Great Marshmallow Answer To Success Essay

Does the Great Marshmallow Hold the Answers to Lifelong Success?

What makes people successful in life? Is it being born into wealth and having everything given to you? Or is it the hard climb up a figurative ladder? No, neither of those. Nor is it helping other people, receiving inheritance, becoming a scholar, or pursuing your lifelong dreams. Apparently, it is the ability to, as a child, resist a marshmallow for fifteen minutes in the hopes that a strange man in a small room will give you another. If that creepy image hasn’t given you enough chills to burn this piece of paper, then maybe you can sit through a psychological explanation of the experiment. In either 1968 or 1972 (like the amount of licks it takes to get to the center of a tootsie pop, the world may never know) a man sat down 600 children and asked them if they would like one marshmallow now, or two

Worshipping them will do no good, neither will testing children in whether they prefer one or two. Success can’t be measured in your wealth or fame, but rather in love and compassion. There’s no good way of knowing if someone will be the new innovator of the century or just another guy barely paying rent, and there’s certainly no way of testing it while that someone is a four year old child in a room with a man in a white coat. Perhaps we should spend less time testing future generation’s future success with the marshmallow experiment or essays about the marshmallow experiment, but rather teach them how to achieve that success. Where are the financial, computer sciences, or programming classes? Knowing how to write about an experiment that, though promising it sounds, does nothing to help us with real world problems may be fun, it doesn’t help when you’re stuck on the curb in a blue gown, diploma in hand with no job and no food. Now, that’s really what we should be thinking