INTRODUCTION Me want cookie . . . but me wait. For almost anyone who was or lived with a child sometime in the past forty years, the first part of that sentence calls up images of a blue, fuzzy, grammatically challenged, adorably gluttonous Muppet: Cookie Monster. But the second part caught me off guard when I first heard it. Cookie, as his name implies, was traditionally an embodiment of immediate gratification. Sure, once in a while he was tweaked to accommodate the concerns of the time. When the healthiness of kids' diets was in question, Cookie's penchant for sweets was changed to include fruit. When the dangers of food allergies in schools became apparent, he made sure his cookies were nut-free. Yet across the years, one trait remained constant: impulsivity. When Cookie wanted something, he wanted it now. But in 2013, during Sesame Street 's forty-fourth season, that changed; but me wait became part of Cookie's Muppet mantra and, as a result, part of a new generation's early education. Self-Control, Success, and the Road Not Taken This change is evidence of our society's continuing obsession with success. And when it comes to achieving that success, whether it's at the office, in managing finances, in bettering health, or even in pursuing an unlikely dream, decades of research has revealed that self-control is key. By that, I mean the ability to resist urges for immediate gratification in order to obtain greater rewards in the future. Best-selling books such as Willpower, How Children Succeed, and Grit all promise insight into how perseverance and patience can affect our lives for the better. Not to be outdone, magazines from the Atlantic to People routinely feature articles on the benefits of self-control and how to obtain it. I don't mean to criticize this emphasis on self-control and valuing the future. To the contrary, I think we need it. And while the idea of self-control's benefits isn't new -- we can see it extolled in moral tales and treatises going back for centuries -- what is new is that this idea has moved from philosophy and theology into empirical proof. The benefits of self-control aren't a matter of opinion anymore; they're quantifiable. And what can be quantified can, in theory, be maximized. The million-dollar question, of course, is How? How can self-control be enhanced? It's here that I fear we have gone astray. For almost fifty years we've been developing science-based strategies meant to help us reach our goals. Yet on average, we are no better at delaying immediate gratification than we were in the 1960s. If anything, our impatience and desire for immediate satisfaction are on the rise. As individuals and as a society, we're spending more on impulse buys and conveniences rather than saving for a rainy day or retirement. We're diverting our attention to games or social media on our smartphones rather than focusing it on learning and honing skills we need. We're satisfying our sweet tooth and, as a result, expanding our waists simply to gain momentary pleasures at a great cost to our future well-being. And at a more macro level, many of us are resist- ing choices such as spending a bit more for clean or renewable energy that, though somewhat costlier in the moment, will help avoid greater problems down the road. In short, we're planning less for the future, not caring as much about what that future will bring. And while it's undoubtedly true that each of these examples of impatience and shortsightedness stems from many factors, underlying them all is a growing bias toward pleasure in the moment. On any given day, most people fail to stick with their daily goals about 20 percent of the time -- a percentage that climbs quickly if they're busy, tired, or stressed. That means almost one out of every five times we try to work harder, eat better, save more, or prepare for a test or performance evaluation, we're going to fail to do it in favor of something else that's more fun in the moment. And when decisions involve important goals -- the ones that truly matter to people -- the success rate is even worse. Only 8 percent of New Year's resolutions are kept throughout the year. While 25 percent fail in the first week. The result is that most of us frequently end up feeling powerless to stick to our goals and, even worse, upset with ourselves for loafing, splurging, bingeing, or otherwise giving in to a desire for some short-term pleasure that will ultimately cost us. This raises an intriguing and troubling question: If delaying gratification and valuing the future are so important, and if we've been using science-backed strategies for decades to help us do it, why are most of us still so bad at it? One would think that our minds would come equipped with tools to meet the challenges posed by a lack of impulse control. After all, that's one hallmark of evolutionary development: the mind and body retain features that help us to thrive. So, either the development of the human mind has a gaping hole, as the need for self-control has been around since our species's beginning, or we're doing something wrong. And as a scientist who for decades has studied how humans make decisions, I can confirm that it's the latter. Our minds do come equipped with the necessary tools to succeed, but we're forsaking them. We still have serious problems delaying gratification, developing dedication, and cultivating perseverance because our notion of how self-control works is flawed. Put simply, we're seeing only half the picture. When we're forced to choose strategies for success, we tend to favor cognitive ones -- stoic approaches characterized by reason, deliberation, and force of will. If you read those bestsellers I mentioned, page through popular magazines, or even peruse scientific papers, you'll find the same underlying message: rationality trumps emotion. To stand firm in the face of challenges and temptations, we're told to use what psychologists term executive function -- that part of the mind that manages and controls "subordinate" processes such as memory, attention, and feelings. The