The Marshmallow Test & Why You Like to Sabotage Yourself

One thing I’ve noticed that consistently separates ok and good performers from top performers is their ability to sabotage themselves by choosing an easier decision today that leads to worse results in the future. Now of course no one goes around purposefully setting themselves up for failure, so the issue here is that many people are not aware of the tradeoff they are making in the first place.

We are genetically wired to prefer short term payoff over long term payoff. This shows up in our lives from the way we manage our finances to the ways we communicate. In general your brain will tend to prefer eating that piece of chocolate now versus saving it for later.

Now how did this preference come around in the first place? No one is certain but it’s possible that this conferred enough of an evolutionary advantage to show up in all humans born today. It’s possible that there were enough dangers in daily life that choices like eating more today resulted in a better survival chance.

But now that we live in temperature controlled homes and go hunt at the grocery store, fewer and fewer decisions benefit from optimizing for the short term. For example when choosing between spending money now versus investing it so you can spend more later, most would agree that investing is the more prudent decision. However when it comes to actual behavior, many would choose the former.

There have been many experiments done on this subject, the most famous of which is the “Stanford marshmallow experiment” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experiment). There has been evidence linking the ability to delay gratification (long term optimization) with higher levels of success later on in life.

So now that we’re aware of this tendency, how does it actually show up in our lives and produce effects like lower performance? Let’s look at an example.

Let’s say your boss gave you an important task to work on, and you’ve been diligently making progress on it, but then you run into a small issue. You’re not sure how to best resolve the issue but you think that you can figure it out so you keep trying. Minutes turn into hours, and hours turn into days. Eventually you miss your deadline and have to explain what happened and no one is happy with how you dealt with the situation or your performance.

So let’s break down what happened. When the issue first came up, you tried to solve it yourself, which is generally a good idea. However when the issue continued to persist you did not escalate the issue or communicate to mitigate the impact of the problem. This may seem obvious to you right now but when you’re in the moment there’s no distinct transition period where a problem goes from “I think I can solve it if I keep trying” to “I’ve been working on this for too long and need to communicate” and so you will tend to default to the easier thing to do, which is not communicate. Communicating problems is scary and our fear of rejection and loss of social safety (another evolutionary trait that served us well but no longer confers the same value) tends to prevent us from telling someone something they don’t want to hear.

You’ve probably seen this scenario play out in many parts of life, from spouses who both know there’s a problem but don’t want to talk about it, to employees too afraid to speak up to their bosses despite knowing there’s deep systemic issues in their teams. The commonality between all these scenarios is that people are choosing to stay in the comfort of the status quo and put off the issue as long as they can.

Putting things off is not inherently a bad thing, in fact there are many benefits to procrastination, but the problem is that people tend to delay on the wrong things.

Imagine a rocket ship heading from earth to a distance planet. If there is an issue with the direction that the rocket is heading, you would need to spend fuel to correct the course. If the problem is detected early, even very small changes in direction can result in wildly different destinations, whereas if the problem is detected very late, you may not have the fuel remaining to change the direction enough to make it to your destination. This shows the power of “time leverage” in certain problems, where early changes can have orders of magnitude higher impact on the result than later changes. Now of course not every problem in life is subject to time leverage, but in our increasingly complex world more and more issues we deal with start to exhibit this behavior.

Let’s take a look at another example. Let’s say you’re a software developer working on a 3 month project. After working on it for one month you notice that the quality of tests in the system is very poor and would result in bugs being able to go undetected in the system. You decide that fixing the problem would delay you by one week and so you decide to deal with it later. At the end of 3 months you are code complete and hand over the project with a grin on your face. Now the team tries to integrate it into the wider codebase and finds that certain things are breaking. Now you and the team must spend another month fixing integration issues. Here we see that you chose what felt good in the moment (continuing to make progress and meeting the timeline) over what would have been best in the long run (spending the time to fix issues before they spread throughout the system). The reason the fix took longer at the end than at the beginning is because we are assuming there is time leverage at play. Maybe you made a design pattern decision that is not easy to rip out and replace, maybe the tools you chose had limitations that you chose to ignore but are actually deal breakers, the point is that it is a problem where solving the problem early prevents orders of magnitude more problems from appearing in the first place.

Now what are some ways around this problem? Many times this kind of short term thinking comes into play when we are dealing with problems that “are not our own”. These are the types of problems where we don’t benefit or suffer much from the consequences of what we do. Going again with a software example, let’s say you are hired to do work for the government. They want a website that lets people register their vehicles online. You are paid to deliver a solution that people must use and are paid based on completion. You have no incentive to create an experience that is pleasant or write code that is maintainable, and so you optimize for fast completion time so you can get paid. This is of course another example of short term optimization but it’s very obvious in this case why you didn’t care about the long term. You have no real stake in whether the product does well or not, beyond basic functionality. The remedy for this kind of thinking is “ownership”. When we say ownership we mean taking responsibility for the success and failure, as if it’s something you own and have to deal with the consequences of. This kind of thinking will empower you to put yourself in future you’s shoes and take a long term view rather than just a short term one.

Another important aspect of dealing with short term thinking is to recognize that it is happening in the first place. There are two main ways of doing this. You can either build habits that bring this to your attention and create the mindfulness that allows you to notice it in the moment, or you can create processes that force you to confront this issue so that your default mode is not just doing what feels easiest.

There are already a lot of resources out there for habit building and mindfulness so we won’t go into these in depth, but awareness is half the battle. If you can’t recognize that the problem exists your brain won’t even try to solve it.

As for creating processes for yourself, this will likely give you faster results, but also require greater discipline to follow. For example if you know that you are bad at deciding when to escalate issues, set a deadline for yourself. Use a calendar or a checklist and tell yourself that “If I don’t resolve X by Y date, I will do Z”. This allows you to time box your problem and by creating a specific condition for yourself you won’t have to constantly battle yourself to make that decision anymore, because you will have preemptively made that decision already.

We’ve oversimplified the problem a bit here but just being aware of the problem can be very powerful. Of course ideas without action are just fantasies, so I do encourage you to take action today, no matter how small, if you believe this is something that would improve your life.