Hi All, happy Friday!
Here’s your weekly dose of wisdom to keep you on track with your goals.
1. During the workweek, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s important.
The day-to-day noise of deadlines, meetings, and emails prevent us from seeing the bigger picture. No matter how turbulent your life might be, you can always recalibrate with a focus meditation. Sit upright in a chair, close your eyes, and think about nothing but your goal for five minutes.
2. Every person has two sides: an emotional side, and a rational side.
Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, uses an analogy to explain both: The emotional side is an elephant and the rational one is the rider. Although the rider holds the reins, the six-ton elephant can overpower the rider. What is more, the rider can only motivate the elephant to go anywhere if it appeals to an emotional need. This means that if you want to make a change, you need to get your rider and elephant in sync. Make fact-based decisions while listening to your gut.
Your Weekly Digest: Delaying Gratification
This week’s article covered delayed gratification, a powerful ability that can set you apart from others. It’s a topic that ties in well with the focus meditation and elephant rider analogy.
Delaying gratification means resisting the urge of an immediate reward in anticipation that there will be a greater reward later. You can, for example, delay the gratification of spending your money on material items and invest it in stocks, bonds, or retirement funds instead. Delaying gratification is all about giving up immediate pleasure to receive more pleasure in the future.
This doesn’t just apply to accomplishments in day-to-day life, but also to large-scale success. A startup turns into a profitable business if it offers a superior product than its competition. Entrepreneurs must delay the gratification of publishing a product in its infancy and wait until it has sufficient features to attract customers. That’s what postponing gratification is all about.
Until next week,
Mike van der Poel
P.S. I’m currently developing an online assessment to help people find goals that satisfy both their emotional and rational sides. Stay tuned!