Escape The Trap of Instant Gratification

Think about an orange seed. What does it eventually become if watered and nurtured?  It becomes a tree.  This tree bears fruit continuously. The seeds of this fruit if replanted can become an orchard. All of us have seeds but we are too busy lusting for the orchard owner’s lifestyle, position, job title and car to water and nurture our own seeds. We therefore beg, borrow and steal to prove to the world we are an orchard owner but that gnawing feeling of insecurity never leaves us because we know are not.  We know we are faking it until it catches up with us.  Only we know the debt we have taken and continue to take to live up to this expectation. Or the not so honest transactions we silently undertake. Meanwhile our seeds – our ideas, potential, natural abilities, gifts wither and remain underdeveloped. Simply because the process seems too hard.  We are more interested in the Orchard owners house not that story behind the house.  Not the process or sheer character strengthening that got them to where they are. Not the moment when they only had Kshs 200 to their name.   There’s a lie we continue perpetuating to ourselves. That somehow and sometime soon, there’s a deal that will come that will just sort all the underlying problems we are building up.  This deal may just be a lump sum of cash form a transaction, a relationship with someone who has made it, a big job somehow, your employer suddenly sees your massive hidden potential and quadruples your income, you will one day start a business that will take off from beginning etc. And in the meantime you keep blaming everything in sight that you think is keeping you away from your massive break. Your spouse, your employer, the economy, your industry, inflation, rising school fees etc. You are the perfect victim of the disease called instant gratification.  You are in the microwave generation.

Patience is a lot more important than we think.  I met a young man who is on his second job and is now about to take a car loan that will eat up about half of his salary in repayments. Wanting the convenience of driving is not the problem.  The problem is how he is going about it. There are lots of other cars that will not cost him that much.  He immediately wants to buy a car that he thinks elevates his status.  If he is not jolted out of this way of thinking and if nothing changes in his life, the scenario I have just described above will be him. We all know that there is always a higher social status to live up to and hence the car to go with it. There’s someone else I know who is struggling to save her ailing business (which was once very profitable) because she withdrew money to buy a house in a very nice neighbourhood.  Others have been known to dwindle down family inheritance that took decades to build in two years because of jetting round the world. The intern who quits from a company that would provide huge prospects in six months because he or she was offered a few shillings more somewhere else. Those few extra shillings will be used for drinks on Friday night.  Maybe you want to be like the boss who leaves work early to go play golf without understanding the years of extra hours that were put in before. You therefore start leaving early at your own detriment. Instant gratification also shows up in what we do not do.  There are many people who want to go into business but will not take those steps because of fear that there will no longer be able to gratify themselves the way they have been doing.  They will not be immediately able to maintain the lifestyle that they have become accustomed to.

Sometimes people ask why they should be working so hard if they cannot do all these nice things. You can do the things you enjoy.  I however believe that it’s all about doing the things you truly value and being able to do them sustainably. The same way the orange tree bears fruit continuously. It’s not doing things to get other people’s attention, respect, approval or prove something to others.  For that to happen it means we do at times have to make some very rationale decisions that the outside world would refer to as sacrifice. How are you going to live that lifestyle that you have become accustomed to sustainably and even without going to an eight to five job? The missing puzzle in all these examples and when we are caught up with instant gratification is the bigger picture. If your biggest picture is your current lifestyle or aspiring to have somebody else’s lifestyle, then it is a very small bigger picture. There’s life beyond your next car, house or holiday.  What is that for you? It has got to be bigger than the urge to buy the next version of the phone you have. Define how you want your orchard to look like.  What do you want to experience? Who do you want to become (character)? How do you live? What will be your income? Who is important? What impact do you want to have? By all means put the car you want to be driving sustainably. Keep that in mind this year as you make your decisions. Reveal the bigger picture through your everyday actions.  You can’t serve two masters.  You may not get it all one hundred percent right and nobody ever does but something has to take priority.  Is it going to be instant gratification or process?  Process is what results in orchards.  Is it going to be the Orchard or the Microwave for you? Let’s now get this year started.