term executive wasn't picked by accident. This aspect of the mind is, in essence, the boss; it gives the orders that the rest of the mind is supposed to follow. Executive function allows people to plan, to reason, and to use willpower to keep focused, accept sacrifices, and ignore or suppress emotional responses that might get in the way of reaching their long-term aspirations. And cognitive strategies such as these -- ones based on reason and analysis as opposed to emotions -- are believed to maintain the perseverance required to succeed. But the fact that a given set of tools sometimes works doesn't imply that it will always work. Nor does it imply that they're the best tools for the job. In the case of our reliance on cognitive tools such as willpower, I believe we've created a predicament. We've ended up with a set of tools that, while effective at times, is inefficient and fragile. More troubling, under certain circumstances these tools can even be harmful. The upshot of using them is that we're often setting ourselves up for failure while increasing the likelihood of damage to our physical and mental well-being over the long run. The False Choice For centuries philosophers, psychologists, and people in general pitted cognition -- those supposedly rational, logical mechanisms of the mind that feel like you can guide them -- against emotion -- those supposedly irrational and capricious components that seem to emerge unbidden -- when trying to understand how we make decisions. And for most of that time we've tended to trumpet the former while stigmatizing the latter. This one-to-one mapping of reason to virtue and emotion to vice doesn't reflect reality, however. It sets up a false choice. As we'll see in the chapters that follow, the mind has emotions because, more often than not, they help us. In psychological parlance, they're adaptive. They nudge, or sometimes thrust, our decisions in ways meant to help us achieve our goals, not to thwart them. We often miss this essential truth when we fail to recognize that the decision- making machinery of the human mind is quite complex. It often must manage competing goals, some of which are focused on present outcomes and others on future ones. If it's true -- as most researchers in the field believe -- that emotions did evolve to be adaptive, then it follows that some must be attuned to short-term needs and wants while others are attuned to costs and benefits coming down the line. Yet when it comes to self-control, almost all studies of emotion have focused on those feelings relevant to the short term -- emotions such as anger, lust, and desire, which favor satisfaction of an immediate craving or impulse. Even among psychologists, the prevailing view of how we should develop self-restraint, diligence, grit, and the like can be boiled down to something quite simple: cognition is good, emotions are bad. Most believe that the best way for people to resist eating the second piece of chocolate cake, spending their paycheck on an impulse buy, or watching a movie when they should be working is for their mental executive to marshal its army of cognitive tools and overcome emotions bent on satisfying cravings for immediate pleasure. As a result, experts and friends tell us to use reason to convince ourselves that saving money or going to the gym is worthwhile. To use techniques such as distraction to keep ourselves or our kids from reaching back into the cookie jar. And, if necessary, to use willpower to make ourselves stick to the plan. Unfortunately, when these strategies are used too frequently or under demanding conditions, they often fail. For example, each time a person uses willpower and executive function to resist temptations in relatively quick succession, those tools become less effective. Likewise, strategies based on distracting oneself from a short-term desire become more difficult to implement the closer any desired object looms -- a perverse fact given that this is when we need self-control most. We're never told to use an emotion itself to achieve a challenging goal. This is unfortunate, even tragic, because emotions can be such powerful tools for maintaining selfcontrol. On balance, they're both easier to use and more robust than the cognitive tools we're told to reach for. Sure, emotions can lead us astray. We've all felt the distracting pull of pleasure when confronting a difficult task. We've felt listless when depressed or eager for a quick fix or guilty pleasure. We've felt angry and wanted to lash out even when we know doing so might be harmful to others and ourselves. Yet we're making a profound mistake if we assume that just because some emotions can lead us into temptation, all emotions will. If emotions always guided our decisions in problematic ways, we wouldn't have them; they would have been left in the evolutionary dustbin long ago. In truth, emotions are among the most powerful and efficient mechanisms we have to guide good decisions. They're the first such mechanisms we developed, too. Emotional responses existed long before we acquired the cognitive abilities to plan ahead -- abilities that reside in the frontal lobe of modern humans -- yet still faced the challenges posed by short-term desires (for example, to eat all the food rather than share with our fellows). The trick to success, then, comes in understanding that emotions don't only happen to us; we can use them to help achieve our goals -- if we develop the wisdom to call upon the right emotions to meet the challenges at hand. When it comes to long-term success, the "right" emotions are principally these: gratitude, compassion, and pride. These emotions, unlike basic feelings of happiness, sadness, anger, or fear, are intrinsically tied to social life, and that provides the key to their effectiveness. At base, social living regularly requires a willingness to accept costs in the moment to ensure better days ahead. We didn't originally develop self-control so that we could study for exams, save for retirement, or go to the gym. For most of our evolutionary