A post about delayed gratification.

I wanted to write a post about delayed gratification. I think, as an overarching concept, delayed gratification is incredibly strong, and I wondered– how do you flex your delayed gratification muscle.

You see, habits are built by repetition, but repetition is often reinforced by positive emotions.

How do you build the habit of liking pain?

Working out produces endorphins, you feel better when you work out, and it gets easier and easier to get back into the gym.

How does that work with compound interest? With writing a blog (lol)? There is no immediate external gratification. It doesn’t always feel good to write these things. Sometimes it feels like fucking agony (now). There’s only a huge potential upside after the passing of time that these posts mean something to me or others.

What would you do if you had to teach somebody delayed gratification from scratch? Would you use shorter time cycles? A day? A week? A month? What’s the shortest timeframe where you can associate a good feeling with doing something slightly painful?

How do you impress upon someone the fact that doing the shitty thing now is almost always better than waiting to do it later?

Again, another idea that takes so many forms. Swallow the frog, rip off the bandaid. It appears so many times. These ideas are ubiquitous in human experience, we have phrases dedicated only to that idea!

I wonder what a delayed gratification ‘workout’ regimen would look like. Certainly some type of actual physical workout. Writing? Depositing money in your savings account?