Immediate Gratification (7/21/14)

I was having a conversation with my friend Bob Turel about a project I wanted to do for a Toastmasters leadership conference. Instead of doing the same old presentation with a presenter at the front of the room just lecturing I wanted to do a small panel discussion with a decent length Q&A session at the end. I also wanted to tailor the presentation theme so that it had a wider appeal to a non Toastmasters base so that I could go out and promote my session to the general public.

In our dialogue Bob eluded to one of my biggest pet peeves, immediate gratification. More and more it seems like society wants everything yesterday without having to put any skin in the game. It made me think back to my first presentation to a Rotary Club. In my opinion I gave a terrible performance. I could try and justify my poor showing away by saying I was tweaking the speech, was on short sleep, and had been working at the airport to scrounge up cash for the book tour, but that isn’t an excuse. Part of success is having bad days, learning from them, and having a better performance the next go around.

You don’t get that from immediate gratification. That experience is reserved for those who have the strength to seek out the hard way of doing things. It’s an experience that lies on the long road that is bypassed by the short cuts taken by immediate gratification. There is no express line to success, but you can shorten the time it takes to get there by committing to do the hard work sooner. Thanks for the reminder Bob.