Your Short-Term Thinking is No Longer Serving Your Goals
You want to prepare yourself for the day when you are the one that needs help. Regrettably, human nature thinks in short-term stories.
While there is a laundry list of why short-term thinking is a peril to your success, there is an evolutionary reason why short-term thinking is etched into your DNA.
Until approximately 12,000 years ago, Homo sapiens were hunter-gathers. The time was a pre-agricultural world where the hunter-gather was a subsistence culture that relied on:
- Hunting
- Fishing
- Foraging for wild vegetation
- And looking for other nutrients like honey
The lifestyle was both dangerous and uncertain. Some publications have the average lifespan of a hunter-gather to be 31 years.
Therefore, the thinking of the hunter-gatherer was not long-term:
- Raise animals to produce meat and dairy products
- Plant seeds for the spring
- Store honey for later use
Steven Pinker wrote, “To appreciate this burden, one doesn’t have to believe that we are cavemen out of time, only that evolution, with its speed limit measured in generations, could not possibly have adapted our brains to modern technology and institutions.”
Short-term thinking was a tool that helped you survive in dangerous and uncertain times. Approximately 12,000 years later, Microsoft founder Bill Gates writes, “I think the world has never been better—more peaceful, prosperous, safe, or just.”
The average life expectancy is 76 years old. But the author David Sinclair believes that aging is a disease that can be treatable within our lifetime. If medicine can push your lifespan north of 100 years, then short-term thinking no longer serves your needs.
Founder of Amazon Jeff Bezo told Wired in 2011, “If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people.”
What are Bezo’s action items:
- Write out new ideas – it forces you to consider all aspects of an idea.
- Dedicate time to thinking about the future – it is a scheduled time where you can think about new ideas, problems, and research solutions.
- Routinely check in on long-term goals – assess your progress on pre-selected initiatives every three months.
- Work backward – you are doing this from the goal, so you understand what you need to achieve that goal.
If you want to prepare yourself for the day when you are the one that needs help – then you must short-circuit your evolutionary programming.
You must reprogram yourself to think long-term.