What does CSI, ice cream and the latest, greatest real estate marketing tools have in common?  Something that could forever hold you back if you aren’t careful…

Solving an exciting major crime in just 45 minutes, experiencing that luscious feeling of sweet cream melting in your mouth and believing that the latest real estate “silver bullet” will solve all your problems are all examples of instant gratification.

Hey, I like watching a great TV show and eating ice cream as much as the next person.  I even paid $249 for an awesome book on writing headlines, titled: “How to Write Great Headlines Instantly!” (which unfortunately was 160 pages pages long – so much for “instantly”).

The problem is that our collective sense of what is important is increasingly based upon “Get it now with the least amount of effort“.  Short term pleasure often results in long-term pain.  Time lost, weight gained and precious financial resources badly misplaced in so-called solutions that promise little or no effort to see immediate substantial benefit.

It is only natural to want instant results with the least amount of effort.  In fact it’s wired right into our survival mechanism.  However, what helped us survive often holds us back from reaching our full potential.  That requires hard work, dedication and a willingness to transform our need for gratification into fulfillment 0f enjoying the process…

Every achievement requires many efforts. Those individual efforts combine with each other to bring the desired result.

Ralph Marston

If you set your egoic goals for the purpose of freeing yourself, enhancing yourself or your sense of importance, even if you achieve them, they will not satisfy you.

Eckhart Tolle

One of the most powerful ways to overcome the allure of instant gratification is to take pleasure in the process of whatever you do.  This means the act of doing what is necessary is even more fulfilling than the results you are striving to achieve.

While we can perhaps rightfully blame Madison Avenue for pushing the drug of “You deserve to have it now!”, each of us certainly has the ability to simply just say “no”.  Instant gratification never fills the void of desire nor built a sustainable business.  Enjoying the process of doing what’s necessary pretty much always does…

(BTW, before you send in a comment pointing out the irony of this post’s title, let me assure you it was full intended :0)