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The full talk is in the Feifan series on Fanshu, a Chinese audiobook app; this page is only a summary.
What this episode is about
Why do people who habitually practice delayed gratification end up further away from its true meaning?
After work, you have to finish the housework before you can start having fun; when you buy something nice, you have to wait for a moment important enough to use it; instead of spending money now, you save it for the future…. In traditional families, all of this is treated as the virtue of delayed gratification. Sometimes, simply to keep ourselves in check, we even have to put enjoyment off.
But in this book, Walter Mischel—the father of delayed gratification—tells us that all these elaborate rules are actually the opposite of delayed gratification! The point of delayed gratification has never been to delay better; it is to gain greater satisfaction. People who are truly good at delayed gratification are not those who can endure the most, but those who have ample anticipation and confidence in the satisfaction that will come later.
You will hear
- A comprehensive look at the research findings from the marshmallow experiment
- A breakdown of the prerequisites and underlying logic of delayed gratification
- How to move beyond the “technique” of self-control and grasp its deeper “way”
Quote of the episode
People choose delayed gratification only when one prerequisite is met—one that is very easy to overlook: confidence in the future.
Many parents go to enormous lengths to train their children’s endurance and willpower, yet make no effort at all to give them confidence in the future.
True success does not lie in whether we can completely restrain the supposed flaws of human nature, but in how we recognize and understand them—and then make peace with them.
About the author
Walter Mischel Walter Mischel was a renowned American psychologist, known as the father of the marshmallow experiment and famous for his experiments on self-control and delayed gratification.
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