I enjoyed the article. Even though I've heard most of it before, I'm the kind of person that really needs reminding of the core message. Somehow it's so easy to fall back into the "willpower is the trick" mindset. Perhaps because it's reinforced so heavily in popular culture, as the article mentions.

The article does however, in my opinion, commit a crime in bringing up the often misrepresented marshmellow experiment as some kind of fundament of psychology. The one where a child is promised a second marshmellow if they can resist eating the first one placed in front of them for a 15 minutes.

Children make do with the mental faculties and model of the world available to them. They live in a world shrouded in mystery in which adults regularly break promises to them for reasons they can't comprehend. Once the adult telling them what to do has left the room, I don't blame the kids for feeling an urge to take a bird in the hand over two in the bush. That's a perfectly good default instinct to have before you've acquired absolute trust towards friendly strangers in university buildings.

Imagine a real-world analogy to this kind of experiment. Adults choosing to go for the double reward would likely be labeled naive, bad with money, or gamblers. Extrapolating to the general population is ridiculous. Mischel's research wasn't about that at all.

From the article: In Mischel’s marshmallow experiment, only a quarter of the subjects were able to resist eating the marshmallow for fifteen minutes. This implies that a large majority of us lack the self-control required to succeed in life.

(disgruntled noises)