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How to communicate effectively with difficult people
How to handle conflict
How to stay calm under pressure
Seizing short-term opportunities
Grabbing short-term opportunities can lead you to settle for a small present reward rather than wait for a larger future reward.
This tendency is known as the present bias. While it may feel good at the time, it can negatively impact long-term planning and decision-making.
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How the present bias impacts your success
It’s tempting to take a reward that is available right now, but the cognitive bias can harm your future self.
For example:
- You may work hard to get a place on a law degree course, but then give in to the present bias and spend most of your time socialising at the expense of your ...
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Illustrating the present bias
The classic experiment to show if the present bias is at play is to ask, "would you prefer $100 today or $110 in one week?" The desire for instant reward will cause many to take the $100 now rather than waiting for the reward.
A study showed stronger activation in reward-related areas of th...
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Strategies to manage the present bias
Managing the present bias consists in staying mindful of your long-term goals.
- Write down your long-term goals. Create a list of what you want to achieve this year or over the next few years. Then, when you're faced with a choice between different rewards, refer back t...
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Our emotions are short-term biased
Our emotions are obsessed with the present moment because it’s difficult to look past our immediate fears and anxieties. And this prevents good decision-making.
The sweet spot in decision-making is to find the short-term failures that enable huge long-term successes to happen in th...
Our brains are programmed to procrastinate
It’s easier for our brains to process concrete and immediate outcomes rather than abstract and future things. So the short-term effort easily dominates the long-term upside in our minds— behavioral scientists call this present bias.
Short-term thinking
Most of us imagine that we engage in some form of long-term thinking; after all, we have goals and plans. And basically we are in denial about this because it is hard to have perspective about our own decision-making process. The best way to overcome this is to recognize the clear signs of short ...
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