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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Sam Kyle
Read between
January 6 - January 11, 2020
Playing the long game is difficult.
playing the long game is never an accident. Never.
What does it mean to play the long game?
it means skating to where the puck is going, not where it’s been.
understanding the extraordinary power of compounding—how tiny steps can add up as time passes.
being willing to delay gratification today in favor of a bigger payoff later.
Making decisions now that put you to where you want to be down the road.
Playing the short game is the norm because it’s easy.
Playing the short game is a net negative.
if you do the hard thing, you’ll gain outsized benefits.
it’s easier to play the long game if you started a decade ago, the second best time is always now.
Playing the long game means doing the exact opposite of what we’re wired to do, and what the world encourages us to do.
“Competition existed long before strategy.”
We steeply discount the value of anything in the future, especially if it will take work to get it
That means we think it’s worth less if we have to wait for it. This explains why we can sometimes change our behavior by adding even a tiny amount of friction.
In animal studies, mice and birds will choose an immediate food reward over one three times as large that requires them to wait just ten seconds
As a general rule, the larger an animal, the greater its self-control
With our greater intelligence, we can delay gratification far longer than a monkey or a mouse. This is because we have the ability to mentally time-travel, a capacity thought to be unique to humans.
When we delay gratification, we envision ourselves enjoying a future reward.
They don’t have the capacity for patience because they can’t project themselves into the future.
We imagine a time when we are more satisfied as a result of our decision.
The ability to mentally time-travel keeps the future at the forefront so we can focus on our long-term goals.
Many people make a profit from manipulating our immediate survival instincts.
On average, people spend 10% of their income on repayments. And the credit card companies make a fortune on interest.
The average person spends nearly two hours a day on social media.
Would Wayne Gretzky have become the GOAT by downloading an “improve your puck skills in one day” app?
He did this by putting in the work every single day. He knew that one day the payoff would be worth the effort.
The Designer’s Atlas of Sustainability,
To read!
designers rarely have any incentive to think about the long-term performance of their work, unless they’re perhaps designing equipment for a space exploration mission or to store nuclear waste that will need containing for thousands of years.
The History Manifesto
We live in a moment of accelerating crisis that is characterized by the shortage of long-term thinking....
Short-termism has many practitioners but few defenders.
People often overestimate what they can accomplish in one year. But they greatly underestimate what they could accomplish in five years. — Peter Drucker
The longer you play the long game, the more the benefits compound and the greater the rewards are.
Conversely, the longer you play the short game, the more the costs compound.
The first is that your life is so full of negative results that it can feel like you’re drowning, like the guy racked with anguish as he puts his card into the casino ATM, praying tha...
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This is the second consequence of playing the short game: When you do try to change (if you try), the effort required is far greater.
The longer you engage in a bad habit, the more work it will take to break it. The effects really do compound.
If you are, you understand that the tiniest steps can compound. The tiniest steps in the right direction can start a momentum that, over time, will maintain itself and require less and less effort from you.
As Albert Einstein supposedly said (he probably didn’t), compounding is one of the wonders of the world.
Water can cut through rock.
Many of the benefits of the long game come from compounding and gradual refinement.
In the long game, consistency is what matters the most.
