Ryan Daniel Moran discusses the importance of delayed gratification (the ‘marshmallow test’) and long-term planning as key drivers of personal and business success. He uses childhood anecdotes (saving arcade money and NES tokens), cites exponential returns from reinvestment and time investments, and stresses clarity of goals, doubling down on strengths, and building aligned teams/customers via clear direction at Capitalism.com.
Nick Bonesteel asks, what personality traits have been key to your success? You may have heard me talk about. There was actually a study done in children that evaluated if they could find predictable personality traits that would determine success. You might have heard this called the marshmallow test. You give a kid a marshmallow, you see if they eat the marshmallow or if they hold on to the marshmallow when given an incentive to do so. And what this test supposedly showed was that the ability to delay gratification was the greatest predictor of success in children. The children who came back with the marshmallow and said, I'll have my second marshmallow, please, were the individuals who grew up to be more successful than the rest of the group. So being able to delay gratification and do the hard stuff now, even when you don't want to do it, is a personality trait of mine that I think has made me successful even as a kid. I remember, oh, this is embarrassing to admit on camera, but I remember being at a Pizza Hut when I was 6 or 7 years old. This is when people went to pizza shops and ate inside. It was a crazy, archaic time in our history. And we went into Pizza Hut, and there was an arcade game at this Pizza Hut. And my dad gave me fish. And he said, you want to play the arcade game? And he gave me the 50 cents, and I immediately started weeping. And I was asked, why are you crying? And I said, I want to save it.
Even as a kid, I wanted to save my 50 cents and not play the video games.
When I was at home, my mom was afraid that my brother and I were going to play too many video games. When we got a Nintendo nes, it was a breakthrough at the time. And my dad had this idea of he would make tokens and he'd give them to us, and we'd spent. Each token was worth half an hour and half an hour we'd get to play video games. And when we spent the tokens at the end of the week, then he'd give it back to us and we would use them again. I wouldn't spend the tokens. I would save them. And my dad had to go make more tokens because I started hoarding all of the tokens in the house to save for later. There's something in my wiring that says delayed gratification brings a better tomorrow. Sacrificing today is good for tomorrow because of that. That is the reason why I've been able to build businesses, because I'm okay not taking money off the table. I'm okay reinvesting for the next thing. I'm okay learning the thing that's painful to learn because I know it will give me a better payday. Now today I'm more in a mode of I want to enjoy today. I want to do what I enjoy. I want to enjoy my life. Now I But I always plan for the long term. This is a trait and Gary Vaynerchuk has been talking about this a lot on his videos and I could not agree more. The idea of the person who can plan for the longest term usually is the most successful because there are exponential returns to investments, not just investments in the stock market or real estate. I mean investments in your time, investments in your education. There are exponential effects. So you're getting.01%, then 2, then 4, then 8, 16. And then it starts to take off. So if you take money off the table when you're here, you're never going to hit that exponential uptick. It's that exponential return that is what creates the standout overnight successes that have been at this for 10 years. So the ability to delay gratification and therefore playing for the very long term for were probably the pieces that have made me the most successful. Most recently me doubling down on my strengths, being able to forgive my flaws, be cool with my flaws and focus on the activities and the habits that make me happy and that I actually enjoy are the things that have really been able to give me that exponential uptick and is why some people look at me now and say, you came out of nowhere. That came from me doubling down on where I'm strong and forget trying to do things that I hate and do things that I'm not good at and allow me to be in that mode where I am my best, where I derive the most value and allowing other people to do the same and going in a very specific direction together. And that's the final piece. This isn't so much of a personality trait as much as it is a habit that I have had to learn. And that is incrementally getting clearer and clearer about where we are going, what we are building and why we are doing it. The more I get abundantly clear about our goals and expectations, the more the right people get in line to be able to build that. And then there's better people, there's better customers. Those of you who are watching know that the clearer that we are about where we're going and why we do this, the more likely you are to watch the next video or download the next podcast. Download them all, by the way. And that is why people start to have really started to rally around what we're doing@capitalism.com as we get clearer and clear about what we are doing and why we're here. So the clearer you can be and the longer term you can plan, the more successful I believe that you will be.
