How to Reach Your Goals Without Delaying Gratification
Tactics to enjoy the journey while chasing the destination.
Delaying gratification to reach a future success is unnatural. It goes against your very nature as a human. To be happy in the now and make it big, you should approach your goals differently.
Consider playgrounds for a moment. They are a great model of fun work that leads to long term results. Children enjoy their time while building strength, mental knowledge and social interactions crucial to their adult lives.
As we grow, we seem to lose this harmony of loving the process while working to reach our goals. As if we must sacrifice one to have the other. As a result, many self-help resources preach the “you must delay gratification” mantra. But do you really need to defer joy and having fun to produce extraordinary results? Is it not possible to enjoy the moment while designing your future?
To make every workday — at least most days — feel like time spent on the playground, consider this alternative approach.
Why Delayed Gratification Is Not a Suitable Strategy
For millennia, humans lived from moment to moment. We had to continually think about how to get food, avoid predators, and find shelter. While our world is very different from our ancestors, experts showed that our brains didn’t change much compared to early humans. We still love and seek immediately rewarding actions. Eating sweets, gossiping, and hearing stories are all integral parts of who we are.
By delaying instant gratification, you wage a losing battle between your homo-sapiens instincts and your modern aspirations. Today, you do most of what you do not get immediate gratification but rather achieve something or be someone later on. Building a successful startup, investing money, or training to be fit have no seemingly instant rewards.
This contrast between modern success habits and deeply-rooted tendencies begs the question: “is it possible to make long term oriented work immediately satisfying?” James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, answers this question best. He says:
“What is immediately rewarded is often repeated.”
What he means is this: if a habit gives you a dopamine hit, you’re more likely to do it again and again. Otherwise, you’ll have no reasons to keep doing what you’re doing.
While indulging in sweets or checking social media is not beneficial, a feeling of joy right after important work can be crucial in keeping you excited. At the same time, the long term rewards pile up in the background.
Instead of delaying gratification, a better strategy is to add a bit of fun and excitement to your work while slowly moving forward. This way, you won’t need to delay anything. Your brain will process hard work as if it’s eating ice cream. Here are three tactics to make difficult and critical tasks more fun to do.
Tip #1 — Stack Your Habits
Do something you genuinely enjoy right after finishing important work. For example, if you want to stay fit but dread intense cardio workouts, watch an episode of your favourite show right after exercising.
Habit 1: 30 minutes of cardio.Immediately afterHabit 2: one episode of a favourite show.
A study published in the Journal of Neuroscience reveals why habit stacking works so well. The researchers explain that the human brain mostly remembers the ending of experiences.
In the context of habit stacking, the end is the hobby, while hard work is the start and middle of the event. Despite going through an uncomfortable experience, a happy ending is sometimes all it takes to keep a pleasant memory of the whole event. And the more positive feelings you get from experiences as a whole, the stronger cravings you’ll develop for subsequent sessions. The key point is this:
Do something you truly enjoy right after a challenging task. Your brain will associate work with a happy ending. As a result, it will eagerly anticipate the next work session.
Tip #2 — Feel the Joy of Small Wins
What’s a common personality trait between Jerry Seinfeld, Benjamin Franklin, and Charlie Munger? They all make daily progress clearly visible.
According to a study by the American Psychological Association, progress is the best motivator. Instead of tracking your progress weekly or monthly, it is crucial to make it obvious several times a day. Sometimes all you need to keep the pace is tick an item off your to-do list, win a new subscriber to your newsletter, or see the progress bar jump ten percents forward. Such micro-progress adjustments can make you feel victorious, even in a small way. As Confucius once reflected:
“The person who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.”
Many productivity tools that track hourly progress are at your disposal to experience small victories' uplifting power. Trello, for instance, has an excellent checklist feature with a progress bar. Every time you tick a task as done, the progress bar jumps higher toward the hundred per cent mark. This makes you eager to tick the next items on your list.
Be Focused is another wonderful productivity tool. It helps you keep track of how many Pomodoro sessions (work for twenty-five minutes, then take a break for five minutes) you do on a given day. This motivates you always to reach or exceed the previous Pomodoro tally. The key point is this:
Make the smallest of progress clearly visible. This way, you’ll fall in love with the process while moving closer to your desired outcome.
Tip #3 — Chase Flow States
Remember the last time you were fully immersed in your task, your favourite music playing in the background, and time flies without notice? That’s a flow state. When you’re in flow, your progress is frictionless. You are so involved in your task that nothing else seems to matter.
An extensive study published in the Journal of Happiness Studies reveals that people experience intense happiness and enthusiasm when they enter flow. Moreover, the researchers spotted a marked correlation between the yearly cumulative effects of flow states and life overall satisfaction scores. The science is clear:
Not only do they give you instant gratification while you work, but flow states also contribute significantly to your overall happiness in life.
To ease yourself in flow states more often while at work, here are a few tips:
- Listen to the same music on loop. Study music is an excellent choice, as songs with lyrics tend to be distracting.
- Break your project into a series of tasks that are neither very hard nor super easy to do. That’s because difficult work makes you anxious, while an easy job gets you bored: both emotions kill flow states.
- Work in a distraction-free environment. Interruptions and loud noise make flow states hard to reach.
- Use a height-adjustable desk to alternate between sitting and standing. Prolonged sitting may cause lower back pain which is yet another distraction from getting into flow states.
Final Thoughts
Jackie Chan’s gripping autobiography, Never Grow Up, is the ultimate symbol of a person who is always in love with their daily work as they built a fabulous career.
Instead of delaying gratification for the sake of reaching your goals, you can use the right tactics to bring immediate joy and enthusiasm to your daily work. Just by making hourly progress clearly visible, doing something fun right after a challenging task, and regularly getting into flow states, you can turn dull workdays into an exciting journey toward a great destination.
