The magic button trap

Doing easy things vs. doing hard things. Plus, printing money, doing steroids, how to get an amazing romantic partner, and saving 15% on your car insurance in just 15 minutes.

May 19, 2025

A couple years ago I paid this super rich marketing dude for coaching. One of the things I learned from him was the “magic button theory”, which basically says that people want to get the stuff they want quickly and with little effort.

The faster you can give them the result they want, and the less work they have to do to get it, the more they’re gonna buy it.

Imagine how much less appealing this ad campaign would sound if it was “15 hours could save you 15% or more on car insurance.”

For example, imagine you want to lose weight. Which option sounds more appealing to you — working out for an hour a day to lose the weight in 3 months, or working out for 15 minutes a day to lose the weight in 1 month?

Or imagine you want to get a girlfriend. Which option sounds more appealing to you — spending months improving your social skills and going to therapy to resolve your insecurities, or "memorize this one 7-word line to make any woman want you"?

If you think about it, basically all of 20th century American capitalism has been about giving people stuff faster for less money and less work. Some examples:

If you want to eat a tasty meal, you don't need to cook it yourself or go to a fancy restaurant and wait half an hour. You can just get in your car and head to the drive-thru at McDonald's.
If you want to go shopping, don't bother going to your friendly neighborhood bookseller, grocer, game store, and tailor — just go to Walmart and get everything for a low price.
Or, go on Amazon, buy it with one click, and get it shipped straight to your porch in 2 days.
Want to watch a movie? Don't go to the video store — just log into Netflix and watch whatever you want.
Et cetera.

Basically, people always want the fastest, easiest way of getting the thing they want. They want to do the minimum possible amount of work and wait the minimum possible amount of time.

Why you should never press the magic button

There are 3 problems with doing things the easy way. The first is that it usually doesn't work.

There’s no magic 7-word line you can say to make any woman fall in love with you. And there’s no magic business-in-a-box that can make you rich — if there was, zillions of people would already be doing it, and competition would have driven profit margins to almost zero. Et cetera.

Sure, every now and then there’s a real shortcut. But most people who are trying to sell you a shortcut are lying. 99% of the time, there’s no shortcut, and you have to do the hard thing.

The third problem with doing things the “easy way” is that there’s usually a hidden price of your shortcut.

For example, you can build some pretty badass muscles by doing steroids, and you can hit a lot of home runs, but it's gonna take 10-15 years off your life.

Or if you eat a ton of fast food, you spend a bunch of money and you get super unhealthy. It's much better to eat meals you cook yourself with whole foods, even though that takes longer and requires learning how to cook.

Another example: I've listened to a few episodes of The James Altucher Show where he interviews some criminal or fraudster who got caught. The criminal always made a ton of money in the short term, but then he got busted and it ruined his life.

If you want to get rich, a much better way is to pay the price today by going through the pain and suffering of building a business. It's much better to spend a few years suffering today for an easy life afterwards, then spend a few years having fun today and then get punished for the rest of your life.

Third, and most importantly, you usually build more character by doing the hard thing, too.

For example, imagine you want to lose weight. Do you get liposuction and get the weight off instantly? The problem with liposuction is that people usually put the weight back on pretty quickly, because they didn’t actually build healthy habits. Whereas people who go on a diet are much more likely to keep the weight off, because going through the hardship of dieting and exercising forces you to develop the habits necessary to keep the weight off.

Another example: a lot of guys get a girlfriend by learning pickup artist tricks and a bunch of "lines". But then they can't keep the girlfriend, because they're not actually a cool person — eventually the girlfriend sees through their tricks and leaves. If you want an amazing romantic partner, work on yourself so you become an amazing romantic partner.

When you delay gratification, you win.

I'm sure most of you reading this article have already heard about the marshmallow test. (If you haven't, basically, some psychology researchers gave kids marshmallows and told them that if they didn't eat it for 5 minutes, they could have another marshmallow. The kids who didn't eat the marshmallows right away went on to have much better life outcomes than the kids who did eat the marshmallows.)

Let's take the marshmallow test a step further. Generally, in life, the people who can delay gratification win at the expense of the people who can’t delay gratification.

Marketing people spend years building businesses where they sell products promising instant gratification. They make a windfall of cash. And generally speaking, the suckers greedily thought they could get instant results without doing the work get screwed.

Politicians promise people all kinds of economic subsidies that help the economy in the short term and screw them over in the long term. For example, the American government has borrowed and printed a shitload of money because the American public wants government services but doesn't want to have to pay taxes. The politicians who gave people instant gratification got re-elected over and over again. They also left America with rampant inflation and a massive national debt.

When someone offers you the magic button, and you press it, you're the sucker.

How do you escape the magic button trap?

The good news about the marshmallow test is that some evidence shows that delaying gratification is a skill. It's a muscle, and you can build it by just delaying gratification more often.

So build the ability to delay gratification and do hard things. And start thinking about how to get the result you want in 6 months to a year by working hard, not how to get the result you want tomorrow by doing something easy.

Generally speaking, if you want to change your life, think in terms of building skills and habits instead of changing the outside world. Change starts from within.

And have the mindset that most things that promise instant results are scams. Also, have the mindset that going on a hard journey to improve yourself is almost always worth it, and that pursuing a long-term goal will make you a better person in other ways you can’t imagine right now.

Hey! Thanks for reading.

My name's Theo, and every other Monday I post an article like this one about something that was on my mind the week before. Usually it has something to do with psychology or how the economic/social environment around us works.

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