intellectual; basically, he is a very well-read and supersmart guy. He’s smarter than me, for sure. But I was able to put him on the back foot because I was prepared, I had receipts, and I timed them right. Delayed gratification is often the key to deploying receipts. You might want to show all your evidence early on, but it’s almost always better to wait for the right time, for that moment where it will have the biggest impact and undercut your opponent’s argument. In March 2021, I found myself going back and forth on Twitter with high-profile Republican congressman Dan Crenshaw of Texas on the subject of immigration and the situation at the U.S. southern border.

Coming of Age in the Milky Way
by Timothy Ferris
Published 30 Jun 1988

Consequently the idea slowly took hold that an adequate model of the universe not only should be internally consistent, like a song or a poem, but should also make accurate predictions that could be tested against the data of observation. The ascendency of this thesis marked the beginning of the end of our cosmological childhood. Like other rites of passage into adulthood, however, the effort to construct an accurate model of the universe was a bittersweet endeavor that called for hard work and uncertainty and deferred gratification, and its devotees initially were few. One was Eudoxus. He enters the pages of history on a summer day in about 385 B.C., when he got off the boat from his home town of Cnidus in Asia Minor, left his meager baggage in cheap lodgings near the docks, and walked five miles down the dusty road to Plato’s Academy in the northwestern suburbs of Athens.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
by Nick Bostrom
Published 3 Jun 2014

The outlook now suggests that philosophic progress can be maximized via an indirect path rather than by immediate philosophizing. One of the many tasks on which superintelligence (or even just moderately enhanced human intelligence) would outperform the current cast of thinkers is in answering fundamental questions in science and philosophy. This reflection suggests a strategy of deferred gratification. We could postpone work on some of the eternal questions for a little while, delegating that task to our hopefully more competent successors—in order to focus our own attention on a more pressing challenge: increasing the chance that we will actually have competent successors. This would be high-impact philosophy and high-impact mathematics.2 What is to be done?

The Billionaire's Apprentice: The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund
by Anita Raghavan
Published 4 Jun 2013

Projects you expect to learn the most from, the partner explained, often turn out to be disappointing, and assignments that have seemingly little promise can often turn out to be invaluable, offering a consultant a new insight or expertise. The important thing is to have “a learning mind-set” so that you learn from anything you do and everything you do, the partner advised. The insight resonated with Gupta, a man who grew up in a land where deferring gratification was a way of life. While others jockeyed to get on teams that worked on what seemed like the most promising consulting projects, Gupta took a Zen-like approach to getting new assignments. Whenever he visited Miles, he would say, “Bud, I don’t want to know what’s available. Just tell me what I should do and that’s fine with me.”

Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future
by Jean M. Twenge
Published 25 Apr 2023

By their early 30s, 1 in 3 Gen X’ers had earned a four-year college degree, compared to 1 out of 4 Boomers. That also meant Gen X’ers took longer to start their adult careers. Getting more education means you don’t make as much money in your teens and early 20s, but you make more later. Higher education is the definition of deferred gratification. Figure 4.18 (next page) shows the difference in education levels between Gen X and their grandparents and parents. The majority of the Greatest generation didn’t even finish high school, while the average Gen X’er went to college, with 35% attending at least four years of college. By 2020, 4 in 10 45- to 54-year-olds (all Gen X) had earned a four-year college degree—not bad for a generation of slackers.

NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
Published 2 Sep 2008

I suppose my hesitation was that the mindset Dweck wants students to have—a firm belief that the way to bounce back from failure is to work harder—sounds awfully clichéd: try, try again. But it turns out that the ability to repeatedly respond to failure by exerting more effort—instead of simply giving up—is a trait well studied in psychology. People with this trait, persistence, rebound well and can sustain their motivation through long periods of delayed gratification. Delving into this research, I learned that persistence turns out to be more than a conscious act of will; it’s also an unconscious response, governed by a circuit in the brain. Dr. Robert Cloninger at Washington University in St. Louis located this neural network running through the prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum.

Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes
by Maria Konnikova
Published 3 Jan 2013

Distancing has been shown to improve cognitive performance, from actual problem solving to the ability to exercise self-control. Children who use psychological distancing techniques (for example, visualizing marshmallows as puffy clouds, a technique we’ll discuss more in the next section) are better able to delay gratification and hold out for a larger later reward. Adults who are told to take a step back and imagine a situation from a more general perspective make better judgments and evaluations, and have better self-assessments and lower emotional reactivity. Individuals who employ distancing in typical problem-solving scenarios emerge ahead of their more immersed counterparts.

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women
by Hanna Rosin
Published 31 Aug 2012

Boys and girls both fritter away time on technology, but studies show that boys tend to do it in much longer blocks, spending hours after school playing video games. In fact, a consensus is forming that the qualities most predictive of academic success are the ones that have always made up the good girl stereotype: self-discipline and the ability to delay gratification. In other words, the ability to spend two hours doing your homework before you take out the PlayStation. Of course, it’s possible that girls have always had the raw material to make better students, that they’ve always been more studious, organized, self-disciplined, and eager to please, but, because of limited opportunities, what did it matter?

Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny
by Nile Rodgers
Published 17 Oct 2011

So I refocused on staying stopped, which, paradoxically, meant doing something instead of doing nothing. Hmm … this made sense to me. Anything of value (even drugs) that I had ever achieved required action and discipline. Double hmm … I remembered one of my teacher’s words at the end of a lesson: “The only thing to remember is this simple definition of the word ‘discipline’: the ability to delay gratification. It’s an easy way to visualize the training required to adopt a behavioral pattern.” Suddenly so much was clear to me. The embarrassing guitar performance, the contract on my life, the message on my answering machine, the voices—they were all mental mirages, and all egotistical ones at that.

Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story
by Greg Smith
Published 21 Oct 2012

A scientist talked to us about the Stanford marshmallow experiment—the one where children were left alone in a room with a marshmallow. Some gobbled up the marshmallow; others waited and then ate it; still others waited until the tester returned to the room. The subjects were tracked over the next forty years, and the researchers found that the ones who had delayed gratification the longest ended up growing into leaders; the little piggies, not so much. It occurred to me that back on the trading floor I was seeing more little piggies and instant gratification than I was seeing under the old Goldman model of “long-term greedy.” ——— Right about this time, I was experiencing some volatility in my personal life.

