Delayed Gratification Gone Too Far
When you've left the marshmallow so long, it's gone bad
UPDATE: Originally published in September 2024, this essay is about the massive life reframe that unfolded on my two-month “sabbatical road trip.” I have since jump-started my post-corporate life with my post-Delayed Gratification mindset. Updates and reflections are after this post. But first, the original…
I sit on a rainy day in the Basque County of France, exhausted from three gloriously sunny days of surfing and CrossFit, eating amazing local food, and enjoying the reality of not working, not monitoring a work email inbox, and otherwise flaunting the freedom of a true sabbatical. This may be the first time in my life that I’ve fully embraced eating the marshmallow.
I learned early on in my (barely) adult life to master delayed gratification. It was out of necessity; I had just been crowned a Teen Mom with the birth of my daughter at age 16 while a junior in high school. I learned to persevere to graduate high school and go on to college, then graduate school, and then my first job, and so forth. There would be no blissful college years of socialising, freedom, and study-abroad travel, but that’s not to say that I never had moments of joy — I truly did with wonderful friends and experiences along the way. I did feel the need to be conservative with money, never leaning into my full paycheck for housing or cars, and certainly never taking more than two weeks between my work experiences, even when I was moving cross-country to take a new role.
Delayed gratification has been a gift. Throughout my career, I became known as a hard worker capable of tackling difficult problems, and I’ve gotten great satisfaction out of my work. It’s an important part of my personal identity. And over time, my expertise and work reputation earned me opportunities to work at some of the best companies in the world.
Delayed gratification was the key to me writing my book, The Work Revolution: Freedom and Excellence for All, which essentially required me to do nothing but work a full time job and write every weekend for seven months, eschewing all television, movies, pleasure reading, and most socialization until I turned in my final manuscript. I think it took me about two years to recover from that.
I firmly believe the book established my credibility as a thought-leader, leading to my most recent role as the Head of Global People Development at Chanel. I spent 8.5 years in this role, starting in New York and then relocating to London with the establishment of a new headquarters in the UK for Chanel. I am extraordinarily proud of the work I did with my extended team and colleagues, and I learned who I was uniquely as a leader, finding my voice and my own style.
However, I remember a moment in my late 20s when it started to dawn on me that delayed gratification shouldn’t be a default choice. I had taken my first trip to Italy with my sister and brother-in-law, a magical experience in which we visited Gubbio, the hometown of our great-grandmother1. Unlike the Di Grasso failed Sicily family reunion in Season 2 of The White Lotus, we were lucky enough to actually track down our distant relatives and were welcomed in with open arms. They organised a huge feast of a lunch, inviting even more relatives we didn’t know existed, tasting local foods that we had experienced growing up, never realising the true origins.
During this trip, I purchased and brought home a beautiful tin of extra virgin olive oil from the region. To call it special was an understatement. I treasured that olive oil so much that I couldn’t bring myself to use it. Nothing was so important as to call into use the quality of this oil. So I kept it on a shelf for a very long time. When I finally found the right occasion to use it (and to be honest I couldn’t even tell you what that was), I eagerly opened the tin, only to quickly realise it had gone bad. Delayed gratification? Not this time.
It was at that moment that I vowed to myself that I would use the beautiful things I acquired over the years, never being too precious about anything. And to a certain extent, I’m happy to say that has gone well - I have thoroughly enjoyed using the extraodinary products I was lucky enough to acquire in my years at Chanel, for example. But over the past few years, I’ve slowly come to realise the one area in which I’ve not gotten it right: WORK.
I’ve programmed myself to work work work work work work…and I’ve blindly set the goal to earn and earn and save and save because as they say you never have enough for retirement.
It’s difficult to make the decision to slow down, to take stock and be intentional to start enjoying the fruits of labor. Yes, sure, we do this in little ways - by taking vacations to exotic locations, splurging on fine wine and gorgeously prepared food, buying a lovely house or dream car. All the while, we continue work-work-working with little sips of air here and there to refresh and restore, never quite feeling like we’ve gotten a full, deep-lungs breath of life-filling oxygen. And on we go…
I was coming up on five years in London, and it was a critical moment to decide what was next for me with regard to my role, and life really. I was ready for something new, but what, exactly? Should I stay at Chanel and find a different role? Go to a new company? Reach to become a Chief People Officer, the logical next step in my career? Push for an even-higher salary somewhere? I tested a lot of these ideas by putting myself in the running for three or four different roles, and luckily the universe gave me the answer I had all along: none of the above.
