How Long Term Thinking will Change Your Life
By Warren Wong
Long term thinking will change your life. Oftentimes, it’s the short term ruckus that captures our attention: whether it’s the stock market, get rich quick schemes, or even a potential mate, the short term gains are the ones that catch the headlines and make for a better story. But, it’s the long term decisions that make all the difference.
Never before has technology transformed the way we tackle problems, and provided us with solutions created faster and more customized to our needs. With the advent of social media, Artificial Intelligence, and supercomputers, whoever wonders if in the future we will even need to think at all, let alone do.
Today we are going to discuss how long term thinking will change your life, and how short term thinking can be to your detriment. We will examine some commonly important decisions we face and how short versus long term thinking can affect them.
What is Long Term Thinking
Long term thinking is the ability to think of a problem, challenge or issue at hand with a long timeline rather than a short one. It’s choosing to see the bigger picture rather than the short term gains in order to make a decision that will benefit you over time, not just in the present moment.
Sometimes it’s denying yourself the cupcake after a workout, in order to see long term results of a healthier lifestyle. It’s choosing to invest in further education, which requires short term sacrifice of late nights, and lost weekends in order to advance your career years down the road.
Long term thinking is a tool, a mental model that helps you approach important decisions in your life. It’s opting to go against the grain. Choosing to think strategically over a long time horizon rather than short term pleasure seeking, comfort based decisions.
Why Long Term Thinking Will Change Your Life
Long term thinking allows for compounding to take place. It was Einstein who said, “Compound interest is the 8th wonder of the world.” No doubt Warren Buffett understood and applied this concept to investing, but this applies to other areas of our lives. In some of the most important decisions of our lives such as who we marry, our craft, where we live, and who we associate with, long term thinking can be applied.
For example, taking a long term approach to our craft. I specifically didn’t choose to say career and instead focus on craft because a career can change throughout our lifetimes, sometimes many times. However, the skills we develop can be widely applied across careers. Focusing on the basics such as writing, reading, problem solving, story telling, and emotional intelligence are skills that can be widely leveraged across disciplines and reach a wide audience. By focusing on basic skills that can be leveraged widely, you have the added benefit of compounding, which over a long enough timeline can have immense impact.
How we approach our relationships can be viewed with a longer term approach as well. The short term approach would be a transactional relationship of what they can do for me. The long term approach would be, how can I provide value? How can I be a better friend, partner, teammate? The first approach will quickly dissolve under any real pressure. The second is built on a solid foundation, can last decades, and people that you can count on when the going gets tough.
How to Apply Long Term Thinking In Your Day to Day Life
So that’s all great, but how do I apply long term thinking into my day to day life? I would separate the next decisions you need to make into 2 categories, the decisions that you have already made, and the ones you have yet to make.
What are the decisions that you have already made that warrant further thought? Some examples could be: what did I study in school, who did I decide to be my partner, where am I currently living?
We want to take each question and apply long term thinking. For example, if you studied accounting at university and are currently practicing as an accountant it begs the question, do you enjoy what you do? Are you fulfilling your potential? Is there something else you have a passion for?
If the answer is other than accounting, the easy choice would be to continue doing that, but the long term decision may be to start taking courses for a different field, one that you do enjoy, in the hopes of changing fields down the road. This would be the long term approach which may take years, but ultimately the right decision to make since it will impact the rest of your life.
The easier choice may have been no choice at all which would leave you on the same path. It doesn’t take much thought, no need for extra work, and it satisfies other areas of your life like having a steady paycheck, and co-workers you get along with.
Decisions that you have yet to make may include retirement plans, where you want to settle down or do you want children. Let’s look at retirement, since this one is usually decades away, it ends up being socked away and forgotten about. Retirement planning is a great example where long term thinking can be applied because it’s usually very far away, but has a huge impact on our quality of life when we do reach retirement.
The short term easy decision would be to delay retirement planning, and spend your hard earned money now. Long term thinking would be to think of your retirement today, start saving and investing, and to think of how you want your retirement to look. Each mode of thinking leads to vastly different results, one requires disciplined action sustained over a long period of time and the other just lives for today.
Conclusion
A common objection to long term thinking is that it takes too long. They wish for a get rich quick scenario where they hope to hit it big, whether that’s getting really good at tennis in a matter of months, not years or decades or that their first book will be an instant best seller, not their third, fourth or fifth. The first scenario is the quick win, the second scenario is the one that is built on a solid foundation, and hard to maintain. No wonder why no one wants to do it, because it’s hard. Precisely because it is hard makes it valuable.
Long term thinking is a mental model that can change your life. In today’s society with the constant churn of gunk, whether it’s the latest slop from less than reputable media, or fast fashion, wear once and throw away clothes, our tendency to prefer short over long term thinking is more prevalent than ever. In order to take back control of our lives and to change our lives for the better, long term thinking needs to be prioritized.
Long term thinking focuses on re-aligning decisions you have already made and those yet to be made with a longer time horizon. It’s making difficult choices that prioritize your future self rather than your current self. It’s the unsexy choices that you have to make that won’t make headlines and no one knows you’ve made and have to keep up day to day for years on end. But, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. One day you’ll look back and see what you were able to accomplish, and know that you changed your life when you decided to change the way you think.
