IF YOU ASK SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE why they’re successful, it’s striking how often they’ll bring up episodes of failure. “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career,” Michael Jordan once observed. “I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been entrusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over, and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
How people respond to failure is a critical dividing line between those who make it and those who don’t. Success requires more than motivation, more even than a deep urge to rise. Willpower and perseverance in the face of adversity are equally important.
Led by social and developmental psychologists such as Roy Baumeister, Carol Dweck, and Angela Duckworth, a large and growing body of research has demonstrated that the capacity to resist temptation—including especially the temptation to quit when a task is arduous, daunting, or beyond one’s immediate abilities—is critical to achievement.
This capacity to resist temptation is exactly what we mean by impulse control, and the remarkable finding is that greater impulse control in early childhood translates into much better outcomes across a wide variety of domains.
This finding was first made—stumbled on, actually—by Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel in his famous “marshmallow test” of the late 1960s. Trying to determine how children learn to resist temptation, Mischel began putting treats in front of three- to five-year-olds.
The children were told that they could either eat their chosen treat (often a marshmallow) or, if they waited a few minutes, get another one too. Children who held out for fifteen minutes received a second marshmallow.
A majority ate up; only a minority held out. The great surprise, however, came years later. Although it wasn’t part of his original plan, Mischel followed up on the roughly 650 subject children when they were in high school. It turned out that the children who had held out were doing much better academically, with fewer social problems, than those who hadn’t.
Now confirmed by numerous studies, the correlation Mischel discovered between impulse control and success is nothing short of jaw-dropping. Kids who “passed” their marshmallow test, waiting the full fifteen minutes, ended up with SAT scores 210 points higher than those who ate up in the first thirty seconds. For college grades, impulse control has proved to be a better predictor than SAT scores—better even than IQ.
In the most comprehensive study to date, researchers in New Zealand tracked over a thousand individuals from birth to age thirty-two. Controlling for socioeconomic status, intelligence, and other factors, the study found that individuals with low impulse control as children were significantly more likely to develop problems with drugs, alcohol, and obesity; to work in low-paying jobs; to have a sexually transmitted disease; and to end up in prison. Those with high impulse control were healthier, more affluent, and more likely to have a stable marriage, raising children in a two-parent household.
There’s been another finding too, of equal if not greater importance. Willpower and perseverance can be strengthened. That’s where culture comes in. Cultivating impulse control in children—indeed in anyone, at any age—is a powerful lever of success.
But not by itself: impulse control by itself has nothing to do with academic achievement or moneymaking. The Pennsylvania Amish have as much impulse control as any group, denying themselves electricity and every modern convenience. But they aren’t academically or economically overachieving, because their culture points them away from those goals.
In other words, impulse control in isolation is mere asceticism. As always, it’s the fusion of all three Triple Package elements that creates an engine of economic success.
Excerpt From: Amy Chua. “The Triple Package.”