Delayed gratification is a term you have most likely encountered when you either looked into self-improvement or improving your financial situation, and by all means, it’s something extremely important in those areas of one’s life, but in many more as well.
In case you haven’t encountered this term before directly, or haven’t even heard of it (even if you’ve looked into the above-mentioned areas), let’s have a look at how Wikipedia defines this concept:
Delayed gratification, or deferred gratification, is the resistance to the temptation of an immediate pleasure in the hope of obtaining a valuable and long-lasting reward in the long-term.
In other words, delayed gratification describes the process that the subject undergoes when the subject resists the temptation of an immediate reward in preference for a later reward. Generally, delayed gratification is associated with resisting a smaller but more immediate reward in order to receive a larger or more enduring reward later. A growing body of literature has linked the ability to delay gratification to a host of other positive outcomes, including academic success, physical health, psychological health, and social competence.
So, this basically means giving up some instant or soon reward/temptation in hope of receiving an ever bigger one sometime in the future. This might sound a bit silly, but as soon as we’ll put it into a couple of contexts it will start to make a lot more sense.
I believe that the best context I can give you right now would be my own experiences. You will find them below.
My Experiences
Let’s have a look into my programming career and see what impact did the Delayed Gratification effect have upon it:
It all started with a regular day in December 2019 when I stumbled upon web capabilities which, after looking into them more thoroughly, motivated me to become a Web Developer.
I studied and learned a lot, I practiced with a lot of smaller projects, and I never knew it would make me any good. Everyone seemed to be much better at it than me.
It wasn’t until October or November when my efforts started being rewarded after getting some paid projects from freelancing clients I started having.
There is another aspect that needs to be mentioned here; I started posting gigs on Fiverr for a couple of months prior in hope of finally being able to put my skills up to the test with real projects, but to no avail until October / November.
I could’ve given up at any time, and I wanted to, as I wouldn’t receive any offers for 4 or 5 months straight, and I wanted to on several occasions, but I continued to hope I will be able to demonstrate that my hard work has finally paid off.
The same for my development skills, as I was always unsure about my ability, especially after failing to do certain things on several occasions, whilst others seemed to have no issue doing them.
These are 2 contexts that I consider relevant for the delayed gratification effect. Despite no instant gratification I gave up for other than living and enjoying my life as my peers have, I still believe they prove the power of this effect.
Now that we’ve gone through some of my personal experiences that regarded the Delayed Gratification effect, let’s discuss some other conceptual/abstract examples:
Saving Up Money
Let’s say you have 50k USD in your bank account right now. And let’s say you have 2 choices for all this money; you can either buy that brand new car you have always wanted or… you could put that money in the S&P 500 index which is tracking the 500 companies in the US.
Where would you be in 5 years with any of these choices?
Well, going with the first choice, you would buy that brand new car, you will probably enjoy it for a maximum of 3 months, after which you’ll get used to it and probably want something better, as that feeling of pride will start to wear off.
Its value would likely depreciate down to somewhere around 50–60% of what it initially was, and that would leave us with a car that would be worth 20–23k USD in 5 years. That would be a loss of 40–50% from the initial value of 50k USD.
Now, let’s see what happens if we put our money in an index fund like the S&P, which historically has seen an average growth of 10.5% from 1957 up through 2021.
With an investment of 50k USD, in 5 years, that investment will be worth well over 82k USD, which would be an increase of 60%, without taking into consideration any other additional payment made into the S&P 500 investment account during those 5 years.
If it were for me, I think you can guess what I’d choose. I would say that it would make for a pretty consistent return. Just think that if you would invest 50k USD in S&P 500 it would probably double over the course of 6 or 7 years.
Just think about it; you can resist the temptation for a while longer, and in a couple of years, with the initial investment, reinvesting the dividends, as well as some recurring deposits made into the same investments account, you could buy a brand new car for free in about 4 or 5 years, which sounds pretty good for me.
You can make the calculations here for yourself; below is linked a website where you can also calculate the return if you also reinvest the dividends, as well as if you make some weekly/monthly deposits: https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/.
Starting a Business
Imagine you want to start up a business, you knew from the beginning it wouldn’t be easy, you have prepared yourself for its launch, but to your surprise, the results weren’t really up to your expectations. What do you do?
This could branch out into a much different discussion, but let’s say for the sake of example that the circumstances and your idea are all great, but nothing really happens in terms of a business boom. So, are you going to continue working and trying to market and develop your idea and let it die?
Well, if we conform to the Delayed Gratification concept, the right choice would be to identify possible bottlenecks and continue working on your idea and developing your business.
It might not yield immediate results, of course, but since we identified the circumstances and the idea as being right, we know that it will yield great results in the future, but still, the fact that you haven’t got any good results so far, especially since you already put in so much work demoralized you.
Frankly, the Delayed Gratification concept resembles religion, as it’s similar in the principle of believing something good will happen to you if you continue to be good (continue the hard work you have done so far) at some point in the future that is unknown to you.
Disclaimer
One more thing I wanted to mention before finishing off is that there are, of course, some nuanced exceptions to this principle.
Not all things you have put the effort in will yield any results whatsoever. Let’s say you want to create a new typewriter machine, well, sorry to dissapoint you, but that is on its way out, not on its way in.
There will always be some exceptions that you could possibly figure out before starting getting into something which will require a compound effort over a long period of time.
There are also some other examples I could think of from the top of my head like, and not limited to:
- Starting a YouTube channel.
- Becoming a successful artist.
- Building your dream physique.
- Chasing a dream job.
The process for achieving any of these wouldn’t be much different from any of the previously mentioned examples; they all require a lot of effort and you’ll never achieve the success you’ve dreamt of until you do.
Some crucial traits you will develop during this whole process which are more subtle would be the gained patience, faith in the process and your abilities, the ability to control your impulses, and increased willpower which has been developed by trying your best to achieve your dream, whatever it might have taken to achieve it.
These are all qualities you would expect from a successful person, and they are.
But bear in mind that not all successful people, if any were born with these qualities; have all improved and gained these traits after going through this very process, which has been tedious, hard, lengthy, and full of roadblocks, but that’s what it takes.
So keep in mind that almost all successful people have gone through delayed gratification, and all have endured suffering, pain, a lot of time working alone, they have sacrificed socializing, personal comfort, free time, money, resources, and other pleasures in order to achieve a higher goal.
Conclusion
To round it all up, the Delayed Gratification effect is what separates the successful people from the rest; it represents the trial through every successful person has to go through in order to gain the abilities he needs in order to fulfill his goals.
As long as you don’t give up and resile throughout all of the challenges that the path to success puts you through, you will at some point achieve anything you have planned to. And don’t forget, dream big!
I hope you enjoyed reading this article, and I hope it has motivated you, or at least, it offered you some insightful information you might use as a stepping stone on your way up to success.
Cheers!
Also published here.