There was another defining moment for me during this contemplation. Though I’m still hovering below the age of 50 (barely), and plenty of friends and family around me have passed the age of 50, it was only when one friend in particular turned 50 that I was rattled awake. She was one of my very best friends at my very first job out of graduate school. We were in our 20s at the time, of course, finding our way in the world of work, slowly building areas of skills and expertise. I was learning to surf during that time, which is to this day one of my favorite things in the world, the truest way for me to reconnect with nature and my inner self. Because I lived in Florida, getting time on the waves was easy, accessible. However, as I moved along in my career, work took me to locations that were less accessible for surfing. During my years in New York having discovered Montauk as an amazing getaway and surf hub a mere 3-hour train journey away, I set a goal that I would one day own a beach house in which I could store my surfboards and show up to a familiar break and surf with locals I came to know. One day.
But somehow, my friend turning 50 was a jolt to my system - I’ve worked this hard for 24 years doing work that I mostly love, but never with the amount of freedom that I’d ideally like. I barely get time to surf, and that surf house was still a floating but far-in-the-future notion. Delayed gratification gone amok, again. When would I have enough in the bank to finally justify one of the very things I’ve worked so hard to earn?
So yes, here I sit, having exiting my role at Chanel a few weeks ago, unsure about what will come next, but enjoying a two-month roadtrip with my partner and our big dog, sampling surfing towns from France through Spain to Portugal. It’s partly a scouting trip for a town we might decide is right for the surf house, and it’s partly a discovery for both of us on what we want next for work. I’ve decided that mostly loving work isn’t good enough - I’ve given everything of myself for work until now, and for the next precious 15 or 20 years left in my career, I want to completely love the work and the amount of autonomy that I have, with enough time sprinkled in to enjoy that beach house before my body is too far past the Use By date to actually enjoy it.
Postscript March 2025
I’m 50 now. I’m working as an independent consultant advising on leadership and people programs. Oh, and my partner and I opened a CrossFit gym.
Along our two months of wandering, my partner and I asked the question: What is your DREAM job? For him, it was opening and running a CrossFit gym. I had never dared to think about running our own CrossFit gym2; I thought it was impossible to make money doing this.
We ran the business case (yes, you can make a living). We found a property (which felt a little like winning the lottery). We swapped the beach house dream for a CrossFit dream.
Isn’t this just more delayed gratification, you might ask?
Maybe.
We definitely went into the venture knowing it would take a good deal of time before we would turn a profit. We also decided to think long-term about our vision and what we wanted to build, committing to an upfront investment with our own money. All signs of delayed gratification.
BUT. We are getting all the joys of running a local community-based business and the freedom of being our own boss. We are doing the work we love now. It is hard work, but it is the most gratifying work I’ve ever done.
What I thought I needed was a beach house. But it turns out, the reason I needed it was to recover from work that was sucking the life out of me. Now? I don’t want the hassle of second-home ownership and AirBnB rentals and things breaking down and and and…
It turns out, all I really needed was more ownership over my life and my work, more autonomy and control. The flexibility to visit someone else’s beach house, whenever and wherever I please. Gratification now, gratification daily, gratification with my life.
Our great-grandmother immigrated to the US from Gubbio, Italy in the 1920s to marry a man she had only met through letters. He died at an early age from black lung, working the coal mines in rural Pennsylvania, so we never met him. But Nonna we knew and loved, having never learned English despite living most of her adult life in the US. We decided to visit Gubbio, assuming it was a poor village that justified her leaving it for a better life in the US, but we were surprised and delighted (and confused?) to see how quaint and lovely it was!
I found CrossFit in 2012 and it was like being a kid again in a playground, bouncing around monkey bars and going upside-down in gymnastics—all the things my body loves to do! I’ve been fully committed ever since, earning my Level 1 Trainer certificate and visiting CrossFit gyms over the world. I can attribute more than 90% of my adult friends to CrossFit connections, and it continues to be one of the biggest loves of my life.
Love the part about the beach house not being the "real" dream but the next thing to THINK ABOUT and FEEL INTO rather than materialize as a reality—so the real next thing that wanted to become a physical reality could enter. This happens quite often—the left brain grabbing onto the first supposed life rope offered. These interim goals are actually experiences we can have via highly attentive imagination to see if the body really wants them to continue very long. . .
As a fellow human with Italian roots who identifies as a hard worker your story deeply resonated with me. Thank you for the remainder that delayed gratification is important, but so is finding time to savor those marshmallows!