It’s a weird space to be, when you are doing a lot, and yet it feels like you have not done enough, or worse, all the work put in, shows no results.
Alternatively, in your capacity, you are doing a lot, while in fact you might not be doing enough at all.
So let’s talk about personal capacity and potential here.
Just like a manufacturing unit, we as humans too have a personal capacity, sometimes we operate to full capacity; sometimes we operate to half capacity. The goal is find our optimum capacity.
What is “Capacity”?
It is the ability of our body, mind, and soul to do something…do the actual work…any work… reading, writing, eating, sleeping, riding, driving, office work.
What is your capacity?
Let us assume you are a cab driver? You have the capacity to drive X amount of hours in a day, anything below that is the underutilization of your ‘potential capacity’ X-n, and anything above that is an over utilization of that capacity X+n.
Should you be operating at full-capacity? Ideally you should be operating at full-potential-capacity, however the goal should be to identify that “optimal” capacity of potential at which you find the balance to live, enjoy, achieve, and hustle.
Now, let us assume you are a Student; your exams are coming up in 3 weeks. If you have an ability to study for 8 hours straight, but are getting distracted and studying for roughly 4-5 hours then you are undermining your potential capacity. The only person who loses out, in this case, is you! How do you lose out, you were probably gaming, or watching Netflix, or catching up with buddies/girlfriend/boyfriend, chilling out, having a good time!
Welcome to undermining your potential capacity by choosing temporary instant gratificationover delayed gratification.
You see, you assign yourself a task, and you begin to work on it, but somewhere you find yourself distracted with, let’s say for the lack of a better example, Social Media. You force yourself to get back to work, by now you have lost your focus and you have to try 5 times harder to get back to the task at hand, only to find another gratification you must have now, probably a slice of that leftover whatever-makes-you-happy-food, oh wait! What is that another distraction…a text from absolutely anyone… yes you must gratify yourself now.
This patters of satisfying every non-critical need your emotional brain throws at you, makes it nearly impossible to focus or get back to the task at hand. By the end of your dance with focus and distractions, you are already exhausted; you have distracted yourself several times by time-consuming-instant-gratification.
A 20 minutes task which needed focus has now turned into a 4 hours all-nighter, which is super tiring and ….. “Phew, life is hard man! I work so hard, I can’t get it done, it can’t be my fault, and this is hard! Why does it always happen to me? I can’t live like this, I need a break…” – (insert break as the next must have gratification)
Is life really that hard and unfair, TBH probably not, someone on the other hand who chooses to ignore her distractions, decides to respond to all the notifications an hour later, eat once the task is accomplished, maybe listen to music “after’ completion, rather than spending 5 minutes choosing a song (we all have done that at some point…). Such a person is highly likely to complete her task successfully, with peace of mind and fulfillment at the end of day, and then reward herself with every distraction she likes.
So her life is as hard as yours, she chose to make it a little less hard on herself.
Research shows that people who chose to delay their gratification are more likely to achieve better results, and thus more likely to be successful in life.
Success, you know success, good house, good spouse, good family, good money, great values, debt free life, great reputation, good mindset. Basically all things good!
Let’s see what happens to people who choose instant gratification.
Based on the “Marshmallow Study”, it was found that children who chose instant gratification of needs grew up to accrue higher debt, lower grades, lower paying jobs, or unemployment, and even diseases such as diabetes and obesity.
(“What is Marshmallow Study?” – Google it. “Why didn’t you post a link?” – because, stop being Lazy and Google it yourself!)
The bigger problem is that people associate instant gratification with “feeling good”. The 2 are very different from each other, you do not feel good when you sleep in, and you feel the panic and FOMO right after you wake up from a longer slumber, that pint of ice-cream does not make you feel good, it makes you look fat (that’s right, fat shaming), That extra hour of TV watching did not add feel good factors, it made you feel sluggish and dizzy.
Instant gratification blocks people from attaining their goals, their paths, and creates the highest distraction ever. Thus slowing down their potential operational capacity and making them perform under capacity.
Guess who never sees the finish line: an underutilized potential capacity performer.
The good news is, now you know; now you can change. You want your company to run on full potential, identify your distractors and learn to delay them.
You want to wake up early – delay the gratification of that extra beautiful morning sleep to a better quality sleep at night.
You want better grades – start by have that 1 extra hour of “focused” distraction free study time, delay your gratifications for the breaks and vacations.
You want to operate at full capacity and achieve your goals – delay the gratification of distractions, food, pleasure, party, games, and social media. Achieve your goal and then reward yourself with all of your gratifications.