Delayed Gratification or Quick Fix?

In life you always have 2 (or more) choices, there is an easy way and a hard way, but there is also a right way and a wrong way to do something.

The ‘easy’ way or the quick-fix way usually ends up being more work down the line anyway, yet the majority of people choose this quick fix because it initially seems like it is much less effort.

As an example take someone who is really overweight, and reads an article that tells them how to lose weight, but this means they have to eat healthy and exercise, which requires discipline and dedication to getting a better body.
Instead they will rather pay hundreds if not thousands of dollars for ‘quick-fix’ weight-loss programs,liposuction and diet pills simple because they claim to let you lose lots of weight with no effort.

After time people will realise that these things do not work, they have spent fortunes and they are still overweight…Right back to square one. Was that really less effort?

It’s the same with making money, how many people do you know that spend money on some ‘get-rich’ scheme, promising to make you hundreds of thousands of dollars with an easy-to-follow system that will sho results overnight or within a week? Same story…quick-fix.

There is no free-lunch. Of course there are exceptions, like a chain-smoker who lives to be 94 years old, but you cannot expect to smoke a pack of cigarettes and live to be 94!Read an interesting post on this here.

Anyone who has achieved something will tell you that the only way to really do it is delayed gratification.

What does this mean? Well…exactly what the two words say. Delayed gratification means that you are willing to wait for results and success until your hard work and effort pay off. This would mean finishing your work before you go out and party, re-investing your monthly profits into your business and building it up so that after a few years you will be making multiple times your current profits instead of you using up your profits for your own pleasure each time the profit is available.

Take anything you do in your life, and you will find that it will take 2-4 years to get good at it and much longer to master it. If you can accept that you are willing to work hard at something, put in much effort and time and resources often without seeing results for a long time, but knowing that the reward comes at the end, then you can do anything.

Whether it be improving your social skills, making money with internet marketing, building up a business,learning a sport or instrument,losing weight and building the body you have always wanted…whatever you choose to work at.

Initially delayed gratification seems like the hardest way, lots of effort and work, but when it’s done it is so much better. Let’s take the weight loss example again:

Man A – let’s call him John, is really unhealthily overweight but does not want to commit to the effort of chipping away at his problem day after day until he reaches his result. He is a successful lawyer and has lots of money, and he wants a ‘quick-fix’, so he forks out a few thousand dollars on revolutionary weight-loss pills and supplements. After 3 months this has lost him some weight but when he stopped taking the pills he gained it back even faster. He decides to go for liposuction at a huge expense, and after surgery he is looking better but after a year is back to his same old overweight self.

Man B – let’s call him Peter, is just as overweight as John, only Peter has seen himself in the mirror one time too much and decides he is going to do whatever it takes to lose weight and keep it off to get a healthy body. He buys books and does research, draws up a meal plan and switches his meals to raw foods and lean protein, draws up an exercise plan and gets up at 5am six days of the week to go to gym and go jogging before work. Initially he has moments where he wants to quit and does not care that he is overweight, but he has made a huge poster above his bed saying ‘I will not quit, I will get a healthy body’, and he continues his routines. After 1 year, Peter enjoys eating healthy foods, doesn’t touch junk food, and has lost all his excess weight. He has a lean, good-looking body and his fitness is is great condition.

So after reading these two examples, initially the quick-fix seems less effort, but quick fixes usually don’t work in the long term, and after that year, the quick fix resulted in no change and a huge amount of money wasted, and the delayed gratification or ‘hard way’, resulted in achieving the desired result, and keeping it that way for many years to come.

Next time you have to make a choice, think about what you are going to do:
The ‘quick-fix’ or ‘delayed gratification’ ?

Have a Rockin’ day
Diggy