A short talk by Rich Bello discussing the classic "marshmallow test" (children offered one marshmallow now or two if they wait 15 minutes). The speaker highlights that children who delayed gratification later showed substantially better life outcomes (e.g., ~211 points higher SAT on average) and uses the study to argue for the importance of self-discipline and distraction strategies.
Questions this video answers
15 minutes.
One marshmallow now, or two marshmallows if the child waited 15 minutes.
211 points (on average).
Chapters
So here's a great, a great little study, kind of a cute little study where this, the proctor came in, had these little kids come in, hundreds of kids actually. This is a big study. Some of you may have seen it. Proctor comes in and they bring a marshmallow to these little kids. They give the little kid a marshmallow and say, you know what? If you cannot eat this marshmallow for 15 minutes, you get two marshmallows in 15 minutes, right? You'll get two. If you could just not eat the marshmallow for 15 minutes, right? So let's see, let's see how this, let's see how this plays out. Okay? So I'm gonna go, and you can eat the marshmallow now, but you won't get another marshmallow. So she's telling the little kid if you don't. She's telling what I just said, if you don't eat this marshmallow for 15 minutes, you'll get two. Kid's like, trying not to eat it. Trying not to eat it. He's distracting himself. The key is he's distracting himself. Watch that. He's like, what can I do to not eat marshmallow? Didn't do it. Quite didn't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. Hitting the marshmallow, doing everything but eating the marshmallow. Still didn't do it. So this young gentleman earned himself two marshmallows. He did not eat the marshmallow. Now, the funny thing about this study is that it wasn't really done to understand long term fulfillment. What it was done was how do people distract themselves from a desire? What is it? And they figured out they just come up with all kinds of different ways to distract. You saw how the kid distracted himself all different ways, hid himself from it, licked it, all kinds of different things. But the interesting thing was one of the parents of the study looked back, he noticed the kids were in his son's class and noticed some of the kids that were able to pass the test. A lot of kids weren't able to. The kids that were able to pass the test and delay gratification, those kids were more successful by far than the kids that ate the marshmallow. So it basically shows that. And by far statistics were those who could delay gratification, they were happier by far. By all measures, they had higher SAT scores by 211 points, by the way, on average, went to better college. The list is, it's a long list. Those who couldn't delay gratification increased drug use, jail time, gambling. Bad stuff, Right? Bad kids. Right. Just because they didn't. Just because they could not eat a marshmallow. That's why this happened, so they didn't have discipline. Right. This just goes to show the power of discipline, the importance of discipline.
