Why Delaying Gratification Should be your Secret Sauce

Sep 16

Written By Andrew Woodbury

Avoid the path of least resistance for best results

Read time: 4 minutes

Here’s our TTT for this week on how to grow your online teaching business.

What is TTT? A Tip, Takeaway, and Task. On Thursday.

Enjoy!

Tip: Delaying Gratification is your secret weapon

What’s the most important skill in your teaching business?

Your results?

Your methodology?

Your number of followers?

Today, we argue none of these are as important as the number one thing: the ability to delay gratification.

Here's why.

We're so wired to see results and returns quickly. We desperately want others to validate our ideas. Imposter syndrome, insecurity, and dopamine drips drive this.

But if we seek immediate gratification, we don’t give ourselves to flesh out the really good and scalable ideas underneath.

What often happens in seeking quick returns is that we create small, unimportant tasks for ourselves to check off and feel good about ourselves. But these tasks don’t move the needle at all in a business sense.

Tasks like formatting that document, setting up a new Notion scheduler, creating a new student folder, or reading another chapter of that great book on productivity.

These all likely emit feelings of completion, but are rudimentary in nature and don’t move to grow the business.

Don’t read a page; write one instead. Don’t format a document; create a system that does it automatically; don’t set up a new scheduler when the one you have works just fine.

So, why is it human nature to do these types of tasks?

Because it's the path of least resistance, which makes us feel good.

Takeaway: Embrace the path of most resistance

Delaying gratification also means embracing the path of resistance. The easy decision is (almost) always the path of least resistance.

Another way of saying this is the path of quick returns.

This is why it's logical to move from a classroom - where we earn an hourly wage - to online in our own business, charging an hourly wage.

Quick returns. Path of least resistance. Dopamine city.

The most important traits of successful people are said to be creativity and discipline.

The creativity to create something new and identify a gap in the market.

The discipline put a process in place to see it through.

And that process is where we can find success and put that gratification into the future. Make a schedule to get 1% better every day, and make incremental progress on a daily basis with a big, grand goal as the destination.