ESYB2 029 - The Marshmallow Test
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[00:00:00] There's an ongoing debate on what makes people and entrepreneurs successful, and a lot of people have different ideas. But there was one study from Stanford University that actually became a tremendous and very accurate predictor of success. And you can test this in kids as young as four or five years old.

Here's the study. This is the Wikipedia page for that study. I'll have this linked in the resources of this video. So you can come here and read it in detail. And there's a lot of YouTube videos about it. There's a lot of articles about it. It's a really famous study. Here's how it worked. They got a lot of kids into the study and they were told that the study is something else and every kid got into a room with a professor and the professor said, I'll give you this marshmallow to eat.

And then they pretended like they forgot something and they said if you don't need this marshmallow before I come back, I'll give you another one. So you'll have two. So the test was really whether the [00:01:00] kid delay gratification and wait to get the second marshmallow. Because if the kid waited until the professor came back that kid would get the second marshmallow.

And some kids of course ate the marshmallow right away, some kids waited and got their second marshmallow but then this study tracked these kids throughout their lives and it was very consistent that The kids who were able to delay gratification to get a bigger reward later, they succeeded in their studies, in university, in career, in business.

And there's an interesting takeaway here. This suggested that it's not economic background or anything else that predicts success. It's actually willpower. And willpower is something that more or less can be trained in everybody. Of course, some people have more or less of it, but everybody can work on disciplining themselves.

And even [00:02:00] understanding this very test highlights how important willpower is and how important it is to delay gratification for bigger rewards later. And knowing this alone, people start to focus a little more on disciplining themselves. And for entrepreneurs, this is incredibly important because just about every project I've worked on, starting over a decade ago to starting this year, there was always a ton of failure in the beginning.

And most people, they get excited about a project, they work on it, it becomes frustrating, they quit. Or another way this Manifest itself is a lot of my clients, right away they ask, well, how much money can I make? Can I make a million dollars? These kinds of questions. And it's not a terrible question on its own, but it's a little bit of a sign and a clue that this person is focusing on the very short term, very zeroed in on the [00:03:00] reward, and not really focusing on the long term of it, the work.

Actually all the things that will make them successful and I see this in my clients all the time But now, you know marshmallow test, right? You got to focus on the long term. So a lot of things it's wiser To create your plans and position everything with the vision that okay, maybe not now Maybe not in six months, maybe like in two or three years, but in the meantime every day you got to work towards this goal and perfect, perfect it, perfect it, perfect it, improve, improve, improve, and then success will happen.

It's the persistence and the discipline that can help achieve great long term goals. Not getting excited about it and quitting quickly. So if you're in your entrepreneurship journey and a lot of people are nagging you, this thing is not working. What are you doing? Do something else, get a job, [00:04:00] then, you know, marshmallow test.

They're wrong because the long term is where success happens.

