The Battle for Bandwidth
I’ll just say it; people are not good long-term investors by default. Evolution didn’t reward our ancestors for decades of patience, immediate gratification will always be innately compelling. Delaying gratification is almost always necessary to achieve long-term goals and managing the urges to do so is an ongoing struggle. We have hundreds of thousands of years of evolution we’re bumping up against because seeking immediate gratification was necessary for survival for our ancestors[i].
Think; hyperbolic discounting[ii] (present bias), or FOMO[iii] and loss aversion[iv]. These are all well studied deeply ingrained cognitive biases working against us. We can’t get rid of them but we can better manage them with some forethought and oversight.
About 20% of our energy consumption is from our brain[v], we try to run it efficiently since it’s so metabolically expensive. From an evolutionary perspective delaying gratification wouldn’t have been obviously beneficial for reproductive success and it involves more deliberate, expensive thinking[vi].
So, how do you delay gratification for long-term goals?
I think one key is framing. You must frame your current actions in context of the larger goal. You need to enjoy being the person working towards those goals. Focusing on the journey instead of the destination. This is the real key. You must find gratification in the journey, so you’re not really delaying gratification as much as being gratified by working toward your goal. Aside from the fact that it can be difficult to keep efforts going if the idea is that you’ll “be happy when…”, it can be devastating to defer the gratification only to realize that you’ve been heading toward something that would never make you happy in the first place.
Another key is to manage bandwidth. Decision making isn’t easy. We can only make so many good ones in a day. Financial planning involves the allocation of limited resources across time and bandwidth is most certainly a limited resource.
It’s in taking enough decision making off your plate to make better decisions where it matters more. Whether that’s habits to automate certain choices, delegating certain decisions. We don’t like to do hard things; there is no secret. However, how you design your environment can encourage certain behaviors. Things like putting your running shoes and clothes by your bed at night before you go to sleep can make going for that morning run a little more likely.
Our routines determine a lot of our actions so designed routines with intent can help us to guide the path of least resistance toward things we should do even if we don’t necessarily want to. The pain points tend to be hardest in the moment, proactively smoothing out those pain points is the secret to habits you can stick to. How can you set yourself up so it will be easier to do the hardest thing tomorrow and harder to do the easy thing. What decisions can you just make ahead of time to free up your capacity?
Making decisions under uncertainty is mentally taxing and metabolically expensive. What is worth noting is that by better designing your environment to encourage the behavior you want and limit your decision fatigue, you’re compounding the things that you’re leveraging in your favor. Making the right choice in the moment can be a bit harder than making the easy choice, when you’re depleted the gap widens. If done properly, you can decrease opportunities to make “easy” choices that might be “bad” for future you while also decreasing decision fatigue so you can be less likely to slip when the rare opportunity presents itself.