history, none of that mattered or even existed. What did matter to survive and thrive was having strong social bonds -- relationships that would encourage people to lend support to others in need while knowing full well that their sacrifices would be returned if and when required in the future. Establishing and maintaining such relationships required behaving morally. It meant being fair, being honest, being generous, being diligent, and being loyal. In short, morality itself was adaptive; being perceived to have good character marked a person as capable of overcoming a desire to be overly selfish and, therefore, as a person with whom it was safe to partner. And as we'll see, it's precisely the emotions of gratitude, compassion, and pride that make us more willing to behave in these valued ways. Think about the last time you felt any of these three states -- really felt them. They probably pushed you to accept some type of immediate cost. Gratitude has led me to spend many hours repaying favors or debts. I've moved more couches and spent more time making gifts for friends than I thought possible, all to make sure that others whose friendships I valued knew I appreciated what they had done for me and, in so doing, kept those bonds from fraying down the line. Compassion is similar. It moves many people to give money, time, or emotional support to others in need. It encourages an altruism that ensures efforts will be returned for our kind acts when we need them. Pride, too, can encourage people to sacrifice for future gain. I'll always remember one of my students telling me that the only thing that allowed her to get up at 5:00 a.m. every day to practice rowing on the frigid Columbia River was the pride she felt in being part of her team. These emotions grease the wheels of social life by making us act in ways that, though costly to our pleasure or resources in the short term, bring the promise of greater rewards in the future. They give us self-control. These same emotions -- the ones that push us to value the future in order to grow our social success -- can be co-opted to help us achieve success in any area of life: academic, professional, financial, health. Just as they nudge us to sacrifice in the short run to better our relationships with others, we can use them to manage our relationships with someone else who's central to our hopes and dreams: our own future selves. As we'll see, cultivating these three emotions can help us meet our own needs and goals in a way that is more powerful and less fraught than relying on reason and willpower alone. Collateral Damage Depending on fragile cognitive strategies to reach our goals doesn't only reduce our chances of success, it can also harm us in more subtle ways. Broadly speaking, these harms -- what I call collateral damage -- tend to be of two types. The first centers on stress. Because most of the cognitive techniques are corrective in nature -- they're meant to override or tamp down a more basic desire for pleasure rather than prevent that desire from emerging in the first place -- they usually require a good deal of effort. It can frequently feel like you're wrestling with yourself as you pursue a goal. And since few experiences cause more stress than those that combine great effort with a sizable risk of failure, feelings of tension and temporary burnout can arise. This kind of stress isn't only unpleasant, it also has been shown to interfere with our ability to learn. So in some ways, using cognitive techniques is like taking two steps forward and one step back. Over time, however, the negative effects from using these tools can be even more pernicious; they can lead to declines in health. This brings us to the second form of collateral damage. Although a bit more diffuse, the impairments are no less troubling. In modern life, success for many requires gaining more and more competence in highly specific realms. If you want to be a top violinist, you've got to practice for hours and hours to hone your craft and stay one step ahead of the competition. If you want to get into Harvard Medical School, Yale Law, or a famed Silicon Valley corporation, it's much the same. Competition is fierce, meaning dedication to building knowledge and skills is essential. How we choose to motivate ourselves to do this, however, can make a world of difference. The currently recommended ways -- the ones that rely on executive function, reason, and the like -- all share a theme: rational antisocialism. That is, they treat the mind as if it were a machine existing in a social vacuum, with engineers tweaking its mech-anisms to make it ever more efficient. If you want to succeed, the thinking goes, work harder, faster, longer, and more efficiently. That's what a computer or robot would do. So, if you're a human, who unlike those entities is saddled with temptations to seek multiple types of enjoyment, do everything you can to suppress those. Bring willpower online to thwart irrational emotional responses that might lead you astray. When willpower fails, use techniques of distraction, habit formation, goal reappraisal, and the like. But the human mind isn't a computer. It has an owner who is a social being, meaning that it evolved to take care of a body that has social needs -- needs that these cognitive mechanisms often ignore or even inhibit -- that are also inherently linked to achievement. As we'll see later in this book, links to other people not only drive perseverance and success but also make us more fulfilled and resilient. The personality trait of grit -- the ability to use self-control to keep focused on future goals over long periods -- has been linked to achievement. This makes great sense, as those who are habitually more willing to accept sacrifices in the short run to enhance their skills in the long run are more likely to reach their goals. But, and it's a big but, it's a risky approach. One of the most celebrated early findings in grit research came from a study of the prestigious pressure cooker that is the Scripps National Spelling Bee. Although