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car
by Anthony M. Townsend
Published 15 Jun 2020

Like a normal person doing a normal job, you’re looking for some feedback, and some reassurance that you’re on the right track. But your first draft always has rough patches, and even the gentlest of critics will quickly find them. And so you return to your desk for rewrites, having taken your first real step developing the acute sense of delayed gratification you’ll hone as an author. Now the pressure is on, because while we live in a world of Wikipedia revisions, deepfakes, and redacted tweets—you the author still get but one shot to nail your text perfectly. Nothing could be more different from the way programmers create code. Their vocation is intensely collaborative, endlessly iterative, and immediately gratifying.

The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter
by Joseph Henrich
Published 27 Oct 2015

And all these psychological differences are in some way biological differences.15 Thus, to explain much of human psychology, and certainly much of the content of current textbooks of psychology, one needs to establish the causal interconnections between the various products of cultural evolution, like institutions (e.g., monogamous marriage) and technologies (e.g., reading), and features of our brains, biology, genes, and psychology. For example, as I mentioned above, getting married in a monogamous society lowers a man’s testosterone, reduces his probability of committing a crime, increases his aversion to risk, and may strengthen his ability to defer gratification. In polygamous societies, many poor men cannot get married, because the high-status men attract most of the women as first, second, and third wives, so the crime rates for these unmarried poor men go up, not down. Meanwhile, married men in polygamous societies probably don’t have the drop in testosterone because, unlike married men in monogamous societies, they are still openly and actively on the marriage market and testosterone is linked to the pursuit of female romantic partners.

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture
by Ellen Ruppel Shell
Published 2 Jul 2009

The thrill of most pleasurable human experiences—getting high on psychoactive drugs or luxuriating in a great cigar—has at its core the nucleus accumbens. Within that nucleus the dopamine system motivates us to eat, drink, and have sex while we can. Evolution created the dopamine system for a very good reason: Given the short, brutish lives of our early human ancestors, delaying gratification raised the probability that there would be no gratification at all. When confronted with matters that were dangerous, edible, or sexual, primitive man knew instinctively that it was safer to act now and think later. Today, those of us more genetically inclined than others to react impulsively are likely to have particularly sensitive dopamine pathways: The more impulsive we are, the more we are driven to action by a danger or incentive—or perhaps more accurately, by the prospect of a danger or incentive.

A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived
by Adam Rutherford
Published 7 Sep 2016

A Troublesome Inheritance posed some ideas that race is not only very clearly defined genetically, but that these distinctions in DNA account for not just the physical characteristics of certain populations, but also some of the social and cultural behaviours. The book frequently misrepresents much of the work that is used to defend his assertion that recent evolution within so-called races explains why certain people appear to be better or worse at certain things. According to Wade, the English display a ‘willingness to save and delay gratification’ and this is absent from certain tribal cultures. Jewish genes are ‘adapted for success in capitalism’. The Chinese are predisposed to obey authority (how similar this sentiment is to that of Galton expressed in the letter to The Times in the nineteenth century). These statements are unsupportable in any form based on our knowledge of history, genetics and cognitive ability.

50 Psychology Classics
by Tom Butler-Bowdon
Published 14 Oct 2007

Goleman took McLelland’s ideas further, presenting 25 emotional competencies based around the following core five: Self-awareness Awareness of our own feelings and the ability to use them as a guide to better decision making. Knowledge of our own abilities and shortcomings. The sense that we can tackle most things. Self-regulation Being conscientious and delaying gratification in order to achieve our goals. Ability to recover from emotional distress and manage our emotions. Motivation Developing an achievement or goal orientation, so frustrations and setbacks are put into perspective and qualities such as initiative and perseverance are refined. Empathy Awareness of what others are feeling and thinking, and in turn the ability to influence a wide range of people.

The Devil's Derivatives: The Untold Story of the Slick Traders and Hapless Regulators Who Almost Blew Up Wall Street . . . And Are Ready to Do It Again
by Nicholas Dunbar
Published 11 Jul 2011

For the derivatives salespeople and traders who had already bought imaginary Porsches and Notting Hill houses with correlation booty wrapped up in a model-based PV number, EITF 02-03 was maddening. They didn’t want to be told that the synthetic CDO profit they were convinced was rightfully theirs would stay locked away for a decade or more. And this delayed gratification also grated on the nerves of the senior management of investment banks that had poured money into the expensive infrastructure needed to trade the new products. How would they explain to analysts that their growth projections needed to be revised downward, because accountants had locked away those revenues and virtually thrown away the key?

Bit Rot
by Douglas Coupland
Published 4 Oct 2016

However, placing my carry-on bag onto the conveyor belt, I ripped my thumbnail backwards, breaking off a wide swath of the top, and I was suddenly in that magical state of being where I could either (a) chew off the broken part of the thumbnail, most likely ripping out a chunk of the nail in the corner and so causing immense bleeding, stinging and disfigurement that could possibly continue for weeks, or (b) be an adult, wait just a little bit longer and perhaps locate some form of device for safely removing the offending piece of thumbnail. This was a very tough call—sort of like a marshmallow test of delayed gratification. As we all know, nature has programmed human beings to always choose option A, even though it’s by far the stupider choice. So what did I do? I tried to be an adult, and then…I had a brainwave. After my bag had gone through the scanner, and I was standing shoeless on the floor’s rubber padding (a place the security staff dub “the mushroom patch”), I said to the gentleman on the other side of the conveyor belt: “This is a weird request, but here’s the thing: I just ripped off a chunk of my thumbnail but it’s still attached to the thumb, and I know if I remove it with my teeth, it will turn into an unholy bloody painful mess.

Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control
by Stuart Russell
Published 7 Oct 2019

It causes us to seek out positive stimuli, such as sweet-tasting foods, that increase dopamine levels; it makes us avoid negative stimuli, such as hunger and pain, that decrease dopamine levels. In a sense it’s quite similar to E. coli’s glucose-seeking mechanism, but much more complex. It comes with built-in methods for learning, so that our behavior becomes more effective at obtaining reward over time. It also allows for delayed gratification, so that we learn to desire things such as money that provide eventual reward rather than immediate reward. One reason we understand the brain’s reward system is that it resembles the method of reinforcement learning developed in AI, for which we have a very solid theory.4 From an evolutionary point of view, we can think of the brain’s reward system, just like E. coli’s glucose-seeking mechanism, as a way of improving evolutionary fitness.

