The 2 Types of Gratification

Amar Pandit , CFA , CFP

July 23, 2021 | 2 Minute Read

As you already know, there are 2 types of gratification: Instant and Delayed. This Nano hopes to give you a fresh perspective on it.

Let’s take the example of writing.

A Tweet, Instagram Story or a Facebook/LinkedIn Post will give you instant gratification in the form of Likes, Shares, Retweets and Hearts. A Book on the other hand is a form of delayed gratification. It takes a lot of thinking, research, writing, rewriting, editing, postproduction process and then marketing. This takes months or even years. This is delayed gratification. Though many more people can write books, they simply do not because very few want to go through the pain of delayed gratification.

You can see the same trend even when it comes to investing.

Implementing a Delayed Gratification Strategy (not only in investing but in everything we do) is like getting compounding to work for us.

As always, we have a choice to make.

Do we want to chase instant gratification? Or

Do we want to follow the compounding path of delayed gratification?