Mark Manson

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What if most of what you consider your personality is actually just coping strategies that you forgot about?

Like you think you're out there being authentic and sharing yourself with the world, but it turns out you're just sharing your survival strategies from childhood.

So I want to start off this chapter by talking about

maybe the most famous psychological study i i don't like if it's not the most famous it's top five for sure it's known popularly as the marshmallow test right so walter michel was a professor at stanford he brought in a few dozen preschool kids into a room placed a marshmallow on the table and told them that if they could wait 20 minutes they would get a second marshmallow for free

He then tracked how long the kids waited and if they could wait the full amount of time.

Now, follow-up check-ins with those children found that, in general, the children that waited the longest tended to have the best outcomes when they became adults.

So they scored the highest on the SAT, they had the best grades, they had the most confidence, they had the best relationships, so on and so forth.

Now, the reason this study gets broadcast so much is because it's simple to understand and it's a very neatly packaged conclusion, which is that

Delayed gratification in many ways is the key to life.

If you can just learn how to delay gratification, then you'll have better outcomes at work and your relationships and so on and so forth.

Now, what's fascinating, what never gets talked about is the fact that Walter Mischel, the lead researcher on this study, did not believe that conclusion himself.

because it turns out he had been running variations of the marshmallow test in a variety of different places for many, many years, and the outcomes were not at all consistent with what happened at Stanford.

For example, one of the first times he ran it, he was in Trinidad and Tobago, and he brought children into a room, offered them candy, and promised them the double amount of candy if they could wait for a certain amount of time.

And what was interesting in Trinidad

is that the one variable that correlated the most with the children who could wait versus the ones that couldn't was the children who had fathers in the home.