Here’s my column from the April issue of Scanorama. Enjoy!

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Apparently, self-control is a good thing:

Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly [to get marshmallows now instead of waiting and getting two later], seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.

[T]he ability to delay gratification … was a far better predictor of academic performance than I.Q. In other words, “intelligence is really important, but it’s still not as important as self-control.”

That’s my problem. I would have failed the marshmallow test. I’ve always been the kind who eats all candy right away, hand to mouth until the bag is empty. The upside is that I would have been just fine with getting only one marshmallow now. No regrets, either.

However, I always did well in school, I had the patience to learn those German verbs, and work my through the math problems. Maybe I’m a genius?

But I can’t get up at 5 am to work out, I’m no good at dieting, and I generally prefer now to later. Which is why I can never have projects just lying around. I’ve published three books, two of them were collections of my earlier articles, the third an oral history of a hockey team.

I would love to have “work-in-progress”. When I picked up painting, I loved it – the actual work – but I always had to finish everything in one sitting. (Standing).

So, now I’m actually trying to practice having unfinished work lying around. I go to bed in the middle of a sentence instead of burning the midnight oil and working my way to the end of the story. I would love to have a half-finished crossword puzzle folded inside my notebook, so that I could add a word every now and then, over a course of days and weeks.

And this weekend, I did something that may be a step to the right direction.

This:

Although, I chose Monday’s crossword because it’s the easiest, and I finished it in one sitting.

Upside: I should have been working instead. I feel like a better person already.

The small path to the gym goes through a tiny piece of recreational area. I want to say forest, but that’s just too grand a word for what is a very tiny green spot on the map, but yes, the path goes through the woods.

It can be scary in the winter, especially when I’m listening to music on my Apple® iPhone™ music player, especially after J told me that the urban predators look for people just like that.

It only takes me a minute to cut through the “forest” – with real living animals such as roe deer and hares – but a lot of different thoughts rush through my head. I know, there’s nothing in the dark that isn’t there in the light, and all that, but yesterday, I walked to the gym in full daylight, and saw three of these shady beasts hiding by the side of the construction site, and my heart missed a beat.

Then I turned on the music and cut through the forest, knowing that I’d be able to outrun the ‘saurs.