My Final Lecture: What I Learned About Living a Good Life
The Michael Shermer Show
00:00
The Marshmallow Test: The Key to Success
The key to being a successful Navy Seal or anything else in life is summed up in the book's subtitle, Mastering Self-Control. In its simplest form, children between the ages of four and six were given a choice between one marshmallow now or two marshmallows if they waited 15 minutes. Some kids ate the marshmallows right away, but most engaged in unintentionally hilarious attempts to overcome the temptation. All of us in fact have future selves, or more accurately, there is no fixed self, but rather an ever-changing self. We can not only anticipate how our future selves might act, we can take measures today to alter our future selves' behavior.
Transcript
Play full episode
