When $80 Is Worth More Than $100

If someone were to come up to you and offer you $80 on the spot or tell you that they would give you that they would give you $100 in one year which would you take?

Interestingly, the vast majority of people would actually take the $80 immediately despite knowing that $100 has a greater value.

This is known as time discounting and it basically means that something loses its perceived value the further away we are from receiving it. In this case $100 to be paid later is logically worth more than $80, but in the moment we tend to discount its value because it is not immediate. So we perceive that $80 given immediately is worth more than $100 given one year from now.

Often we do this with our physique goals too. We may have a goal that we know is important to us (a lean physique), but the date we could realistically expect to attain that goal is far in the future so we begin to discount the value of that goal when faced with a competing option.

Even though we would logically say that our physique goal is more important or valuable to us than eating that entire jar Nutella in the back of the cupboard, in the moment of decision the importance of that goal can become devalued because of how far away that goal is.

As a result, we can begin to perceive the immediate consumption of Nutella as actually being more important than our physique goal that is far in the future.

The next thing we know we’re waking up in the morning on the kitchen floor in a carb coma with our face covered in Nutella, a large wooden spoon still in hand.

Often we talk about sticking to your plan being a choice, but when we hear that we tend to think of it as being a fair choice. But our feelings will make us do illogical things more than we might like to admit.

So the key here really is to commit up front to make decisions only based on principle and not on emotion.

If you’ve not decided to deviate from plan beforehand in a rational manner, then you don’t allow your feelings to make the decision for you in the moment.

When you invite your feelings to make a decision, you can be almost certain that they’re often going to make the wrong one.