The Secret of Self-control, willpower and discipline?

The New Yorker Magazine had a great article on what research has uncovered about delayed gratification and what an essential life skill it is. 

It seems learning simple and easy self-control skills can have a huge effect on how one's life develops, but few people learn those skills. So I've highlighted some some excerpts, but I suggest reading the whole article.

"...after just a few sessions, students show significant improvements in the ability to deal with hot emotional states...even the most mundane routines...are really sly exercises in cognitive training: we’re teaching ourselves how to think so that we can outsmart our desires."

"...the ability to delay gratification [is] a far better predictor of academic performance than I.Q."

"Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it."

And there are tricks you can use that work terrifically well. For example:

"...Mischel has found a shortcut. When he and his colleagues taught children a simple set of mental tricks—such as pretending that the candy is only a picture, surrounded by an imaginary frame—he dramatically improved their self-control. The kids who hadn’t been able to wait sixty seconds could now wait fifteen minutes. 'All I’ve done is given them some tips from their mental user manual,' Mischel says. 'Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it.' "

"...he previously showed that children did much better on the marshmallow task (waiting before eating a marshmallow) after being taught a few simple 'mental transformations,' such as pretending the marshmallow was a cloud..."

"Interestingly, the scientists found that high delayers were significantly better at [being] less likely to think that a word they’d been asked to forget was something they should remember."