12 Ways Playing The Long Game Will Change Your Life
One of the most important things I talk about for entrepreneurs (and people trying to get ahead in general) is long-term thinking. It's also the least native way to think as biological creatures and requires discipline to condition ourselves to do. Hopefully this list will encourage someone that it's worth it...
*Note also this is my first post. I plan to contribute much more but am thinking through personal best practices. As a starting point I think a list of single sentence, congruently structured points followed by max 3 (not-too-run-on) sentence descriptions is a nice starting point constraint. I tend to be verbose and want to use this platform as a place to get prolific at planting idea seeds rather than spending hours watering and fertilizing them (for now anyway). Said another way I think not overusing the platform will lead to better using the platform. Geez maybe I'm embracing moderation in my old age. Hah what a perfect segue into...
...12 ways playing the long game will change your life.
1. You'll work out more
Life is long, even longer if you take care of it. When you see the 95 y/o version of yourself and the current version as 2 points on the same continuum you will be kinder to the future version by being harder on the present version.
2. You'll invest in better quality food, nutrition, and biotracking
Pursuant to the above comment, health span extension is a real thing now. I think future generations will look back on this one with pity as the era we started learning the right things to do but still hadn't full embraced doing them. I don't intend to be part of giving them that schadenfreude-esque satisfaction.
3. You'll focus on making more money when you're younger
In no area of life is the saying that "youth is wasted on the young" more true than in the area of finances. If the best time to make money was 20 years ago, then the second best time is today! Make money and invest it now to maximize the value of compounding.
4. You'll take a different approach to education
Traditionally most of us try to get education "over with" early in life then spend most of our adult life making money and building status with what we've learned. We may plan in retirement to learn some new stuff in a trivial, "putter around with it" kind of way, but rarely with same seriousness as when we were younger. The long game encourages a more cyclical and/or "drip" approach to lifelong education and reminds us that while the nature of our intelligence changes over time it does not decay unless we have a specific (probably preventable) disease that causes it to.
5. You'll feel less need to be right
The longer time the horizon through which relationships are considered, the less we will want to be right and the more we will simply want to feel connected. In very few relationships are those not antithetical goals (a hypothetical exception being a case of academics with a friendly-rivalry or something peculiar like that).
6. You'll become more adaptable
Rigidness falters as a strategy and is exposed as weakness in the light of the constancy of change we cannot help but observe if we look out far enough ahead (or behind). Generally to be inflexible is to be shortsighted.
7. You'll be more conscious of your own neurology and take better care of it
In a very real sense we are our brains. When we consider the amount of time we are going to have to spend with ourselves it becomes absurd not to take care of our brains in every way we can learn to do.
8. You'll be more creative
Not necessarily the long game per se, but viewing time through a more fluid lens is a key element of creativity. Creativity is a process that resists man-made time constraints (though sometimes a time constraint can foster it too). The healthier and more tool-like our relationship is with time the better we can use it to promote (or at least allow for) creativity.
9. You'll have a more flexible definition of productivity
Modern society is a complex tyranny of urgency and dopamine but great work takes time and doles out sparse rewards. The modern axiom of "think what you want to do in the next 10 years and try to do it in the next 6 months" (thanks Elon) still assumes we can concentrate intensely and delay gratification for 6 months., which we won't be able to do unless we are facile with longer increments of time than that.
10. You'll do more meaningful things and less meaningless things
Time turns meaningless things into regret while it turns meaningful things into pride. The more we consider time the better we shift our priorities toward meaningful things.
11. You'll get more deep sleep and have better sleep hygiene overall
We typically shortcut sleep (or don't take the time to create good sleep practices) because "there's not enough time". But over the course of a life getting sufficient deep sleep adds years of energized and mentally acute living along with allowing us to do more now with the time we have. It is a net-positive trade to invest in good sleep if we look out far enough ahead and account for the totality of our life not just what we have to do tomorrow.
12. You'll be more honest
Time is the enemy of dishonesty. Over time lies become confusing burdens while the truth becomes a cushion of peace.
