I want it all and I want it Now!

There was a time, albeit I admit, quite a long time ago, when most people made a living by living off the land. Almost everybody was farmers or hunters. Back then humans knew to wait patiently for the right time to plough, to sow and to get the harvest in.

Even the days felt longer, especially as a child when there was nothing to do on a Sunday. No shops were open. No sports played. Some people literally just went to church and then quietly sat still the rest of the day. Today, we can’t imagine sitting still for so many hours.

And imagine all that waiting? Fortunately, we have fast food restaurants, ATM’s, Drive Through’s. Actually, you don’t even have to get out of your house, just order your favourite food and they will deliver it straight to your front door.

No waiting. No delays. Everything is getting easier, faster and more convenient for all of us. We don’t even have to press buttons anymore, just touch a screen or better yet, use voice commands.
This is all good stuff, right? Not quite. We are actually missing out on some of life’s best lessons on the road to success by all this instant gratification.

In this modern world, people are not used to living with discomfort. We expect results and gratification, right now! We want answers faster than they can be delivered. Just imagine how the internet has supercharged this impatience! People no longer know how to wait, or what waiting even means. It’s nice to have what you want when you want it, but the ability to delay gratification is extremely important.

The problem goes beyond the discomfort of having to wait. So many of us don’t know how to live with things the way they are and how to live in the situation as it is. The key to patience is knowing that everything will be fine and develop the faith that there is a plan. It is easy to forget this, and therefore many people try and control situations and want things to work out according to their own timing.

You will not be given any life experience before you are ready. When you find trust and develop the understanding that things are moving the way they’re supposed to and in their own time, then you can relax. The mind wants to believe that changing our circumstances will bring us peace. The mind thinks we’ve got to do something. But the reality is that we can relax in the circumstances as they are now, knowing that patience will bring deep peace and healing.

M Scott Peck wrote that “Life is difficult” in his famous book, The Road Less Travelled. Once we break the illusion that life should be easy, we can begin accepting that life is difficult. It is only once we have accepted this truth that we can begin to transcend it. Later in his book, Peck contradicts himself by exploring how delayed gratification can make life easier.

This reveals a certain irony about delayed gratification in that if we do what is easy, our lives will be difficult. And if we do what is difficult, our lives will be easy. Delayed gratification is one of the most effective personal traits of successful people. People that delay gratification are more successful with their careers, relationships, health, finances and really all areas of life.

Delayed gratification is the ability to resist the temptation for an immediate reward and wait for a later reward. Generally, delayed gratification is associated with resisting a smaller but more immediate reward in order to receive a larger or more enduring reward later. A growing body of literature has linked the ability to delay gratification to positive outcomes, including academic success, physical health, psychological health, and social competence. A person’s ability to delay gratification relates to other similar skills such as patience, impulse control, self-control and willpower, all of which are involved in self-regulation. Broadly, self-regulation encompasses a person’s capacity to adapt the self as necessary to meet demands of the environment.

With impatience and the demand to have everything now, also comes low frustration tolerance. This refers to the error of assuming that when something’s difficult to tolerate, it’s ‘intolerable’. This thinking error means magnifying discomfort. It also means not tolerating temporary discomfort when it’s in your interest to do so for longer-term benefit.
Low frustration tolerance (LFT) is an unwillingness to tolerate short-term pain for long-term gain. An LFT attitude is present in statements such as ‘It’s too difficult to change – this is just the way I am’ and ‘I may as well just give up’. Frustration occurs most often when something or someone gets in the way of you achieving your specific goals and aims. The more important your goal is to you, the angrier or more annoyed you’re likely to feel when something blocks your attempts to reach that goal.

People who frequently experience unhealthy anger tend to have a low tolerance for frustration. High frustration tolerance (HFT) means increasing your tolerance for frustration to help you experience appropriate levels of healthy annoyance in response to goal obstruction. This makes you more effective at solving problems, so your anger doesn’t get in the way of you seeing possible solutions to everyday hassles and setbacks. High frustration tolerance is present in statements such as: ‘This is an uncomfortable situation, but I can stand the discomfort!’ ‘This event is hard to bear but I can bear it – some difficult things are worth tolerating.’ ‘Even if I feel like I can’t take it anymore, chances are that I can.’

Healthy, robust and successful people are often able to tolerate temporary discomfort in the pursuit of longer-term goals. They practise self-denial and delay gratification when doing so is in their long-term interests. These people are the ones, who are able to eat healthily, exercise regularly, save money, be romantically faithful, study effectively, and so on. You can experience intense pleasure in the present and the future, but often some degree of pain and effort today are necessary to win you greater pleasure tomorrow. This will be true for many of the achievements you’ve already made in life.

Healthy and productive people tend to be prepared to tolerate a degree of risk and uncertainty. Demanding certainty and guarantees in an uncertain world is a sure-fire recipe for worry and inactivity. Safety (or more accurately, the illusion of complete safety) comes at a cost – fewer rewards, less excitement, fewer new experiences.

The fact that you don’t know what the future holds is grounds for calculated risks and experiments, not avoidance, reassurance-seeking or safety precautions. You can make educated decisions and take calculated risks, but if you accept that 100 per cent certainty is exceptionally rare (and, in fact, unnecessary), you can reduce undue anxiety and worry. Risk is inherent to existence. You live in an uncertain world every single day of your life – Embrace it!