Hacker News Reader

IMO, someone who perseveres through the horribly difficult early stages of learning an instrument to the point where they can play something passably well is learning delayed gratification. The ability to delay gratification is directly correlated with success in life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...

View on HN

That correlation disappears once you control for wealth. People go for instant gratification once they've learned that they can't trust that the thing they're delaying gratification for will ever come. People like to make fun of people who pick 100 dollars today over 200 dollars a month from now, but for the "other half", 200 dollars a month from now might as well be an eternity from now. And because wealth tends to be heritable and have other knock-on effects, what the study is really testing for is how trustworthy a child thinks adults are with offers, which is affected by whether that child is raised in the kind of environment where nothing can be guaranteed since an entire paycheck may have been entirely used up.

"Why Rich Kids Are So Good at the Marshmallow Test" : https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/marshmall...

IIRC the ability to delay gratification as measured by the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment is quite heavily correlated with "food security in the household" and whether you are involuntarily hungry as a kid. Half the correlation goes away in replication studies that controlled for social background.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com