Do you remember at some point hearing a story about the famed Marshmallow test?  Put a kid in a room with a marshmallow in the table in front of him.  Tell him he can eat it now, but if he waits until [the researcher] gets back, he will get two marshmallows.

One now, two if I exercise self control and wait.  Probably not the terms the child would use to describe the options, but it’s a nice, quippy summary.

Years later they track down the kids and those who had the self control and earned the second marshmallow are now more successful by considerable amounts than those who didn’t wait.

I have thought about this experiment in a number of ways over the years.

For one, it is a very interesting experiment on how this trait of self-control, and self-denial in a sense, impacts later life.

But it makes me wonder, should we be doing this test with our kids and those who don’t wait, we might as well write them off because there is no help for them anyway.  Those who “pass” the test, well, they are going to be a-okay anyway, so little intervention is needed in their life.

I doubt the researches came to that conclusion, but it makes me wonder, what is the point of such research?  What do we do with that knowledge?  Does it breed a fatalistic mentality that, since the child either does or does not possess a certain trait innately, what we do as parents matters little.

I wonder if the long term outcome could be altered.  If the experiment were repeated, and those kids who ate right away, if parents and teachers then took extra time and effort to help instill self-control and delayed gratification, if the success gap between the two groups might close.

I’ll readily admit, I enjoy reading the latest studies on human behavior, in particular on how that relates to business and achievement.  But academic studies, without a plan to respond to the findings, is rather pointless.  The findings should then inform an action plan to improve people’s lives and potentially their future outcomes.