The power of long-term thinking

BY DANIEL COLE

The Law of Time Perspective says: The most successful people in any society are those who take the longest time period into consideration when making their day-to-day decisions. In other words, these people make long term plans and start working towards those plans on a daily basis. This law implies that the longer time you take into consideration while setting your goals: the better you get and the more successful you’re likely to be.

Think about these questions, in five years’ time, given your current spending habit or lifestyle, do you think you will be financially secure or financially independent? Will you be better off in five years’ time, given the kind of friends or relationship you are keeping right now? Given your current eating or health habit, will you be in a better healthy state in five to ten years from now if you keep to it? We often don’t think about these things, and by consequence, we live our lives doing damage control.

Chet Holmes has rightly said, “Most people spend more time planning a vacation than they do planning a life.” Your ability to think, plan, and work hard in the short term and to discipline yourself to do what is right and necessary before you do what is fun and easy is the key to creating a wonderful future for yourself. Your ability to think long term is a developed skill. As you get better at it, you become more able to predict with increasing accuracy what is likely to happen in the future. This is a quality of the superior thinkers.

Long-term thinkers are not overly worried about temporal problems or setbacks; they have a longer time-frame that helps them put life and its happenings into perspective. The most successful people are long-term thinkers. They look into the future as far as they can and come back to the present to make decisions that will lead them to what they’ve seen.

Thinking and planning long-term requires sacrifice. The success of every dream requires discipline. The discipline of how you use your time, how you allocate your resources, and the discipline to stay focus

Be futuristic in your thinking. Plan ahead of time. Be careful of shortcuts and short-term gain. Stay committed to your goals, even if your efforts don’t seem rewarding at the moment. Whatsoever endeavor you give your waking hour to think about its benefits in the long-term. If you don’t see a future in it, reconsider your priorities because the best you could give to anything or anyone is your time. Think about your current skillset, if they are aligned with the demand of your industry, because sometimes in life, the knowledge that got you this far might not get you any farther, as the world keeps changing and improving so also its requirement to get along.

Great visionaries are long-term thinkers, they do not just know where they are going five years, ten years, or twenty years from now, but they also have an action plan on how to get there. They might have to take so many detours in the course of their journey, but they have a clear sense of direction. You have to be well-positioned to the trends of your time; otherwise, you might lose relevance. How can you leverage technology to scale what you are doing? Think long-term.

A classic example of long-term thinking is the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative launched in the United States, aimed at curing and managing all diseases by the end of this century. Another similar illustration is Dmitry Itskov initiative, the Russian billionaire and entrepreneur who is currently working on the “Future evolution of human being; (Cybernetic Immortality)”.

Approach life and its responsibilities with a long-term perspective. The beauty of building anything worthwhile is not really what is being built, but the memories and moments we collect along the way.