35. People’s Ability to Delay Gratification (Or Not) Starts Young

You want to buy that Kindle, but you’re thinking maybe you should wait a while. Maybe you should see if the price comes down later this year, or maybe you should pay down your credit card debt before you spend money on a new gadget for yourself. Do you wait or not?

Whether or not you are the type of person who can delay gratification, chances are high that you’ve been this way (a delayer or not a delayer) since you were a child.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Walter Mischel conducted a series of studies on delayed gratification with preschoolers. Years later he followed up with the original people in his study. He found that when the children who were able to delay gratification became teenagers, they were more successful in school, received higher SAT scores, and were better able to cope with stress and frustration. He followed them into adulthood, and the differences continued. On the other side, the children who could not delay gratification as preschoolers were more likely to have problems as adults, including drug abuse.

Ozlem Ayduk from the University of California, Berkeley, is bringing these same individuals back to the lab. The researchers are using fMRI brain imaging to get a better look at the parts of the brain that are active in delayed gratification. As I write this book, her research is not yet complete.

Giving a Presentation for Non-Delayers

Since you don’t know how many people in your audience might be good or bad at delaying gratification, you should assume that you have both types of people in your sessions. You need to make sure that you are not making people wait till the end of your presentation to “get it.” You need to have “a-ha” moments throughout the presentation so that people who “can’t wait” feel that they are learning something “right now.”