Delayed Gratification: Patience and Long-Term Goals

Can Patience Pave the Way to Success? Exploring Delayed Gratification

You promised yourself that you would lose weight, yet found yourself devouring fried chicken and burgers. You had an exam the next day, but still spent the entire night gaming. If immediate temptations repeatedly overwhelm your stated intentions, it may be worth examining your capacity for delayed gratification.

Although delayed gratification has become a popular term online, the underlying idea is far from new. As early as the fourth century BCE, Aristotle argued that many people were unhappy because they confused pleasure with happiness. In the account presented here, genuine happiness comes from cultivating good habits, surrounding yourself with friends who nourish the soul, developing your potential, and moving toward your goals—not simply chasing whatever feels good at the moment.

Li Dan once illustrated his understanding of delayed gratification on the Chinese debate show “I Can I BB” by contrasting gathering with farming. A hungry gatherer could simply reach out, pick a fruit, and enjoy it immediately, but, as he put it, such people were eliminated. Those who survived were the “unhappy” ones who suppressed their desires and chose to farm instead, planting in spring and waiting several months to eat the autumn harvest. That wait, in his analogy, is delayed gratification.

What Exactly Is Delayed Gratification?

In psychological terms, delayed gratification is the ability to postpone a reward available now in order to obtain a better reward later. Its opposite is immediate gratification: choosing the reward that can be enjoyed at once.

A classic illustration is the Stanford experiment conducted by psychologist Walter Mischel. He met individually with four-year-old children, placed a marshmallow before each child, and said that he had to leave for a while. A child could eat the marshmallow immediately or wait fifteen minutes until Mischel returned and receive a second one. Faced with such a tempting choice, the children reacted differently. Some ate the marshmallow as soon as he left. Others tried to resist, held it near their mouths to smell it, and eventually ate it. Still others distracted themselves by fiddling with their clothes.

After fifteen minutes, two-thirds of the children had eaten the marshmallow. Only one-third waited for Mischel to return and received two. The article identifies the waiting shown by this group as an expression of delayed gratification.

What Are the Benefits of Delayed Gratification?

1. Delayed Gratification and Academic Performance

According to the article, Mischel conducted a series of follow-up studies on the participants fifteen years after the original marshmallow experiment. The children who had waited for the second marshmallow generally had higher SAT scores, better health, and fewer behavioral problems. Most of those who had not waited encountered various difficulties, such as dropping out of school and lacking plans for the future. These findings describe an association; they do not by themselves show that waiting for the marshmallow caused every later difference.

2. Delayed Gratification and Broader Success

Beyond Mischel’s series of experiments, the article says that research by other scholars has demonstrated that delayed gratification is a very important trait among successful people. Those who could control when they received gratification generally did better in their careers, relationships, health, and finances than people concerned only with immediate gratification.

Delayed gratification asks you to tolerate some dissatisfaction now for the sake of a long-term goal you genuinely want to achieve. In the process, avoiding pleasures that would interfere with your progress strengthens your self-control and ultimately helps you reach that goal relatively sooner.

Why Is Temptation So Hard to Resist—and How Can You Delay Gratification?

“I know I have not finished what I need to do, but I still want to play a game first.” Freud's psychoanalytic framework offers one explanation for this impulse. In that framework, the id follows the pleasure principle and pursues enjoyment without submitting to reason or values, while the ego and superego restrain it according to reality, morality, and rational judgment. From this perspective, the desire for immediate gratification is instinctive. Yet life cannot always be organized around present pleasure; long-term aims often require us to manage immediate desires and postpone satisfaction.

Here are four ways to practice delayed gratification.

First, redirect your attention. When temptation appears, do not depend solely on a prolonged contest of willpower, which can be difficult to sustain. Instead, choose another activity that takes your attention away from the temptation without undermining your long-term goal. If you are trying to lose weight and suddenly want to overeat, for example, you might watch a film or television program you have been meaning to see.

Second, use small immediate rewards to support long-term progress. Divide a long, tedious task into manageable units and reward yourself after completing each one. A lengthy revision session, for instance, can become several shorter tasks, with a modest reward—perhaps a small snack—after each section. This creates a cycle of work and reward that can make the larger task feel less discouraging and reduce the urge to quit.

Third, practice mindfulness or meditation consistently. These practices can improve your awareness of your emotions and desires and strengthen your ability to regulate them.

Fourth, seek a little encouragement when your motivation drops. At the moment when you feel ready to give up, even watching an inspiring video may provide an unexpectedly useful boost.

Must We Always Delay Gratification? What About Living in the Present?

A line from “Kung Fu Panda” captures the appeal of living in the present: yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and today is a gift to be treasured as such.

There is nothing wrong with this outlook, but its meaning should be clear. Living in the present means making peace with your past rather than remaining trapped by it. It means not becoming excessively anxious about a future that has not arrived, appreciating what you already have, and making the most of the only day you can truly grasp: today.

Living in the present is not the same as relentlessly pursuing immediate gratification. The former is an attitude toward life. The latter, in the sense criticized here, means doing whatever produces pleasure now without considering its future consequences. That unrestrained pursuit of immediate pleasure is not what the article advocates.

Nor does delayed gratification require rejecting every present pleasure. It means temporarily giving up only those pleasures that could obstruct a particular long-term goal. Wanting a high GPA, for example, does not mean that every hour outside class must be devoted to studying.

Living in the present helps us enjoy life, while delayed gratification helps us reach long-term goals. Their functions differ, but both can contribute to a better life. They are not mutually exclusive.

The ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus is quoted as advising us to approach what we cannot control with optimism and confidence, and what we can control with caution and restraint.

In practice, we should rationally weigh the benefits and costs of present choices against our long-term aims, then decide according to our own circumstances. Delayed gratification has distinctive benefits, but its popularity online is no reason to become anxious. People may share a desire for a better life while taking different routes toward it. Still, if you genuinely want to accomplish a particular long-term goal, delaying gratification may be the one sure way to achieve it.