Imagine that you’ve set a series of goals that you can only achieve by giving up things that provide you with enormous satisfaction. If your desire is to excel in music, you’ll have to put in many hours of practice today to reach the level of proficiency that can only be achieved over the years. The same goes for sports, business, and many other dreams you may want to pursue. None of them will be possible if you don’t put tomorrow’s success before today’s party.

The study didn’t end with the children’s academic performance. After these clues, Mischel kept following for decades the students to whom he offered marshmallows in the late 1960s, recording the aspects that he considered most susceptible to being affected by strong or weak self-regulation: health, stability, and personal relationships. When those same Bing Nursery children were nearing thirty years of age, they continued to show personal and professional performances that reflected their self-control: Those who couldn’t wait for the treat as preschoolers and succumbed to instant gratification had a higher body mass index than those who could wait for a future reward.

This attribute has greater implications than showing strength when tempted by an appetizing sweet. It has nothing to do with the relationship between treats and physical appearance. Its explanation lies in the mental plane: Those who as children could not bear to wait for a reward and chose to eat the treat on average showed a lower perception of themselves, a less efficient handling of stressful situations, and a higher rate of addiction to different substances and drugs. As if this weren’t enough, they also had lower levels of education and higher divorce rates.

On the other hand, the children who had shown signs of self-control rated better decades later in all the aforementioned indicators and also had greater resources to deal with adverse social situations.

Check out this example. I make you an offer: $5 million right now or one penny doubled the first month, and the new amount doubled the following month, and so forth. Which would you choose? Answer honestly.

If you choose the second option, at the end of the first month you’d only have two measly pennies, instead of immediately having $5 million. After a year, you’d look back at your little penny and see that it had amounted to around twenty dollars. You’d sigh and regret your “stupid” decision. You’d leave the money there and try to forget that mistake.

HOW DANGEROUS ARE THOSE WHO THINK THEY DON’T NEED ANYONE!

Two more years go by and you’re surprised by a call from the bank. The manager is requesting a meeting with you. You remember your penny, and when you check your account, you see that your balance has exceeded $343 million. You were right to bet on the future.

That’s what it’s like to bet on the future. In the moment, we think that a penny isn’t going to make a difference. If you train for an hour today, you’ll weigh the same tomorrow, you won’t notice any changes, but that doesn’t mean it’s ineffective. It’s a gamble that multiplies itself like your shy penny.

Invest in yourself. Your willingness yields the highest growth rate. You are the best long-term investment and a business that runs no other risk than trying. Stand firm during downturns because it’s precisely in crises that stocks offer us their highest returns. You count on divine support, so you will never be without means if you lean on faith.

Multiply yourself with a future bet, with the absolute confidence that the investment you make in yourself will need to draw new graphs to hold you. You are the currency that doubles in value with each wager. You are the swollen ground of riches you are now building. Persevere and don’t depreciate yourself. If you stand firm, you will trade up.

Your tenacity surpasses the value of metals and precious stones. Your discipline redefines the mathematics of indices. Your heart of gold protects you. No liquidity is more valuable than the sweat of your efforts. No closing is more valuable than the times you’ve said no because you believe in a higher yes.

I’ll put my money on you. Your value will double every day.

OUR MARSHMALLOWS

Going back to the penny exercise, you could tell me that you don’t know if you’ll still be alive in three years, so you’d prefer the five million from the start. But that would show you lack faith and purpose and have no goals worth reaching or living for. If you prefer the five million because you don’t know what the future has in store for you, then you should eat without moderation, get into unlimited debt, and cancel your insurance. Would you do that? Of course not. Then you do believe in the future.

Let’s look at the marshmallow choices of our life: an affair or marital strength, laziness or a professional career, comfort or a transformative project. Each of these elements is linked to knowing that our future achievements require a disciplined today. We will always be faced with the choice of either giving pleasure to who we are now or making the effort to please that hazy being we will be in a few years.

THERE’S A LOT OF POWER IN THOSE WHO KEEP THEIR PROMISES.

As we saw in the Marshmallow Test, the balance tips in favor of those who choose to postpone pleasure in order to make it grow. Standing firm in the face of temptation turned out to be a predictor of healthier personal behavior, less aggression, better grades—though that’s not related to intelligence—a tendency toward stability in personal relationships, and better learning rates. The balance always moved in favor of those who had chosen to postpone pleasure to make it grow.

These children were unknowingly announcing what their tendency would be as adults. However, the fact that this is an innate condition doesn’t justify what we do as adults. The time for considering yourself innocent for not being able to resist life’s temptations at every moment is over. Just because your self-regulation has been weak up until now doesn’t mean you’re destined to fail. Self-control can be strengthened. Willpower is like a body that is toned with practice and knowledge. If you believe you would’ve been one of those children who did not resist temptation, you can change this reality, or continue to compete against adversaries who have a leg up on you. The most outstanding athletes are those who combine effort and knowledge, even when they’re up against physically advanced opponents.

Since this is a struggle between current and future pleasure, one way to minimize that distance is to create certain immediate trade-offs. In other words, you should reward yourself when you invest in your future. Think of it as an advance on profits. Set up an account where you can deposit points every time you choose well. This is much more than a metaphor. You can set compensation criteria that you can turn into a concrete profit whenever you wish.

Let’s say you take time to study Mandarin, training that may be a deciding factor in your promotion. You traded the pleasure of watching a popular series for time spent studying a language that will require several months to see slight progress. If you reach a benchmark, such as five hours, you can turn it into something that can be used as a reward. In a way, you will get a reward in advance, but it will become an investment you’ll make in creating habits and rapid progress. Before long you’ll see that there’s no greater pleasure than making progress in what you want.

If you stay active, you’ll have fewer chances of finding yourself in a situation where you could make the wrong choice. The popular saying is true: “I’m too busy on my own grass to notice if yours is greener,” to which I’d add that you don’t have time to notice how green your grass is either. Work, especially work that requires mental effort, places us in circumstances that reduce our willingness to engage in unnecessary conflict. At the end of the day, you should focus on how many times your partner smiles when you’re with them, how your children are behaving, how much time you’ve spent cultivating yourself, and turn that into a reward you collect in the present.

AN OPEN AND WILLING HEART IS A MUSEUM OF BLESSINGS.

There are tools to help us stay on track. Since it’s often difficult to decide on rewards and willpower plays against us, we can “automate” our responses with the implementation intention method. This was developed in Germany by Peter Gollwitzer to help people put their intentions into practice and improve their habits in the long term. When I use the word automate, I mean predetermining a response to certain stimuli and creating a plan for when, where, and how you’re going to act.

Here’s how this implementation works. We set up an action that we find hard to activate on our own, and we do it without having to think about what we’re doing. For example, we can say to ourselves, “After brushing my teeth in the morning, I’ll go for a jog.” “Each time I see the neighbors, I’ll take my blood pressure.” “When I enter the elevator, I’ll check my bank account balance.”

This works because often the mental processes we use to take action lead us into a maze of worry and we end up doing nothing. We don’t always find the motivation, we convince ourselves that we don’t have the bandwidth, or we rationalize that it’s not the right time.

The idea is to connect a specific situation to an expected action defined by you. Although this suggestion may sound too basic, this technique has been proven to be effective in creating positive habits and has been favorably tested to create appropriate habits in children.