Page 111 - Hard Goals

102 HARD Goals

ment I’ll get from eating the cake right now. If my decision was
this:

Option A: Enjoy cake now.
Option B: Look skinny and feel emotionally great tonight.

I’d choose Option B in a heartbeat. But that’s not my decision.
My decision is more like this:

Option A: Enjoy cake now.
Option B: Look skinny and feel emotionally great in three
months (while experiencing cake deprivation in the
present).

To the quirky human brain, my future payoff doesn’t seem
nearly as enticing as what I can get in the present. Granted,
my payoff in the future is great (way better than fi ve minutes
of cake enjoyment), but I’m mentally discounting that payoff.
After all, who knows what the future holds? I could be dead in
three months. Maybe I’ve got some vacation time coming up
and rationalize that I’ll have plenty of time to diet then, and
probably even exercise, too. Maybe in three months science will
have discovered a new drug that makes you lose all your excess
fat and I won’t ever have to think about any of this again.
Whether or not I stick to my diet goal is entirely based on
how much I value the present over the future (or how much I
discount the future). This will determine whether I eat the cake
and get the smaller immediate payoff or forgo the cake and
get the bigger future payoff. (In research shorthand this is the
Smaller Sooner versus Larger Later choice.)
Each of us has a unique level of bias that makes us value
things we could get right now more than the things we could