THE MICROWAVE MENTALITY

A microwave as we all know is  an electric cooking hardware. It is said that it cooks food much faster than conventional cooking methods such as using stoves, grillers, etc. you can cook popcorns much faster and nicer on a microwave than other methods…

People who are in a hurry for eating, can get something out of the freezer and defrost it within few minutes and have it cooked quickly than having to let it melt or defrost in water…. That’s our people today… everything is needed fast. People do not have time to wait.

The microwave mentality is the attitude or belief that everything should happen instantly or without delay. The following descriptions explain this mentality:

• It is when one wants everything in life to happen within the blink of an eye without regard for natural process of growth. 
• On an adverse expression, a person with microwave mentality is a woman who does not want to fall pregnant but want to be called a mother of a child and have one. 
• It’s the desire to be a millionaire without the regard of the process of learning the discipline of building an investment portfolio or business or any form of income stream.
• There are many examples that one can give, but at the end of the day, having a microwave mentality is believing that everything is taking too long to long to happen such that you’d bribe to get your way up to the next level in business, or to get a degree or marks of a particular subject. 
• A person with this mentality is one who wants everything done as though life is like getting everything on drive through. You know, like the way want instant everything these days: instant food, instant pap, instant coffee. We also want instant weight loss using LIPO SUCTION and dangerous drugs, instant wealth like winning Loto and many other things without putting effort at all.

Don’t take this wrong

We want things to be done much faster and more efficiently, but without compromising the quality of a having quality people. Quality is not instant. It has to be matured. If you love wine, or stake, you will learn that the best wines are the old wines, the older it gets, the better. But people are different, the slower it gets, the more we don’t like it. as a matter of fact people would want to get married and find themselves having babies without having to go through the nine months of emotional imbalances so that they keep their looks.

I read a statement by a Harvard Psychologist, Daniel Gilbert. He said, “if we gave lottery losers each 30 seconds on TV or radio to announce not “I won!” but “I lost”, it would take almost 9 years to get through the losers of one draw”. Meaning it takes so many millions losers to make one a millionaire through lottery. So you get to hear of one lotto winner after a million losses. Life is like that… it take a million other things to get one good thing done. Sometimes you just need to hang in there.

For example: any one who can run fast would like to be like Caster Semenya on the tracks, or like the Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt but if you ask them how they get to achieve their results…. You will crunch. it takes Bolt less than 10 seconds to win an Olymbic Gold medal in the 100m race, but it takes him hours or hard training and months of patience and endurance to build a muscle to run for 10 seconds. 

Why Microwave mentality

There are reasons to this as well. There are many reasons why people behave like this, some are hard to explain in a short space.

• Cognitive capacity. High IQ (intelligence) is linked with future thinking or tendencies. People who can delay instant gratification for a future dated and more pleasurable result often have an executive brain, which is linked with high intelligence. Even children with high IQ are more able to shift their focus from instant rewards than those that are not. On the contrary, low IQ is associated with instant gratification; mostly food gratification and short term pleasure, and also associated with financial hardship.
• Imagination. Inability to invasion a more secure and comfortable future. This usually leads to avoidance of short term pain and replace it with short term pleasure without the knowledge or proper assessment of possible long term suffering
• Feeling of helplessness. If you grew up an a family where people could not deliver in their promises and made you feel victim or vulnerable, you tend to want to take every opportunity to benefit yourself first without wasting any time. This is because you grow up to become very uncertain about whether the people of situation around you will benefit you in the long term or not, so you grab the first possible opportunity to get a reward. There is a negative twist to this one: it can make one to completely depend on someone who is ,more capable of providing gratification all the time and robs you of developing yourself to be independent.

What is wrong with this

The desire for instant gratification has many effects

• It affects the quality of any results that you get. Rome was not build over night. Good things come to those who wait(not those who watch, but those who are patient enough to spend their time adding value to their product by patiently crafting and redesigning).
• It can lead to some form of greed and parasitic tendencies. Such as wanting to attach yourself to someone not to gain the lessons from them, but to eat of their success without your labour. You will see that it was greed and selfish ambitions in that when the host (the blesser, in which ever way you can define it) has lost all or is down on his or her knees, the parasite goes to look for another hostt.
• It robs you of good lessons that time offers:  desire for instant gratification will make you avoid anything that takes time to show results, therefore you will miss the opportunity to learn how to be patient, how to grow something from ground, the discipline and of maturing your own products. Time builds character. You may have heard the statement “wealth skips a generation”: the first generation learns the systems and principles of building things to success, the one who inherits things find them standing and does not know loss, then he can easily squander it and loses all without ability to rise up.
• It also robs you of learning the ability to bounce back. Herman Mashaba, the founder of the old hair product Black Like Me, in the early 90 lost his factory in Pretoria over fire. He was manufacturing over 120 different products for local and international clients. When it burned down, he lost all. Worked hard over 18 months to rebuild the business. If he was looking for instant gratification, he would have collapsed and died of heart attach or stress over the loss. But because building the business from ground up taught him virtue, he survived.
• Financial crisis: Buy now pay later. Instant gratification one of the causes of debt. People want to buy the things they cannot afford with the money they do not have.  Later can lead to gambling, drugs, etc.

      How do you step out of this

• Develop a futuristic thinking. I learned this from my wife. Very focused. Once she set her mind on a goal far ahead, he pushes in all ways to get to it.
• Increase your pain threshold. Instant gratification is also a result of a strong desire to avoid pain. 
• Learn the art of patience. I can explain this enough.
• Learn to count the cost. Often time, instant gratification is paid for by future earnings.

Tips on attaining wealth in a reasonable space

• I don’t think that exist. We all are different. Things will always happen in different times for different people. It is therefore very safe to never think of wealth or personal development in that way. progress happens slowly, allow it to happen as you learn. however, the rate of success  for you, what ever that success, it will depend on your level of mental grow. 
• How long it stays with you will require a lot of things, including the above. 
• Read biographies and apply the principles. A biography can take you through a success story that was build over 50 years. So you can learn 50 year long principles in 5 weeks. But you will have to apply them over time.
• Get mentor-ship or a coach from successful people who sustained their success. That way, you avoid making silly mistakes.