Delayed gratification: Where do you stand?

You will find it helpful to think about your investment in delayed gratification. If nothing else, knowing this about yourself will help you make better life decisions.

I like to think about delayed gratification in life intervals in powers of ten; for example:
-- 50-100 years (e.g. investing in retirement savings)
-- 5-10 years (investing in your education, physical health, your children, etc.)
-- one-half-to-one year (saving for vacations, going on diets, etc.)
-- 3-6 weeks (planning a day off, an event with friends, etc.)
-- 2-4 days (what you'll plan for this weekend, dinner with friends, etc.)
-- 4-8 hours (how you'll spend your evening after work/school, etc.)
and less than 30 minutes (for those of you with weak powers of delayed gratification).

At this extreme, my dog Gershwin, for example, has a maximum delayed gratification period of about one minute. I can't motivate him to withhold gratification for more than that length of time, no matter how hard I try.

I found out fairly early in my career that I do not like to work on projects that have a 50-100 year time frame or longer. At least one of the graduate research theses that I completed had a challenge with a 100+ year time frame, it was unlikely that I would witness "significant" results in that field during my remaining lifetime. After several degrees and numerous jobs I have settled in on 5-10 years maximum as my limit of "delayed gratification" in a job of project, and am much more comfortable with one-half to one year. There are two reasons for this: (1) I want to see results for my efforts in the fairly short term and (2) my interest level starts to drop after several years, and I want to move on to something else. I'm just not a good long term research person, and that's OK.

Not suprisingly, looking back on my career discover that I have changed my "job" in significant ways about every 3-5 years. I can identify about 10 distinctly different jobs and/or careers in my lifetime. Again, after 3-5 years I want to see measureable results attributable to my efforts and I get bored and want to move on.

Of course, not everything is quite that simple, and most efforts have a combination of short and long-term gratifications. I raise sequoias from seed, and their maturity is definitely in the 100+ year category. I will not live long enough to see the mature trees. However I do have the pleasure of accomplishing seed germination (very difficult!) and seeing them grow in the 5-10 year timeframe. And there is this mysterious often uncharacterized component of delayed gratification that benefits not me, but someone else, namely, those who will hopefully appreciate those trees 100-500 years from now.

So what is your interval of acceptable delayed gratification? And is it aligned with life decisions that you make?