One of the key skills successful people have that others don’t is the ability to delay gratification. Training yourself to resist immediate rewards and to wait for larger more compelling ones can make a huge difference to your life. It can help you make more informed decisions and excel in your personal and professional pursuits.

But it wasn’t until the 1970s that the long terms benefits of this skill were put to the test in the famous Marshmallow Experiment. Stanford University psychologist; Walter Mischel, placed a plate of marshmallows (or cookies in some cases) in front of a class of first graders and told them: they can either have a marshmallow now, or wait until Mischel came back from an errand, and then they can be rewarded with two. The majority of students decided not to wait and went for their marshmallow. However, the few who resisted the temptation received two marshmallows for delaying gratification.

Mischel followed the latter group well into their adolescence and he claims to have gathered important and surprising results. He found that those who were able to delay their gratification were much more likely to receive higher SAT scores, have better social skills, were less likely to abuse drugs or alcohol, and they fared much better in many social and professional measures of success.

Since its publication, the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment continues to be the most widely cited “proof” of the long-term effects of having a strong ability to delay gratification. However, despite the popularity of this study, I nevertheless find it misleading. In what follows I am going to present a few challenges to the study, and at the end I’m going to provide an alternative view on delaying gratification.

1. One Marshmallow And You’re Out…for Good.

While delaying gratification and having self-control is one of the many indicators of success, resisting the temptation to eat a marshmallow at 5 years old is by no means sufficient to make such a prediction. In fact, upon learning about the experiment, one is bound to form the impression that delaying gratification is an innate ability; that some people are born with the “stuff” that makes them successful and so are able, at 5 years of age, to choose to wait. Others, however, made the mistake of choosing the wrong parents (hehe) and as such weren’t born with any special equipment, and for this very reason, they dove in and ate the marshmallow.

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But given everything we know about skills, it doesn’t seem right to believe that skills are something you are born with. In fact, I think delayed gratification is a skill in the same way playing the piano well is a skill. We get better at both by doing. And a critical part of improving your self-control rests on the degree to which you choose to practice that skill. It also rests on how well you recover from making mistakes. You’ll find that on some occasions you have exerted yourself too much and went overboard and on others you did too little and missed, but eventually you will hit the mark, and the more you practice, the more you will hit the mark more consistently. In this sense, delayed gratification is a skill that needs attention over one’s lifetime. It’s not a lottery ticket where you need a few lucky strikes to make it. The marshmallow experiment, unfortunately, seems more like a lottery ticket.

2. Marshmallow V. Non-Marshmallow Contexts

We also need to take into account that some people are really good at delaying gratification in some areas but not others. You may be better at delaying gratification when it comes to cookies, but not as good when it comes to watching TV instead of doing work. In fact, transferring the skill of delayed gratification from one context to another isn’t quite so direct. Each context comes with its own set of challenges and cravings. So consider delayed gratification when it comes to food as one muscle and when it comes to doing your work as another muscle, and just as there are strong and weak muscles in the body, so is the case with the different muscles of delayed gratification. Being strong in one area doesn’t mean you’re going to necessarily be strong in another. For example, Stephen King; one of the most prolific novel writers in the world is able to write for hours on end, but when it came to drugs and alcohol (a long time ago), he couldn’t delay gratification.

Based on the above, we obviously can’t generalize from the marshmallow context to other performance-oriented contexts and assess on that basis alone how good or bad someone’s life is going to turn out. So what the one-time Marshmallow test indicates, in my opinion, is that some students were better than others at delaying the immediate gratification of having a marshmallow, and that’s it. That’s as far as any researcher can go with this evidence.

On a side note, imagine what it would be like to use this test in our school system and categorize students based on whether they decided to have a cookie now or wait to receive two later. Are we going to treat the cookie masters differently than the cookie monsters? According to the study, it seems like we should. Given our limited resources, it would make more sense from a resource optimization standpoint to focus on those that have that special “stuff” in them to become successful. On the other hand, the cookie monsters wouldn’t receive that attention. According to the study, it would be a waste of time anyway. The cookie monsters will just have to accept that they won’t score high enough on their SATs or get in a top tier academic institution upon graduating. They should also accept that they’re more likely to suffer from procrastination and laziness and, by implication, earn less money than the other students who delayed eating the cookie.

But that’s just absurd.

Eating a marshmallow or a cookie or a muffin when you’re 5 years old has nothing to do with how well you do in your life.

• So why has this experiment become widely popular, and why do many believe in it?

This experiment works for a number of reasons:

1. Stanford is a highly recognized and respected brand name. It’s a label that carries a lot of power and authority, and so it’s likely that a lot of folks just accepted that whatever comes out of Stanford must be error proof.
2. It’s a peer-reviewed “scientific research” and it has been stamped by the academic super starts as having legitimate scientific value. Again, many people automatically assumed that it must be sound.

Finally, please recognize that to have more self-control and make more strategic decisions, you must consciously invest in developing that skill. If you fail once, it’s not the end of the world. Recognize that failing is an inevitable part of the process and becoming better at something requires you to be flexible with yourself. Good luck.