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President
by Bandy X. Lee
Published 2 Oct 2017

From his perspective, he operated in a jungle full of predators who were forever out to get him, and he did what he must to survive. Trump was equally clear with me that he didn’t value—nor even necessarily recognize—the qualities that tend to emerge as people grow more secure, such as empathy, generosity, reflectiveness, the capacity to delay gratification, or, above all, a conscience, an inner sense of right and wrong. Trump simply didn’t traffic in emotions or interest in others. The life he lived was all transactional, all the time. Having never expanded his emotional, intellectual, or moral universe, he has his story down, and he’s sticking to it.

The Deep Learning Revolution (The MIT Press)
by Terrence J. Sejnowski
Published 27 Sep 2018

When γ = 0, the learning algorithm is greedy, and decisions are made based only on immediate rewards; but when γ = 1, all future rewards are weighted equally. In a classic experiment, young children were given a choice between either eating a marshmallow immediately or waiting for fifteen minutes to get an additional marshmallow.14 Age was a strong predictor, with younger children unable to delay gratification. Expecting a large reward in the distant future can lead us to make choices with negative rewards in the short term if we deem them necessary to achieve that expected reward. Dopamine neurons receive inputs from a part of the brain called the “basal ganglia” (figure 10.4), which were known to be important for sequence learning and the formation of habitual behaviors.

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All
by Adrian Hon
Published 14 Sep 2022

Exaggerations can also occur intentionally, when marketers cherry-pick the single best improvement from a study and suggest it applies to their entire app. These misrepresentations come at a time when behavioural science itself has been in the midst of a “replication crisis,” along with fields like economics and medicine.6 Influential findings like the results of the marshmallow test, which showed that children’s ability to delay gratification predicted their future academic achievement, have failed to be replicated after repeated retesting.7 In other words, a lot of what’s published in scientific journals has turned out to be completely wrong. In response to this crisis, scientists are adopting better practices, such as using better statistical methods, more diligently retracting bad papers, and preregistering studies to avoid cherry-picking results.

Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children
by Susan Linn
Published 12 Sep 2022

Curiosity, initiative, persistence, creativity—all are foundational for learning, for constructive problem-solving, and for the ability to follow tasks and challenges through to completion. As children’s brains mature and develop, so does their facility with two important skills. One is self-regulation, which includes the ability to delay gratification and to exercise control over impulses and emotions—or, as the adage goes, to think before we speak (or act). The other is critical thinking, which embodies the will and ability to differentiate fact from fiction. Self-regulation and critical thinking each broaden and deepen our life experience.

Gene Eating: The Science of Obesity and the Truth About Dieting
by Giles Yeo
Published 3 Jun 2019

Also, all of us are, by definition, ‘experts’ at eating, given that we are alive. As a consequence, food choice, feeding behaviour and body size, all of which are outwardly visible, have always been subjected to judgement. Gluttony, after all, is one of the seven deadly sins, and many religions view fasting as a method of disciplining the body, delaying gratification for the afterlife. What social media has enabled is the democratisation of judgement. Everyone, should they choose, can now judge everyone else, without the constraint of having to consider the algorithms of societal niceties expected in face-to-face interactions. I only eat clean and real food; therefore I am MORE clean and real.

A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life
by Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein
Published 14 Sep 2021

While it is true that we have lost track of the characteristics of adulthood, it is also true that the hyper-novelty of our world, specifically the reach of economic markets, is making it more difficult to be an adult. The market is full of con artists who want you to ignore your adult responsibilities. One of those adult responsibilities is to not spend money on every latest thing. Selling delayed gratification is rarely a successful business strategy, so it is hard to find in the marketplace. Instead, junk everything is available—junk food, entertainment, sex, news. The aggregate of the market is therefore selling infantile values, which make you a desirable consumer but a poor adult. Absent the hyper-novelty and unconstrained market forces of 21st-century WEIRD societies, childhood is when you take in information from your ancestors, and discover the world that you inhabit, both physically and cognitively.

Why Buddhism is True
by Robert Wright

That’s the question we’ll focus on in the next chapter. 7 The Mental Modules That Run Your Life When I was a freshman in college, I learned that I had an intertemporal utility function. This wasn’t a diagnosis; “intertemporal utility function” isn’t a malady. It’s something everybody has. It’s an equation that describes, roughly speaking, your willingness to delay gratification—your willingness to forgo something you like in order to have more of that something later. So, for example, I might be willing to give up $100 in wages today if I could be guaranteed that I’d get $125 a year from now. But my friend, whose intertemporal utility function is calibrated differently, might demand $150 a year from now in exchange for giving up $100 now.

The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square
by James Traub
Published 1 Jan 2004

It is safe to assume that many of the patrons got merrily plastered. Here was a setting in which not just conventional morality, but adulthood itself, had been temporarily suspended. The Times Square of 1915 would have been practically unrecognizable to the denizen of 1905. The rules of self-restraint and delayed gratification—that is to say, the Protestant ethic—that had been drilled into generations of Americans had been lifted, if not quite obliterated. Barriers that had governed relations between men and women, the rich and their “inferiors,” high and low culture, tottered and often toppled. A new subculture of cosmopolites had appeared; Julian Street called them the Hectics.

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
by Charles Duhigg
Published 1 Jan 2011

Years later, they tracked down many of the study’s participants. By now, they were in high school. The researchers asked about their grades and SAT scores, ability to maintain friendships, and their capacity to “cope with important problems.” They discovered that the four-year-olds who could delay gratification the longest ended up with the best grades and with SAT scores 210 points higher, on average, than everyone else. They were more popular and did fewer drugs. If you knew how to avoid the temptation of a marshmallow as a preschooler, it seemed, you also knew how to get yourself to class on time and finish your homework once you got older, as well as how to make friends and resist peer pressure.

The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture
by Scott Belsky
Published 1 Oct 2018

Alternatively, “Each time we fail, the brain is drained of dopamine, making it not only hard to concentrate but also difficult to learn from what went wrong.” Thus, physiologically, we’re hardwired to have a strong preference for actions, decisions, and projects likely to yield quick wins, because delayed gratification causes anxiety and discomfort. If you consider how short life expectancy was in the dawn of humanity, it’s no surprise that we’re naturally biased toward short-term rewards. Even as late as the seventeenth century, average life expectancy in New England was twenty-five years of age, and 40 percent of people died before reaching adulthood.

