Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  

Author:   Walter Mischel

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Psychology, Self-Improvement

336 pages, published September 23, 2014

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

A child is presented with a marshmallow and given a choice:  eat this one now, or wait and enjoy two later.  What will she do?  And what are the implications for her behavior later in life?  Walter Mischel, the world’s leading expert on self-control, has proven that the ability to delay gratification is critical for a successful life, predicting higher SAT scores, better social and cognitive functioning, a healthier lifestyle and a greater sense of self-worth. But is willpower prewired, or can it be taught?  Mischel explains how self-control can be mastered and applied to challenges in everyday life—from weight control to quitting smoking, overcoming heartbreak, making major decisions, and planning for retirement.  

Quotes

“What we do, and how well we control our attention in the service of our goals, becomes part of the environment that we help create and that in turn influences us. This mutual influence shapes who and what we become, from our physical and mental health to the quality and length of our life.”

 

“Self-control is crucial for the successful pursuit of long-term goals. It is equally essential for developing the self-restraint and empathy needed to build caring and mutually supportive relationships.”

 

“This is encouraging evidence of the power of the environment to influence characteristics like intelligence. Even if traits like intelligence have large genetic determinants, they are still substantially malleable.”

 

“Frances Champagne, a leader in research on how environments influence gene expression, is convinced that it is time to drop the nature versus nurture debate about which is more important and ask instead, What do genes actually do? What is the environment doing that changes what the genes do?”

 

“most predispositions are prewired to some degree, but they are also flexible, with plasticity and potential for change. Identifying the conditions and mechanisms that enable the change is the challenge.”

 

“the ability to delay immediate gratification for the sake of future consequences is an acquirable cognitive skill.”

 

“James Watson summarizes the conclusion: “A predisposition does not a predetermination make.”

 

“The idiosyncrasies of human preferences seem to reflect a competition between the impetuous limbic grasshopper and the provident prefrontal ant within each of us.”

“In the human body, each of approximately a trillion cells holds within its nucleus a complete and identical sequence of DNA. That is about 1.5 gigabytes of genetic information, and it would fill two CD-ROMs, yet the DNA sequence itself would fit on the point of a well-sharpened pencil.”

 

“The depressives, far from seeing themselves through dark lenses as we had presumed, were cursed by twenty-twenty vision: compared with other groups, their self-ratings of positive qualities most closely matched how the observers rated them. In contrast, both the nondepressed psychiatric patients and the control group had inflated self-ratings, seeing themselves more positively than the observers saw them. The depressive patients simply did not see themselves through the rose-colored glasses that the others used when evaluating themselves.”

My Take

While I had previously heard about the marshmallow test and was familiar with the connection between the ability to delay gratification and life success, it was interesting to go more in depth. The Marshmallow Test is an encouraging read in that researcher Mischel demonstrates that our genes are not our destiny and we can develop an ability to delay gratification.  This book is a good companion piece to Better than Before which focuses on habit formation and why positive habits are so important to our well-being.