Red Kites Life

If you haven't already heard of the Marshmallow Experiment it's worth Googling.  In fact, even if you have heard of it, it's worth reading up more about it, as a lot of the early conclusions (from 1970) have now been challenged.  Additionally, many of the conclusions have been employed somewhat "flexibly" in various contexts, from child development to sales management, to assert that if you didn't learn to resist one marshmallow for fifteen minutes in the pursuit of two when you were 5 years old, you will fail to find academic, professional, personal or financial success in your later life.  In fact this conclusion has now been debunked. Why? The original experiments were conducted on children in the Stanford University childcare facility ie these were children of gifted, intelligent, educated, potentially privileged adults whose backgrounds were already likely to lead to their children becoming successful later in life. When the experiments were repeated wit...