Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Bringing the future closer
Lining these up next to each other makes something clear that willpower talk hides. You are not being asked to want the far thing slightly more. You are being asked to feel something years away as strongly as something happening now, which nobody manages. Once the size of that gap is visible, rearranging the timing stops looking like cheating and starts looking like the only reasonable move.
'After that will come seven years of hardship which will consume all but a little of what you stored up' (Quran 12:48). The hard years were real and still far off, which is exactly what makes storing in advance so hard to feel like doing.
يوسف
ثُمَّ يَأۡتِي مِنۢ بَعۡدِ ذَٰلِكَ سَبۡعࣱ شِدَادࣱ يَأۡكُلۡنَ مَا قَدَّمۡتُمۡ لَهُنَّ إِلَّا قَلِيلࣰ ا مِّمَّا تُحۡصِنُونَ
After that will come seven years of hardship which will consume all but a little of what you stored up for them
Qur’an 12:48read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In one imaging study of 151 people, ranging from social drinkers to those with severe alcohol dependence, choices about delayed rewards were linked to specific patterns of brain activity. It is a single cross sectional study in one area, so it is not a general law about smoking or tax returns. It does show that how a person weighs a delayed cost is measurable and varies, rather than being simply a matter of resolve.
Claus ED, Kiehl KA, Hutchison KE. (2011). Neural and behavioral mechanisms of impulsive choice in alcohol use disorder.. Alcoholism, clinical and experimental research doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
No amount of wanting closes a gap of years between the action and its result.
You are allowed to build the consequence rather than waiting for life to deliver one. Waiting is not more honest, it is only slower, and often it never arrives at all.
The towel left on the floor is the model. Tomorrow it is cold and unpleasant to use, and that is the whole of it. Short wait, happens every time, nothing terrible.
Letting the natural consequence do the teaching only works if it arrives soon enough to be connected to what you did. Where the gap is months or years, nobody learns from it. Not you, not anyone.