Delayed Gratification & Business-Building
In 1972, a professor at Stanford named Walter Mischel conducted a famous study which would become known as the “Stanford marshmallow experiment”. Children were left in a room for 15 minutes with a single marshmallow, and offered the choice of either one immediate reward, or two rewards (as long as they didn’t eat the marshmallow by the time the researcher returned). If they were able to resist eating the single marshmallow, they were rewarded with another snack of their choice. The beauty of this study was not quite so much the insight about kids and marshmallows, but that it was a quite extensive study that actually followed up on the child’s progression through life for years. It turned out that…