La paciencia como predictor de éxito

In the early 1960s Mischel created these wonderfully simple tests on children that wound up revealing a lot about them. In what became known as the “marshmallow experiment,” Mischel put three-, four-, and five-year-old kids in a room alone with their favorite treat—a pretzel stick, a marshmallow—and told them that if they could last a few minutes without eating the treat they’d receive a second treat. A small child’s ability to wait turned out to be correlated with his IQ and his family circumstances and some other things as well. Tracking the kids through life, Mischel later found that the better a five-year-old resisted the temptation, the higher his future SAT scores and his sense of self-worth, and the lower his body fat and the likelihood he’d suffer from some addiction.

Esta cita del libro "The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds" de Michael Lewis, me encantó. Un libro buenísimo, por cierto, muy recomendado.