So here I am, waiting for some news from a client on what will happen with a project I’ve been pitching. They haven’t given me an answer, not a yes or a no. It gets to be really annoying doesn’t it? Waiting, expecting, imagining a bunch of “what ifs”. These “what ifs” feed our wild imagination that goes to places we wouldn’t have thought even existed in our minds. They build their own worlds with wonderful scaffolding that grows upwards in the most beautiful dreams, and that digs down dip into the most awful nightmares. Because we imagine great futures with this result as a starting point, don’t we? Nah, I’m sure you’ve never done it, am I right? But dreaming is not the problem here. The problem is when our next decisions come with the dream as a starting point. Because you know, “what if”. So we need now to be patient. We must take a page from meditation and learn to bring the focus to where we want it when our mind strays. Curiously this also happens to have something to do with procrastination. because one of the characteristics of a certain type of procrastinator is his inability to delay gratification. This procrastinator is impatient. He wants it all and he wants it now as the song says. His limbic system wins the battle over his prefrontal cortex and then he loses all control over his impulses. Whatever brings the most immediate pleasure is what gets done, what is important gets shoved to the later drawer.
This is the basis of the famous marshmallow experiment conducted at Stanford some 40 years ago by Walter Mischel. If you don’t know it I’ll give you the basics here. In this experiment the investigators tested the ability to wait of children of both sexes aged 7 to 9. What the kids had to wait for was, as the name may be implied already, eating a marshmallow. More precisely the experimenter left the kid in a room with a marshmallow and then told the kid that he or she could eat it immediately, but if they waited for him to come back a few minutes later he’d give them another marshmallow, so they could eat in fact two. The experimenter left the room and filmed the results. This is pretty much it. Then there’s the follow up studies, after many years follow up interviews were done with these kids, and the results were that those kids that showed more restraint, more patience, were the ones with better grades, were better adapted and more mature. Does that mean that we are screwed if we’re impatient? No, patience is an ability we can develop, like many others, the funny thing is that it requires dedication, and that means, yes, some patience, so it’s a little of a catch-22, but not that much. You can exercise patience by giving yourself a buffer time before making a choice or taking some action, like 5 minutes before pushing that “buy now” button on the web site, or sleeping on it when you have a big decision to take. I like to meditate. What do you like?