The Marshmallow Test PROVED Tony Robbins Right About Success

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]My original employer and mentor, Tony Robbins, used to say "Repetition is the mother of skill." And it's so true. It's all about repetition. Well, most of it, like an 80/20 repetition versus like education and development and all this other spooky stuff, right? And it reminded me of a study that they did years ago where they wanted to see what predicates success. And they said, "Well, when we put these kids in the room and we give them the marshmallow and we say you can either have this marshmallow now or you can have two later." Like waited, they delayed gratification, they were willing to not get the reward immediately so they could get the two marshmallows later on, they were radically more successful in most every way, especially like economics, than the kids who couldn't delay that gratification, right? And I think this connects to what Tony would always tell me, repetition. In order to grind out the repeated upside, the routine, the baseline activities that you need to do, the boring stuff, the scary stuff, the stuff that's not fun. In order to do that, you got to continually delay gratification. It's not about doing the next thing, it's about giving up the gratification that would come along with doing the next thing so you could do the thing that is the foundation of your success. A lot of creative clients, a lot of highly motivated clients are so ADD nowadays, they always want to do something else and it's all about instant gratification. You got to make sure they act upon that basic truth, that repetition is the mother of skill.

[00:01:34]It's statistically proven to be the basis for most success, especially economically speaking.