Monday Morning Motivation – Gratification
(Sharing Resources to Help You Grow Personally, Professionally & Financially)
Sometimes it helps to get a little dose of encouragement — along with a good cup of coffee! — to start the day.
Hopefully the message below will help you get off to a good start for the week. Please feel free to forward the newsletter on to others that you think would benefit from the content.
Gratification
For the next couple of months, I am going to draw motivation for my Monday Morning Motivation from Steven Pressfield’s “The War of Art.” You can find a summary of this awesome book here. This book is one of my all-time favorites as it takes on the topic of “resistance,” which you might think of as that strange force that makes it difficult to accomplish things in life. Pressfield does an awesome job of describing what resistance is, discussing how to overcome it, and framing it in the context of a larger power.
Confession time – today IS a bait and switch on the topic. I am NOT going to write about gratification. Rather, I am going to write about DELAYED gratification.
The topic of delayed gratification has been widely studied. The most famous is the “marshmallow” experiment from the late 60’s/early 70’s. In this experiment, kids were given the option of eating a single marshmallow immediately or two marshmallows if they waited for a short (approximately 15 minute) time. They then tracked the kids over time – 40 year’s time! Compared to the kids who hadn’t waited, the kids who had chosen to wait for that second marshmallow were doing better in just about every dimension of life.
We are going to face challenges where there are easy paths available. However, it is very often – if not always – the case where the immediate satisfaction we receive from the easy path is dwarfed by the reward that awaits us if we are able to wait and endure. Waiting is NOT easy. But it is often worth it.
That brings us to this week’s question:
- Are you willing to delay gratification to receive the blessings that are likely to come by doing so?
Thanks for sharing a bit of your time with me this Monday morning and I wish you all the best for the week.
Curt
(Note: Each week I publish “Monday Morning Motivation” in the hopes that at least one person will find a bit of inspiration and that inspiration will have a positive impact on their life. My motivation comes from experiences, reading, sermons, and discussions.)
Blog post from this past week:
At F5 Financial Planning we focus on helping individuals and families find balance between faith, friends and family, fitness and finance. We make sure that they have the financial freedom to enjoy those things in life that are important to them. And while we believe the left-brain facts and data are critical; we work with our clients to get them in the right state of mind to focus on the goals they want to achieve.
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