"The Business Benefits of Delayed Gratification"

When I was a teenager, my dad's mantra was, "Good things come to those who wait." Heard that one thirty or forty times. Today I would alter it only slightly, and say, "Good things come to those who wait AND keep working to improve while they're waiting."

Every great success story can be traced back to relationships and experiences that could not have been predicted beforehand to generate such powerful results. At his commencement address to the graduating class of Stanford University, Steve Jobs said, "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future." (Fortune magazine, September 5, 2005.) He was referring to his experience of dropping out of college after his freshman year, going back to school just to take a course in calligraphy, and then ten years later inserting all kinds of fancy calligraphy into the software for the first Macintosh computer. He could never have predicted that taking the course in calligraphy would have resulted in fancy calligraphy available in all computers worldwide over the next 30 years. When he was fired by Apple Computer in the early 1990s, he could never have predicted that the work he then did at two startup companies, NeXT and Pixar, would have generated hit films like The Incredibles and hit products like iPod upon his return to Apple.

Look at your own current achievements. Now trace them back to key learning experiences and key relationships you had earlier in your life. Do you see the same pattern repeating itself? The people you met and the experiences you lived through could not have been clear indicators for the results you ultimately achieved, but they served as the basis for those successes. Now look at it this way. If you're suffering through a stretch of hard work and not getting the results you want, then you may very well be laying the groundwork for much greater success in the future. Delayed gratification oftentimes is the crucible for development that generates extraordinary results in the future.

If you become a "results junkie" in needing positive results on a constant basis, you may not only end up in unethical behavior but also rob yourself of natural opportunities to hone your craft and find better solutions than ever before. To me, the people at Enron, WorldComm, Tyco, and Parmalat who ruined their businesses and their careers were "results junkies." They weren't satisfied with good results, or with trying hard and coming up short. They HAD to have great results NOW. This addiction to positive results drove them over the ethical edge and destroyed their futures. But that was only part of the problem. Assume for a moment that they didn't get caught. Assume they got the "great results" that other people thought they had truly earned. If that had happened, they never would have developed any new skills or new insights or new business approaches that really added more value to customers and potential customers.

Ultimately, there are two business benefits of being able to handle delayed gratification: sustained ethical behavior and a constant search for a better way to get results. Sustained ethical behavior allows a person to stay in the game and to sleep better at night. Constantly searching for better ways to generate results leads to breakthrough ideas, products, and services.

Every one wants a good result for their hard work. There is certainly nothing wrong with being rewarded in the short-term with a great result. However, people often become depressed when their hard work is not rewarded right away with a great result. Those folks are missing the long-term picture of success. Many times the greatest successes were preceded by many years of "failure." By being able to cope with delayed gratification, huge achievers developed new ways of approaching situations that led to incredible results.

When Thomas Jefferson was studying to be a lawyer, he met a man named George Blythe. Blythe not only taught Jefferson the law, he also challenged Jefferson to expand his intellectual horizons. More than 40 years later, those expanded intellectual horizons caused Jefferson to commission Lewis and Clark to reach across the continent to find out what other aspects of nature and animals existed.

When Mike Krzyzewski, recently named the 2008 Olympics Men's Basketball Coach, was first named head coach at Duke University he failed miserably. He was constantly coming up short in trying to recruit the very best high school players in the country, and his winning percentage was awful. However, he was learning HOW TO recruit the very best high school players in the country. Over the past ten years, he has recruited more high school All-Americans than any other college coach and his team has been ranked #1 in the country more often than any other college in the country. Both he and his boss were able to handled delayed gratification long enough to generate extraordinary results.

Hang in there with your own short-term disappointments and the disappointments of your direct reports. As long as you and they are continually working to improve and searching for better ways to generate results in an ethical manner, you may very well being laying the groundwork for extraordinary results by staying patient. If you do this often enough, then the habits of staying ethical and constantly searching for better ways to generate important results will stay in place even if you do get good short-term results.

Republishing Articles

Each month my e-newsletter gets republished in approximately 20 blogs, on-line publications, and internal publications for businesses, universities, and not-for-profit organizations. If you would like to republish all or part of my monthly articles, please send me an e-mail at dan@thecoughlincompany.com with "Republishing Article" in the subject heading. I will send you the article in a word document. All I ask is that you include my name as the author of the article and a short paragraph at the end of the article about me with a link to my website.

Take care and have a great month!

Dan Coughlin

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