Hacking Capitalism
by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Reduction of holidays and prohibition of popular recreations were justified with the need to protect public order. A popular icon in the middle class press was the worker who abstained from morally dubious leisure activities in favour of self-betterment and studies. The virtues of self-discipline, delayed gratification, and punctuality were taught to working class children through the education system. By the mid-nineteenth century the playfulness in working class communities had been dampened and the void was filled with commercial entertainment and expanded consumer markets. Agitation and ridiculing of the upper classes disappeared from popular songs and the subversiveness of carnivals faded.

Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol
by Iain Gately
Published 30 Jun 2008

Good Muslims were encouraged to expect an afterlife of sensual excess, spent in a fertile Arcadia: “As for the righteous . . . theirs shall be gardens and vineyards, and high-bosomed virgins for companions, a truly overflowing cup.” Anyone thirsty after a mortal life of abstinence could chose between “rivers of wine, delicious to drinkers,” and a packaged variety (“pure wine, securely sealed, whose very dregs are musk”), upon arrival in paradise. This was deferred gratification on a grand scale, far beyond the Christian version, which left the delights of heaven unspecified, beyond one’s being in the presence of God. Even the most visionary of Christian saints had lacked the confidence to depict their paradise as wet. With such clear limitations to work with, Islam set about conquering the drinking world.

Autotools
by John Calcote
Published 20 Jul 2010

Unit Testing, Anyone? Some people insist that unit testing is evil, but the only honest rationale they can come up with for not doing it is laziness. Proper unit testing is hard work, but it pays off in the end. Those who do it have learned a lesson (usually in childhood) about the value of delayed gratification. A good build system should incorporate proper unit testing. The most commonly used target for testing a build is the check target, so we'll go ahead and add it in the usual manner. The actual unit test should probably go in src/Makefile because that's where the jupiter executable is built, so we'll pass the check target down from the top-level makefile.

Your Money: The Missing Manual
by J.D. Roth
Published 18 Mar 2010

For the next 30 days, think about the item and whether you really want it, but don't buy it—not yet. If, at the end of a month, you still have the urge, then consider purchasing it (but don't pay with credit). That's all there is to it. It's simple, but surprisingly effective. The 30-day rule works because you aren't actually denying yourself—you're simply delaying gratification. This process also teaches you to think through your purchases and breaks the cycle of instant gratification that can lead to compulsive spending. This rule has another advantage: It gives you a chance to research the item you want to purchase. You may find that there's a better product out there, or that you can get it for a better price at another store!

A People's History of Poverty in America
by Stephen Pimpare
Published 11 Nov 2008

If it was us, if it was our lonesome ass shuffling past the corner of Monroe and Fayette every day, we’d get out, wouldn’t we? We’d endure. Succeed. Thrive. No matter what, no matter how, we’d find the fucking exit. If it was our fathers firing dope and our mothers smoking coke, we’d pull ourselves past it. We’d raise ourselves, discipline ourselves, teach ourselves the essentials of self-denial and delayed gratification that no one in our universe ever demonstrated. And if home was the rear room of some rancid, three-story shooting gallery, we’d rise above that, too. We’d shuffle up the stairs past nodding fiends and sullen dealers, shut the bedroom door, turn off the television, and do our schoolwork. Algebra amid the stench of burning rock; American history between police raids.

The Village Effect: How Face-To-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter
by Susan Pinker
Published 30 Sep 2013

In 2011, two researchers from the University of Virginia randomly assigned four-year-olds to one of three activities: a fast-paced TV show for preschoolers (SpongeBob SquarePants, with frenetic pacing and a scene change approximately every eleven seconds); a slower, educational program (Caillou, with scene changes on average every thirty-four seconds); or a control group (they drew pictures for the duration of the shows). Afterward, the kids were given memory games, spatial and fine motor puzzles, and delayed gratification tests (they were offered a choice between two marshmallows that they could eat right away or ten marshmallows if they waited). The results? Though the kids in all three groups were equally attentive before the experiment began, those who had just watched SpongeBob fared significantly worse on the tests of planning and self-control than those in the drawing group, and somewhat worse than those in the educational TV group.42 These are immediate, not long-term effects.

Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life
by Emily Nagoski Ph.d.
Published 3 Mar 2015

Camilla recognized that what she really needed was time for her enjoying to grow and expand until finally it activated her eagerness. They had been working with the hypothesis that it was feeling pursued that made her feel desire, but it turned out the real trick was not the experience of being chased but the amount of accelerator activation that comes with going slowly, delaying gratification. For her, the process of getting from enjoying to eagerness is a bit like the ticking pilot light on a gas stove—not quite enough gas, not quite enough, not quite, until phoof! she crosses from enjoying into eagerness. Or—going back to the shower analogy—her accelerator was like a hot-water heater that took a lot of time to heat the whole tank.

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
by Steven Pinker
Published 14 Oct 2021

There is no “correct” rate, since it also depends on the moral choice of how we weight the welfare of living people against unborn ones.20 But our awareness that politicians respond to election cycles rather than the long term, and our sad experience of finding ourselves unprepared for foreseeable disasters like hurricanes and pandemics, suggest that our social discounting rate is irrationally high.21 We leave problems to future Homer, and don’t envy that guy. There’s a second way in which we irrationally cheat our future selves, called myopic discounting.22 Often we’re perfectly capable of delaying gratification from a future self to an even more future self. When a conference organizer sends out a menu for the keynote dinner in advance, it’s easy to tick the boxes for the steamed vegetables and fruit rather than the lasagna and cheesecake. The small pleasure of a rich dinner in 100 days versus the large pleasure of a slim body in 101 days?