on its own, grit was clearly predictive of success -- kids who had higher levels of grit were more likely to advance through initial stages -- there were some cautionary findings as well. For example, in the final rounds, once differences in verbal IQ and age were considered, differences in grit were virtually meaningless. In other words, a child's level of intelligence combined with experience based on age trumped any influence grit had in determining who won the bee or came close among this select group of finalists. What it did predict among these high achievers was longer hours spent studying and drilling vocabulary words -- longer hours that didn't correspond to better performance but did likely increase social isolation. And few factors are more closely associated with unhappiness or poor health than loneliness and social isolation. So while grit is undoubtedly important, the tools and strategies a person uses to become gritty can matter greatly. More evidence of the threats posed by using a strictly cogni- tive tool set to keep your nose to the grindstone comes from research done by the psychologist Christopher Boyce and colleagues. Boyce's team followed more than nine thousand people for four years as they faced possible failures such as losing a job. They found that people who were highly self-disciplined in their pursuits and who tended to rely on logical analysis and willpower-related selfcontrol to achieve their goals were also the ones who suffered the most when facing failure. While losing a job is difficult for anyone, the drop in well-being among these people was 120 percent greater than among others. These hardworking people do fail less often, but when they do, it takes a greater toll on them, as they have a weaker safety net to catch them when they fall. The way out of this trap -- the way to improve our chances of achieving while also building resilience -- is simply to use the emotional tools available to us. As we'll see, using gratitude, compassion, and pride to pursue our goals will enable us to persevere and resist temptation -- to increase our self-control and grit -- while almost effortlessly helping us create the social bonds that will buttress us against stumbles, stress, and the afflictions of loneliness along the way. The Journey Ahead This book will examine the origins and workings of these three emotions, their ties to self-control and resilience, and their potential for increasing success over the long haul for each of us and for society at large. To do this, I've divided the book into three parts. In the first -- Setting the Stage -- I describe the problem and then dispel our fundamental misconceptions about how to solve it. In chapter 1, I'll briefly review why the human mind prefers short-term rewards over long-term ones, the problems this preference causes, and why almost everyone will succumb to temptation under certain circumstances. Then, in chapter 2, I'll dispel the fallacy that cognition is the only route to self-control by demonstrating the many foibles inherent in relying on reason, willpower, and executive function to get the job done. In the second part of the book, The Emotional Toolbox, I'll show how gratitude, compassion, and pride, when cultivated and used appropriately, provide the strongest bulwark against the indulgence and impulsivity that often underlie failure. Gratitude and compassion are not passive; they are states of quiet power. Pride, when used properly, is not destructive but rather beneficial as it focuses the mind on the future. As we explore each of these emotions in turn (chapters 3-5), we'll examine not only how and why they shape our behaviors but also ways to use them effectively. In the book's third and final part -- Value Added -- I'll explain how adopting emotion-based strategies might offer the most robust way forward both for individuals and for society as a whole. In chapter 6 I'll show how gratitude, compassion, and pride build social relationships -- their original purpose -- that offer a double benefit. In addition to reinforcing grit and self-control on their own, relationships function to keep loneliness, and all its harms to mind and body, at bay. In chapter 7 I'll expand the social view by showing how these emotions can flow through a social network, thereby increasing not only your own success but also that of those around you. The bonus here is that you, too, will benefit when others invite these emotions into play. And in chapter 8 I'll extend the field of view once again, this time to the societal level. Here we'll take a look at how using and cultivating these emotions among larger groups of people can help ensure a society's resilience by increasing its willingness to invest in its future. Finally, in the Coda, I'll reflect on both how this new perspective should change our thinking about the pursuit of success and how strategies using these three emotions should be better implemented. With respect to altering our thinking, it's important to recognize two things. First, from a scientific perspective, gratitude, compassion, and pride aren't just three independent human virtues; they're actually the source of many others. Second, emotions aren't just foisted upon us; we can exert great control over what we feel and when we feel it. In combination, these truths give rise to an entirely new way of understanding how certain emotions can be used to help us thrive. Yet at present too few professionals -- whether they be educators, corporate trainers, managers, or counselors -- have embraced this view, and thus too few people are equipped with the techniques necessary to pursue their goals most effectively. It's time we change that, because if we're going to meet the challenges our lives and careers throw at us, many of which require patience, dedication, and fortitude to overcome, we're going to need every weapon in our arsenal. Excerpted from Emotional Success: How Three Key Emotions Provide What We Want and Need from Life by David DeSteno All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
