TED - Don't eat the marshmallow! | Joachim de Posada

Hi, I'm here because I have a very important message. I think we have found the most important factor for success, and it was found close to here. A Stanford psychology professor took kids who were four years old and put them in a room all by themselves. He would tell the child, "Four-year-old kid Johnny, I'm going to leave you here with a marshmallow. If you wait for me, you will get another one, so you will have two." To tell a four-year-old kid to wait is equivalent to telling us, "We'll bring you coffee in two hours." It's the exact equivalent.

So what happened when the professor left the room? As soon as the door closed, two out of three kids ate the marshmallow. Five seconds, ten seconds, forty seconds, fifty seconds. The longest any of them lasted was fourteen and a half minutes. They couldn't do it; they could not wait. What's interesting is that one out of three would look at the marshmallow, and then do this: look at it, put it back. They would walk around, play with their skirts and pants. That child, already at four, understood the most important principle for success, which is the ability to delay gratification, self-discipline, the most important factor for success.

Fourteen or fifteen years later, there was a follow-up story. What did they find? They went to look for these kids, who were now eighteen and nineteen, and they found that one hundred percent of the children who had not eaten the marshmallow were successful. They had good grades, they were doing wonderfully, they were happy, they had their plans, they had good relationships with their teachers and students, and they were doing fine. A great percentage of the kids who ate the marshmallow were in trouble. They did not make it to university, they had bad grades, some of them dropped out, and a few were still there with bad grades. A few had good grades.

I had a question in my mind: would Hispanic kids react the same way as the American kids? So I went to Colombia and reproduced the experiment, and it was very funny. I used four-, five-, and six-year-old kids, and let me show you what happened.

So what happened in Colombia? Hispanic kids, two or three out of three, ate the marshmallow. One out of three did not. This little girl was interesting: she ate the inside of the marshmallow. In other words, she wanted us to think that she had not eaten it, so she would get two, but she ate it, so we know she'll be successful, but we have to watch her. Okay, she should not go into banking, for example, or work at a cash register, but she will be successful, and this applies to everything, even sales. The salesperson, when a customer says, "I want that," and the salesperson says, "Okay, here you are," gives the marshmallow away. If the person said, "Wait a second, let me ask you a few questions to see if this is a good choice," then you sell a lot more. So this has applications in all walks of life.

I'll end with this: the Koreans did this, you know. This is so good that we want a marshmallow book for children, and they made one for children, and now it's all over Korea. They're teaching these kids exactly this principle, and we need to learn that principle here in the States, because we have a big deficit. We're eating more marshmallows than we're producing.

Thank you so much.