The Rise of the Network Society
by Manuel Castells
Published 31 Aug 1996

The material consequences of this apparently abstract digression on time and capital are increasingly felt in economies and daily lives around the world: recurrent monetary crises, ushering in an era of structural economic instability and actually jeopardizing European integration; the inability of capital investment to anticipate the future, thus undermining incentives for productive investment; the wrecking of companies, and of their jobs, regardless of performance because of sudden, unforeseen changes in the financial environment in which they operate; the increasing gap between profits in the production of goods and services and rents generated in the sphere of circulation, thus shifting an increasing share of world savings to financial gambling; the growing risks for pension funds and private insurance liabilities, thus introducing a question mark over the hard-bought security of working people around the world; the dependence of entire economies, and particularly those of developing countries, on movements of capital largely determined by subjective perception and speculative turbulence; the destruction in the collective experience of societies of the deferred-gratification pattern of behavior, in favour of the “quick buck” common ideology, emphasizing individual gambling with life and the economy; and the fundamental damage to the social perception of the correspondence between production and reward, work and meaning, ethics and wealth. Puritanism seems to have been buried in Singapore in 1995 along with the venerable Barings Bank.26 And Confucianism will last in the new economy only as long as “blood is thicker than water;”27 that is, while family ties still provide social cohesion beyond pure speculation in the brave new world of gambling finance.

The Facebook Effect
by David Kirkpatrick
Published 19 Nov 2010

Will it go out of business? I don’t spend any time worrying about that. It’s fine. Can it be a $10-billion company or something like that? Okay, I think we have a really good chance of getting there.” Some colleagues say Zuckerberg’s desire to prioritize openness and fairness over profit shows he is good at delaying gratification. Or maybe he’s just so driven that gratification is irrelevant. “He’s always striving to do the next thing,” says an executive who has worked closely with him. “For most people there are plateaus and milestones you hit and it allows you to sit back and celebrate and feel a sense of accomplishment.

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics
by Richard H. Thaler
Published 10 May 2015

(Lamont and Thaler), 250 capital asset pricing model (CAPM), 226–29, 348 “CAPM is Wanted, Dead or Alive, The” (Fama and French), 228 Car Talk, 32 Case, Chip, 235 Case-Shiller Home Price Index, 235 cashews, 21, 24, 42, 85–86, 92, 100, 102–3, 107n casinos, 49n cautious paternalism, 323 Census Bureau, 47 Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP), 208, 221 charity, 66, 129 cheap stocks, 219–21 Checklist Manifesto, The (Gawande), 356 Chen, Nai-fu, 243 Chetty, Raj, 320, 357–58 Chicago, University of, 255–56 behavioral economics conference at, 159–64, 167–68, 169, 170, 205 conference on 1987 crash at, 237 debate on behavioral economics at, 159–63, 167–68, 169, 170, 205 finance studied at, 208 offices at, 270–76, 278 Chicago Bulls, 19 Chicago police department, 260 chicken (game of), 183 choice: number of, 21, 85, 99–103 preferences revealed by, 86 choice architecture, 276, 326–27, 357 Choices, Values, and Frames, xiv Chrysler, 121, 123, 363 Cialdini, Robert, 180, 335, 336 Clegg, Nick, 333 Clinton, Hillary, 22 closed-end funds, 238–39, 239, 240 puzzles of, 240–43, 244, 250 coaches, 292–93 Coase, Ronald, 261 Coase theorem, 261–62, 264–65, 264, 267–68 Cobb, David, 115 Cobb, Michael, 115, 116, 117, 118n, 119, 120, 123 Coca-Cola, 134–35 cognitive dissonance, 178 commitment strategies, 100, 102–3, 106–7 compliance (medical), 189–90 COMPUSTAT, 221 computing power, 208 concert tickets, 18–19, 66 conditional cooperators, 146, 182, 335n “Conference Handbook, The” (Stigler), 162–63 confirmation bias, 171–72 Conservative Party, U.K., 330–33 constrained optimization, 5–6, 8, 27, 43, 161, 207, 365 “Consumer Choice: A Theory of Economists’ Behavior” (Thaler), 35 consumers, optimization problem faced by, 5–6, 8, 27, 43, 161, 207, 365 consumer sovereignty, 268–69 consumer surplus, 59 consumption function, 94–98, 106, 309 “Contrarian Investment, Extrapolation, and Risk” (Lakonishok, Shleifer and Vishny), 228 cooperation, 143–47 conditional, 146, 182, 335n Prisoner’s Dilemma and, 143–44, 145, 301–5, 302 Copernican revolution, 169 Cornell University, 42, 43, 115, 140–43, 153–55, 157 Costco, 63, 71–72 Council of Economic Advisors, 352 coupons, 62, 63, 67–68, 120 credit cards, 18, 74, 76–77 late fees for, 360 crime, 265 Daily Mail, 135 Daily Show, The, 352 Dallas Cowboys, 281 data: financial, 208 collection and recording of, 355–56 Dawes, Robyn, 146 Deal or No Deal, 296–301, 297, 303 path dependence on, 298–300 deals, 61–62 De Bondt, Werner, 216–18, 221, 222–24, 226n, 233, 278 debt, 78 default investment portfolio, 316 default option, 313–16, 327 default saving rate, 312, 316, 319, 357 delayed gratification, 100–102 De Long, Brad, 240 Demos, 330 Denmark, 320, 357–58 descriptive, 25, 30, 45, 89 Design of Everyday Things, The (Norman), 326 Diamond, Doug, 273, 276 Diamond, Peter, 323 Dictator Game, 140–41, 142, 160, 182, 301 diets, 342 diminishing marginal utility, 106 of wealth, 28, 30 diminishing sensitivity, 30–34 discount, surcharge vs., 18 discounts, returns and, 242–43 discounted utility model, 89–94, 99, 110, 362 discretion, 106 Ditka, Mike, 279, 280 dividends, 164–67, 365 present value of, 231–33, 231, 237 Dodd, David, 219 doers, planners vs., 104–9 Donoghue, John, 265n “Do Stock Prices Move Too Much to be Justified by Subsequent Changes in Dividends?”

Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants
by Maurice E. Stucke and Ariel Ezrachi
Published 14 May 2020

Why offer a steep discount, when you can entice more consumers by discounting the items twice? Here’s another example—in this case one that doesn’t turn on our math abilities but our basic psychological makeup. Suppose you are offered $100 today or $120 next week. Which would you choose? Many choose the $100, despite the fact that the better choice is, of course, to delay gratification in order to net an additional $20.2 Now suppose you are offered $100 in fifty-two weeks from now or $120 in fifty-three weeks from now. Many now choose the $120. Neurological research has examined why this is the case. The discrepancy between our short-run and long-run preferences could reflect which part of our brain’s neural system is activated.3 The research suggests that choices that involve an immediate reward (such as $100 today versus $120 next week) can disproportionately activate the impulsive part of our brain (the limbic system), which goes for the short-term benefit.

Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
by Jane McGonigal
Published 20 Jan 2011

Official website, accessed June 24, 2009. http://www.dayinthecloud.com. 5 The correct answer is The Graduate, for the phrase “Mrs. Robinson, are you trying to seduce me?” 6 Creative submissions work differently from the puzzles; they don’t automatically unlock points while you’re on the plane, because they have to be judged for creative merit by game masters on the ground. It’s a bit of delayed gratification in its current design, but you could easily imagine an updated version that allows travelers waiting at boarding gates or buying tickets online, for example, to browse and rate submissions so that creative submissions would be rated before the players land. 7 “Day in the Cloud—Virgin Flight 921.”

AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future
by Kai-Fu Lee and Qiufan Chen
Published 13 Sep 2021

If anyone in the family could resist the GI app’s nudges, Nayana suspected it would be her brother, Rohan. After all, fat and sugar were as addictive as heroin, especially for children with no self-control. But that golden elephant made it happen. Even if the eight-year-old didn’t understand insurance premiums or delayed gratification, the rest of the family were conditioned to see any sweet near the boy as a threat to their bank account. Their former indulgence of Rohan’s sweet tooth was over. It naturally made sense. Insurance companies wanted people to live healthier, longer lives—it made for better profits. As for herself, Nayana was still on the fence.

Actionable Gamification: Beyond Points, Badges and Leaderboards
by Yu-Kai Chou
Published 13 Apr 2015

Even when the seller has shipped the item, they sometimes don’t record it as shipped, let alone include a tracking number. During this time of waiting, the buyer has no idea whether the product was shipped or not, and when it will arrive. This definitely does not induce feelings of competency. Luckily, when that dream item finally arrives, joy is reinstalled, and that delayed gratification fuels the drive to buy again on eBay. Unfortunately, when the item doesn’t come in the form you dreamt it to be, therein lies the limitations of eBay. Especially as a used-item market, you may receive items that are in different conditions than described, damaged during shipment, or just plain out not what you paid for.

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement
by David Brooks
Published 8 Mar 2011

These thousand little rules became second nature to Erica, as to almost all the students. She found her diction changing, especially when she addressed strangers. She found her posture evolving, so that she adopted an almost military bearing. These little routines were almost always about self-discipline in one way or another. They were about delaying gratification or exercising some small act of self-control. She didn’t really think about them this way. The rules were just the normal structure of life for a student such as herself. But they had a pervasive effect on how she lived at school, eventually at home, and even on the tennis court. By junior year, Erica wasn’t quite so obsessed with tennis, but she had developed a way of mentally preparing for each match.

Trend Following: How Great Traders Make Millions in Up or Down Markets
by Michael W. Covel
Published 19 Mar 2007

Self-regulation is the ongoing inner conversation that emotionally intelligent engage in to be free from being prisoners of Chapter 6 • Human Behavior their feelings. If we are able to engage in such a conversation, we still feel bad moods and emotional impulses just as everyone else does, but we can learn to control them and even to channel them in useful ways.18 A trend follower’s ability to delay gratification, stifle impulsiveness, and shake off the market’s inevitable setbacks and upsets, makes him not only a successful trader, but also a leader. Goleman found that effective leaders all had a high degree of emotional intelligence along with the relevant IQ and technical skills. While other “threshold capabilities” were entry-level requirements for executive positions, emotional intelligence was the “sine qua non” of leadership.

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity
by Toby Ord
Published 24 Mar 2020

Unfortunately, there is a major challenge. Unlike the case with our own children, there are no wise adults to decide these rules. Humanity would have to lay down the rules to govern itself. And those who lack wisdom usually lack the ability to see this; those who lack patience are unlikely to delay gratification until they acquire it. So while I think a more mature world would indeed restrain its growth in destructive capability to a level where it was adequately managed, I don’t see much value in advocating for this at the moment. Major efforts to slow things down would require international agreements between all the major players, for otherwise work would just continue in the least scrupulous countries.

1939: A People's History
by Frederick Taylor
Published 26 Jun 2019

Especially for the women, the usual pose was attractive, sporty, but not overtly or provocatively sexy, in line with the Nazi regime’s public preference for modesty and subtle indication of female fitness and therefore fecundity. The presentation of how Germany and Germans should be – built on ‘joy’ but not self-indulgence, ‘strength’ not hedonism – expressed itself almost perfectly in KdF’s visions. For the most part, it worked extremely well as a tool to counteract the people’s resentment at constantly delayed gratification in other spheres of life and to promote obedience, consent and contentment. * As the behaviour of Karl Brandt and his companions on that notorious KdF cruise showed, the Reich’s elite was a law to itself. No classlessness for them. Its members might be photographed en famille eating austere Sunday ‘one-pot’ (Eintopf) meals for the Winter Aid – usually some variation of pea or lentil soup, with ham or sausage – but otherwise – as the majority of ordinary Germans knew – most of the Party’s leadership lived a life of luxury and indulgence.

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
by Kurt Andersen
Published 4 Sep 2017

The powerful appeal of the Internet is its instantaneity as much as the “community” it enables—you can send a message now, get any question answered now, buy anything you want now, meet a stranger for sex right now. Telecommunications satisfy one kind of inner child, the impulsive one with zero tolerance for waiting. As a result, over the last couple of decades, delayed gratification itself came to seem quaint. What do the brattiest children do? They shout and name-call and exaggerate, like the new generation of political commentators, like Internet trolls, like Trump. They cover their ears and refuse to listen to unpleasant facts and tell ridiculous lies. They’re selfish, and anytime they’re thwarted or someone else gets something they want, no matter how justly or reasonably, they scream That’s not fair!

Fantasyland
by Kurt Andersen
Published 5 Sep 2017

The powerful appeal of the Internet is its instantaneity as much as the “community” it enables—you can send a message now, get any question answered now, buy anything you want now, meet a stranger for sex right now. Telecommunications satisfy one kind of inner child, the impulsive one with zero tolerance for waiting. As a result, over the last couple of decades, delayed gratification itself came to seem quaint. What do the brattiest children do? They shout and name-call and exaggerate, like the new generation of political commentators, like Internet trolls, like Trump. They cover their ears and refuse to listen to unpleasant facts and tell ridiculous lies. They’re selfish, and anytime they’re thwarted or someone else gets something they want, no matter how justly or reasonably, they scream That’s not fair!

Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World
by Nick Bostrom
Published 26 Mar 2024

I’m not saying that we would necessarily want to eliminate temporal discounting altogether and in every respect—to immediately become beings who are indifferent to when things happen, who would prefer just as well to eat a cookie in a million years as right now. Such radical redesign of our volitional apparatus would itself constitute a disruptive and potentially identity-eroding alteration. But: a gentle tweak, a slight up-tuning of our tolerance for delayed gratification… that could be helpful in letting us develop a bit more slowly without bringing the present too far out of sympathy with the later.171 * * * Another type of enhancement that we may have reason to frontload is the upgrading of our capacities for autonomous decision-making. Being able to make choices that are expressive of our true selves (insofar as such things exist), rather than being driven excessively by impulse, or controlled only by surface and happenstance, or by corporate interests and their advertising agents, may help us preserve personal identity better, by making the changes that we do undergo be to greater extent the products of our own values and volitions.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
by Steven Pinker
Published 24 Sep 2012

It’s unlikely that each of us today had to be instructed in every rule individually, so that if some mother had been remiss in teaching one of them, her adult son would still be blowing his nose into the tablecloth. The rules in the list (and many more that are not) are deducible from a few principles: Control your appetites; Delay gratification; Consider the sensibilities of others; Don’t act like a peasant; Distance yourself from your animal nature. And the penalty for these infractions was assumed to be internal: a sense of shame. Elias notes that the etiquette books rarely mention health and hygiene. Today we recognize that the emotion of disgust evolved as an unconscious defense against biological contamination.24 But an understanding of microbes and infection did not arrive until well into the 19th century.

…

As we have seen, an interest rate is just such an index, because it reveals how much compensation people demand for deferring consumption from the present to the future. To be sure, an interest rate is partly determined by objective factors like inflation, expected income growth, and the risk that the investment will never be returned. But it partly reflects the purely psychological preference for instant over delayed gratification. According to one economist, a six-year-old who prefers to eat one marshmallow now rather than two marshmallows a few minutes from now is in effect demanding an interest rate of 3 percent a day, or 150 percent a month.125 Gregory Clark, the economic historian we met in chapter 4, has estimated the interest rates that Englishmen demanded (in the form of rents on land and houses) from 1170 to 2000, the millennium over which the Civilizing Process took place.

Thinking, Fast and Slow
by Daniel Kahneman
Published 24 Oct 2011

So he just turned to standard operating procedures instead of thinking through the problem.” “He didn’t bother to check whether what he said made sense. Does he usually have a lazy System 2 or was he unusually tired?” “Unfortunately, she tends to say the first thing that comes into her mind. She probably also has trouble delaying gratification. Weak System 2.” The Associative Machine To begin your exploration of the surprising workings of System 1, look at the following words: Bananas Vomit A lot happened to you during the last second or two. You experienced some unpleasant images and memories. Your face twisted slightly in an expression of disgust, and you may have pushed this book imperceptibly farther away.

The Practice of Cloud System Administration: DevOps and SRE Practices for Web Services, Volume 2
by Thomas A. Limoncelli , Strata R. Chalup and Christina J. Hogan
Published 27 Aug 2014

Developers want to launch new features; operations teams want stability. Developers are in the business of making change. They are rewarded for new features, especially ones that are highly visible to the end customers. They would prefer to have each feature they create pushed into production as fast as possible so as not to delay gratification. The question they get the most from management is likely to be, “When will it ship?” Operations people are in the business of stability. They want nothing to break so they don’t get paged or otherwise have a bad day. This makes them risk averse. If they could, they would reject a developer’s request to push new releases into production.

The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall
by Mark W. Moffett
Published 31 Mar 2019

That included any excess that could be stored to tide people over times of dearth. Among the insect societies operating this way are harvester ants that jointly build well-protected underground pantries, where they keep seeds fresh for months. However, most vertebrate societies fail to show delayed gratification by means of a group effort. For instance, each pinyon jay caches its own seeds and attacks any member of its flock who steals from it. Describing the gathering practices of a Bushman society, the anthropologist Richard Lee explained, “The !Kung do not amass a surplus, because they conceive of the environment itself as their storehouse.”11 Nevertheless, cultural practices that yielded a lasting food supply could support long-term home bases.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years
by David Graeber
Published 1 Jan 2010

Cooper’s essay is a brilliant exploration of the relation between debt imperialism—a phrase she seems to have coined, inspired by Hudson—and evangelical Christianity, and it is heartily recommended. See also Naylor 1985. 29. Robertson 1992:153. In Cooper again: op cit. 30. Atwood 2008:42. 31. This is, incidentally, also the best response to conventional critiques of the poor as falling into debt because they are unable to delay gratification—another way in which economic logic, with all its human blind spots, skews any possible understanding of “consumers’ ” actual motivations. Rationally, since CDs yield around 4 percent annually, and credit cards charge 20 percent, consumers should save as a cushion and only go into debt when they absolutely have to, postponing unnecessary purchases until there’s a surplus.

The Impact of Early Life Trauma on Health and Disease
by Lanius, Ruth A.; Vermetten, Eric; Pain, Clare
Published 11 Jan 2011

Because the brain areas responsible for executive functioning go off-line under threat, frightened people lose touch with the flow of time and get stuck in a terrifying, seemingly never-ending present. As a result, their responses are directed toward their desperate need for immediate relief, and delayed gratification is difficult, if not impossible. The documentation of these abnormalities explains why traumatized individuals usually have little understanding of what upsets them and little control over their reactions. Traumatized individuals have more selective development of non-verbal cognitive capacities.

Empire of Guns
by Priya Satia
Published 10 Apr 2018

It has been years since I acquired the debt, but I am glad to at last be able to thank Vivek Ramachandran and Karen Loh for their hospitality in London, and my dear friend Adrienne Copithorne for hers in Cambridge. I also want to record here my deep gratitude to all my friends, who share their lives with me out of choice. I have loved laughing with you while awaiting the horrendously delayed gratification of this completed book. Sunil Khanna was a vital companion in parts of the journey. All my family, in the U.S. and in India, have been a great support. My brother, Rishi Satia, especially, shared references and cheered me on. I thank my parents, Jagat and Indira Satia, as always, for making it possible for me to make a career of reading, writing, and thinking, and for the gentle understanding with which they have always related our own family stories.

