Delayed vs Immediate Gratification (And The Importance Of Both)
I’m sick today. I have a bad cold and cough, and my body is achy. I was sick yesterday too. Luckily, I don’t have many imminent tasks I need to accomplish, and a few of my clients have been kind enough to reschedule meetings as needed.
I did have a few things I needed to get done: namely, posts for this blog.
As I laid in bed coughing, my loving and caring wife encouraged me to skip the blog yesterday, and make it up another day. I knew I couldn’t. It would have been the bad kind of immediate gratification. I would have had a brief rush of dopamine upon deciding to skip the blog, and then it would have gone away. My publishing streak would be over, and I would have given the idea of skipping another day a foothold in my mind.
This isn’t to say that all immediate gratification is bad.
Delayed gratification is the backbone of most long projects. We stack small bricks on the city of our dreams, each day, knowing that the bricks we carry today will become incredible views in a few tomorrows. However, avoiding all immediate gratification is a path to exasperation. If we sacrifice all short-term pleasure for long-term success, we’ll likely find our long-term success sabotaged by our own dwindling motivation.
Here’s my take: each day, do something that could only pay off a few years down the road. Then, each week, take a day to do fun things that have no long-term application whatsoever. For me, I write on this blog daily, slowly sharpening my skills and growing an audience for which I can one day publish books. Also, each week, I take an afternoon to play wiffle ball will my friends. The delayed gratification serves my long-term goals. The immediate gratification keeps me satisfied with my life, which also serves my long-term goals.
Delayed gratification and immediate gratification are both important pieces of the motivational puzzle. We just have to be strategic with both. We need to make sure that our immediate gratification, or the lack of it, doesn’t sabotage the work of our delayed gratification.
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