What Kids Can Tell Us About Thinking Long-Term
Understanding the power of delayed gratification is a complex subject, but there are simple examples that can show how this principle works. One of the most recognizable studies was conducted more 50 years ago by Walter Mischel at Stanford University and is known as the Marshmallow Test. Below is a brief overview of what the test set out to understand.
The experiment began by bringing each child into a private room, sitting them down in a chair, and placing a marshmallow on the table in front of them.
At this point, the researcher offered a deal to the child.
The researcher told the child that he was going to leave the room and that if the child did not eat the marshmallow while he was away, then they would be rewarded with a second marshmallow. However, if the child decided to eat the first one before the researcher came back, then they would not get a second marshmallow.
So the choice was simple: one treat right now or two treats later.
The researcher left the room for 15 minutes.
As you can imagine, the footage of the children waiting alone in the room was rather entertaining. Some kids jumped up and ate the first marshmallow as soon as the researcher closed the door. Others wiggled and bounced and scooted in their chairs as they tried to restrain themselves, but eventually gave in to temptation a few minutes later. And finally, a few of the children did manage to wait the entire time.
Published in 1972, this popular study became known as The Marshmallow Experiment, but it wasn’t the treat that made it famous. The interesting part came years later. 1
Without getting too far into the social science at play here or subsequent studies that may call into question the initial findings, we can take a look at the surface benefit of patience and looking ahead.
Delayed gratification
We live in a ‘right now’ world. Whether it is in our business or personal lives we are used to things happening at a quick pace. Rarely is your District Manager or Regional Manager going to call up and say, “Sales are soft, why don’t you take a few weeks, figure some things out, then get back to me on how we can fix that for next quarter.” It doesn’t happen that way. It is more like, “sales are soft, what are you doing today to change that trend?”I get frustrated with slow internet (talk about petty items to consider from a time standpoint). However, we have become conditioned to getting something we are interested in—information, action, or results—immediately instead of waiting for something else later. In many cases we are not even considering the alternatives - we see the marshmallow, we eat it. Act. Quickly. The thought of, ‘if I wait, perhaps there will be two marshmallows’ doesn’t enter our conscious thought stream.But when we force ourselves to step back and present the option of getting X right now or, waiting and investing time and energy into better results so we could get X +1 or, in many cases, X times 3. That is a significant return on delaying our gratification. It assumes the time element is reasonable, not much different (relatively speaking) than asking a child to wait 10 to 15 minutes before they can eat the treat.
Putting delay into action
If we use our sales example above and instead of looking for an immediate result of fixing sales today, we look at a longer-term solution. In this scenario, we will delay the gratification of improved sales for the day for the expectation of sustained better sales long-term.We identify potential causes of the soft sales trends. We formulate both a short-term and long-term strategy to address those cases. We then place that into action. We can do those things quickly and with a nice mix of short-term activities and long-term actions we can begin to multiple our ‘marshmallows.’ We can hire differently. We can train differently. We can communicate the sales goals to every associate each day. We can provide multiple updates each day to the team on how we are doing. We can provide coaching to associates to encourage their success. All of those elements will have a multiplying effect versus taking the instant gratification of pushing for a day to get better sales with the limited opportunity of that day.I realize that this example is more complicated than a 6-year-old staring at a gooey treat for fifteen minutes, but many of the same principles are at play. As leaders, we must challenge ourselves to think beyond the immediate gratification and see the possibilities of the multiplying our ‘treats’ if we wait, but with a defined plan of action. Skip the single marshmallow and build your plan for having an entire store party with a bag full of marshmallowy goodness for everyone. How do you use delayed gratification to help multiple your outcomes? Join other retail leaders in continuing their development journey with Effective Retail Leader.com. SUBSCRIBE today to receive FREE leadership tips directly to your inbox and monthly newsletters that provide many tools to help further develop your leadership skills all at no cost. JOIN NOW!No spam ever - just leadership goodness.Photo by Rebecca Freeman on Unsplash
- 40 Years of Stanford Research Found That People With This One Quality Are More Likely to Succeed. https://jamesclear.com/delayed-gratification ↩