There. I said it.

I believe, this is belief not opinion, that people like you Poornima have the naturally occurring characteristic plus the kind of environment and life experience both designed to sculpt in your personality the ability to forego reward for future achievement.

It is not to say that you hadn’t felt the slap of that facepalm when you asked for some bucks to party in a sorority and were denied despite being a great student. It is not to mean that your lived experience is not as painful as any human’s when the gratification is denied up front.

It is that you can move on. And you did.

I can not.

What I am saying is that this advice:

Even if we’re not rewarded, it’s important to acknowledge our accomplishments,

is a lot more valuable than this:

By then all those years of not partying and spending my time studying taught me a valuable lesson: to not expect a reward for effort.

We are a rainbow of diverse experiences, and some are better than others at all kinds of thin longitudinal slices cut from the rainbow.

What prompted my reply was that the article, strong built on your life story, wittingly introducing good advice, doesn’t respond to the headline:

Why Doesn’t Doing The Right Thing Lead To Instant Rewards?

Why? The right thing should too and I believe that we’re wrongly built as a society to make the right thing harder to do, which make the adventurers who take the right path come out on the other side a bit too dry, lacking the sweetness of vigour that the lust of living ferments in the others, the ones to get the instant reward for doing the wrong thing.

Virtue should be chosen not taught.