A clarification on celebrating victory

Today my friend said he wished he had this conversation with me years ago, so I’ll recount it for all the similar people who aren’t going to have it in the next several years. (I expect people to be relevantly similar if they are ADHDish and not prone to smoothly doing the stuff they set out to do.) Often if I achieve something arduous, I award myself some kind of predetermined nice thing, such as a sundae. When I discuss this with other people, they tend to say things like “but I can just eat a sundae anyway”, which I hear as meaning that the issue is that that they have no ability to stick to their commitments and not acquire the sundae unless it is earned. But on further discussion, what this friend meant at least was that since there isn’t any rule against eating a sundae any time he wants without doing something arduous, it isn’t a very compelling impetus to work. While I do usually treat the reward as disallowed in the temporal vicinity of it being a prize, that isn’t the important difference here in our models. I’m just not at all expecting a sundae to be a sufficient incentive to work hard for hours. Winning at a challenge, and at achieving my goals in particular, is compelling in itself. The prize for winning is more like a decoration accentuating, concretifying and glorifying the win, which might otherwise be an abstract and anticlimactic point. So if you think you are the wrong kind of person to make use of concrete prizes for achievement, due to not being incredibly compelled by the kind of stuff a child with no money would work hard for, perhaps reconsider. Discuss

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