It's time for another installment of Linus' Irregular Series on Interesting Articles. The article discusses some research that found that those who can manage to forego instant gratification have a much higher rate of success in life by various standards. They placed 4-year-olds in a room by themselves and told them if they don't eat the marshmallow for 15 minutes, afterwards they could have 2 marshmallows. 100% of the children who managed to hold out the 15 minutes became successful high-school students, but 80% of the ones who didn't wait the 15 minutes to eat it were having school problems. The study was performed on several hundred kids in America, Colombia, and Korea, with similar results. Here's a reader's digest overview video of the actual article, to pique your interest:The guy in the video had nothing to do with the study -- he's just some motivational speaker AFAICT, who somewhat sensationalized the research. Here's the full article in the New Yorker, which fleshes out the details. The results are a culmination of several decades of accidental research. Accidental in the sense that the researchers didn't intend to study the long term success of people.
Let me know if you read the full article, and I'll mail you a marshmallow.
