The Problem With Instant Gratification
By: Edie Tuck
Tags: Patience, Journey, Hard Work, Instant Gratification, Dreams

You might ask, what’s wrong with a little gratification? Absolutely nothing! We all look for it, crave it. That acknowledgment from someone else that we did something good. That we succeeded. It’s a perfectly natural human desire to want to be recognized — it’s the ‘instant’ part we need to work on. This brings me back to yet another country song lyrics (not sorry): “Nothing worth it’s ever gonna be easy.” by Paul Brandt. And that goes hand in hand with the now-famous quote, “Dreams don’t work unless you do.” by John C. Maxwell.

I’ve found this to be true, regardless of what you’re trying to achieve in life. Whether you’re trying to lose weight and not seeing any results on the scale, or you’re writing a manuscript that seems to be crawling along. You could be trying to save for a rainy day, but the numbers are only climbing by pennies, or maybe you’re building a business and it feels like you’re always taking one step forward and two steps back.

Understand one thing: life is a constant work in progress, just as we are as humans. We’re continuously evolving, growing, learning, and although things might sometimes appear to stay the same, nothing ever truly does. As long as you’re putting in the work, things are moving forward even if you’re not seeing the kind of progress you’d like to see. Life doesn’t happen instantaneously, but rather, it moves forward one small step at a time. If you keep putting one foot in front of the other, eventually you’ll get to where you’re going. It’s a lot more interesting to experience the journey — if we could just automatically jump to the destination, we would have learned no lessons when we got there.

I know I’m not repeating anything new when I say that what we think of as failures are simply lessons we needed to learn. As long as we’re trying, we’re not failing, we’re learning. We’re growing.

At the beginning of this year, one of my best friends and I decided we would start our own writing and editing business. We’re both passionate about words, we’re practically carbon-copies of each other and agree on practically everything, and there’s nobody in the world I would rather do this with. So we took the first steps, and we’ve been continuing to take steps ever since. Six months later, are we a fully successful company bringing in a constant stream of income that will allow me to quit my day job? Of course not — not yet!

But in those six months, I have learned so much — not only about myself and what I’m made of but about how dreams evolve, how they never stay exactly the same, and how we, as dreamers, evolve along with them. Daryl and I have been watching our ‘baby’ bloom and grow and seeing that although it doesn’t happen overnight, all of our efforts and hard work is beginning to pay off.

Instant gratification is something we all wish for, but it’s not something that would benefit any of us in the long run.

I’ve come to realize that I don’t want automatic. I don’t want instant. Over the past six months, as we’ve worked towards building and growing this business, something else has happened. Something magical that wouldn’t have happened if we could have just snapped our fingers and had a million bucks and a fully-stocked client list in 1.5 seconds.

Our friendship has grown, and evolved, and deepened to become something I never could have even dreamed of. It’s been almost a year since I joined this platform, and ‘met’ this amazing man. A year of growing, slowly and steadily, a bond and a friendship that I know will remain with me for as long as I live. And the gratification I gain from it is better than anything instant I could have ever asked for.