Monday, March 5, 2012

Self-Control

I've often thought about self-control and how it impacts my waistline, but I haven't often connected the idea of self-control with mental capacity.  Here's a quote from an article I read this week:

"Indeed, childhood self-control is twice as important as intelligence in predicting academic achievement."  (click here to read it for yourself:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/opinion/sunday/building-self-control-the-american-way.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=opinion)

This reminds me of some reading I did in "Nurture Shock" (one of my favorite reads from two years ago) that talked about studies done with children and delayed gratification and storytelling.  I'm sure you remember hearing about the marshmallow experiment in which a child had to choose to have one marshmallow now or a few of them in a few minutes (watch a video, which is quite entertaining, showing it here:  http://www.buzzfeed.com/akdobbins/the-marshmallow-test or you can read about it here:  http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_lehrer).

Thought provoking...

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