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
by Ron Chernow
Published 1 Jan 1997

In his later years, Flagler developed into a grandee of such rich tastes that it is instructive to note his austere early style. Not only did he labor six days a week, but he shunned bars and theaters as the devil’s playgrounds and became superintendent of the First Presybterian Church. Like Rockefeller, he advocated self-discipline and deferred gratification. As he said of his first threadbare days in Cleveland: “I wore a thin overcoat and thought how comfortable I should be when I could afford a long, thick Ulster. I carried a lunch in my pocket until I was a rich man. I trained myself in the school of self-control and self-denial. It was hard on [me], but I would rather be my own tyrant than have some one else tyrannize me.” 46 After his wife, Mary, gave birth to a son, Henry Harkness Flagler, in 1870, she never regained her health and turned into an invalid.

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 31 Dec 2009

It is only later—at around the age of eighteen months to two years—that parents introduce their children to the reality principle. For Freud, reality is imposing restraints and constraints, first in the form of toilet training and scheduled feedings. The baby, says Freud, needs to be taught to delay gratification, to repress his or her instinctual drives in order to conform with the norms that make social life possible. Socialization for Freud meant repression of basic drives, which he viewed as ultimately self-destructive and antisocial. Many of the renegade psychologists of the 1930s and 1940s thought differently.

The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
by Richard Dawkins
Published 1 Jan 2004

They have lost some of the normal aphid defensive responses and, according to one intriguing suggestion, some have modified their rear end to resemble the face of an ant. Ants are in the habit of passing liquid food to one another, mouth to mouth, and the suggestion is that individual aphids that evolved this rear-end face-mimicry facilitated being 'milked' and therefore gained protection by ants from predators. The Leaf Cutter's Tale is a tale of delayed gratification as the basis of agriculture. Hunter-gatherers eat what they gather and eat what they hunt. Farmers don't eat their seed corn; they bury it in the ground and wait months for a return. They don't eat the compost with which they fertilise the soil and don't drink the water with which they irrigate it.

The River Cottage Fish Book: The Definitive Guide to Sourcing and Cooking Sustainable Fish and Shellfish
by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
Published 19 Nov 2007

Then start ransacking your beach bag for a safety pin—or go snorkeling for sea urchins. For a more formal session at home, you can boost the flavor of the winkles by cooking them in a simple court bouillon. Drain them when they are done and then consider the only decision you have to make: do I want to eat these one by one from the shell, or delay gratification by shelling them all first and then gorging on several at a time? There’s only one right answer, of course. You can (and most do) eat them au naturel. Or you can dip them in a sweet, mustardy vinaigrette or good old garlic butter. Or there is always the end of the pier thing—dip them in malt vinegar and sprinkle with white pepper.

How the Mind Works
by Steven Pinker
Published 1 Jan 1997

Sometimes the rational decision is “now,” particularly when, as the sayings go, life is short or there is no tomorrow. The logic is laid bare in firing-squad jokes. The condemned man is offered the ceremonial last cigarette and responds, “No thanks, I’m trying to quit.” We laugh because we know it is pointless for him to delay gratification. Another old joke makes it clear why playing it safe is not always called for. Murray and Esther, a middle-aged Jewish couple, are touring South America. One day Murray inadvertently photographs a secret military installation, and soldiers hustle the couple off to prison. For three weeks they are tortured in an effort to get them to name their contacts in the liberation movement.

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
by Rick Perlstein
Published 1 Jan 2008

“And the young people themselves began to develop a sense of their own identity and with it a radically critical attitude about the society that their elders had created. They dissented, they dropped out, they said ‘No’—and the reverberations of that No are still being heard.” The new generation’s ethos had something to do with JFK, all agreed, and the Bomb, and a celebration of the immediate against their parents’ cult of deferred gratification. Their favorite politician, Bobby Kennedy, was like them addicted, Andrew Kopkind of the New Republic wrote, to “sudden, spontaneous, half-understood acts of calculated risk.” They reviled a society lost “among the motorized toothbrushes, tranquilizers, and television commercials” (wrote Kennedy brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, in an article on their signature government program, the Peace Corps).

Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy
by Irvin D. Yalom and Molyn Leszcz
Published 1 Jan 1967

The NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI) and its shorter version, the NEO-FFI, are self-report inventories that are easy to administer, reliable, and well validated across cultures. Five personality variables are evaluated: Neuroticism (distress, vulnerability to stress and propensity for shame); Extraversion (verbal, eager to engage, and enthusiastic); Conscientiousness (hard working, committed, able to delay gratification); Openness (embraces the novel and unfamiliar with creativity and imagination); and Agreeableness (trusting, cooperative, altruistic). 30 W. Piper, A. Joyce, J. Rosie, and H. Azim, “Psychological Mindedness, Work and Outcome in Day Treatment,” International Journal of Group Psychotherapy 44 (1994): 291–311.

Melody Beattie 4 Title Bundle: Codependent No More and 3 Other Best Sellers by Melody Beattie: A Collection of Four Melody Beattie Best Sellers
by Melody Beattie
Published 30 May 2010

Some of our codependent character traits may become the basis for some of our finest characteristics. We may find that our ability to be responsible will qualify us for positions of leadership. We may discover that our ability to put up with deprivation enables us to accomplish something extraordinary that couldn’t be accomplished without the ability to delay gratification. We may find that healing from our pain helps others heal from theirs. Let me close this chapter with a quote from Ellen Goodman, my favorite columnist. Goodman shared the following story with a college graduation class. Eighty percent of life is showing up. Day by day, year by year we were presented with choices and made them.

Andrew Carnegie
by David Nasaw
Published 15 Nov 2007

“Your always busy man accomplishes little; the great doer is he who has plenty of leisure…Moral: Don’t worry yourself over work, hold yourself in reserve, and sure as fate, ‘it will all come right in the wash.’” Speaking to his own situation, that of a man retired in the prime of his career, Carnegie indulged in an orgy of self-congratulation. It was the height of foolishness, he had found, to delay gratification and put off retirement until one was too old to enjoy it. “Sound wisdom that school-boy displayed who did not ‘believe in putting away from tomorrow the cake he could eat-to-day.’…Among the saddest of all spectacles to me is that of an elderly man occupying his last years grasping for more dollars.”