Que sera, sera - or is it? With Mid-Autumn Festival and Typhoon Usagi a fading memory, the furnace of summer morphs to the air conditioned nippiness of autumn. So, comes a new academic year and students’ thoughts turn to preparing for the future (school) and perhaps what their actual futures hold in store. Put another way, you must have asked yourself at some point in your life, “What is the secret to success?” There must be a multitude of answers to this question but here’s a “scientific” one. Deferred gratification. That’s right! Success could be simply a matter of putting off pleasures today for an even brighter tomorrow. Here’s why it’s “scientific.” In the 1960s, Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel conducted the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, in which 4-6 year old subjects were presented with a marshmallow and told they could eat it but if they waited 15 minutes before eating it, they would get one extra marshmallow. A minority of the 600 subjects ate the marshmallows immediately. Of those who fought the temptation to eat the marshmallow straight away, one third were successful in delaying long enough to get the extra reward. Follow up studies done years later revealed those who delayed eating the marshmallow for 15 minutes had higher SAT scores and educational attainment. They were also described by their parents as “more competent.” The takeaway from this? Putting off a little more of what’s fun, like smartphone games, and putting that time into your school studies could be the best thing you can do for your future success. - Louis Lee, Development Director international-tutors/international-tutors-blog
Posted on: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 02:48:14 +0000
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