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We’re stuck in permanent “execution mode,” without a moment to take stock or ask questions about what we really want from life.
Long-term thinking protects us during downturns (of all kinds), because it keeps us moving toward our most important goals.
It takes courage to be a long-term thinker, and a willingness to buck the near-term consequences. But the payoff can be enormous.
There’s a great quote by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that goes something like: we measure ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others measure us based on what we’ve done. This makes sense, of course. But it’s awfully frustrating when there’s a gap between what we know we can accomplish and what we’ve done up to that point.
Everything takes longer than we want it to. Everything.
The challenge for all of us is an inner one: to keep going when it seems like no one is paying attention or cares. And to believe that eventually the world will catch up.
I’ve come to understand what few recognize: the rate of payoff for persevering during those dark days isn’t linear. It’s exponential.
If it were easy to be patient, and easy to do the work, then everyone would do it. What I’ve come to love about patience is that, ultimately, it’s the truest test of merit: Are you willing to do the work, despite no guaranteed outcome?
We earn our success by toiling without recognition, accolades, or even any certainty that it’s going to come to fruition. We have to take it on faith and do it anyway. That’s strategic patience.
The first step is understanding that the key to a meaningful life is to set our own terms for it.
The other step is understanding that we can attain almost anything we want—but not instantly.
Playing the long game—eschewing short-term gratification in order to work toward an uncertain but worthy future goal—isn’t easy. But it’s the surest path to meaningful and lasting success in a world that so often prioritizes what’s easy, quick, and ultimately shallow.
If you’re too busy and frenzied to think, then it’s almost impossible to break out of a short-term mindset.
In other words, being “crazy busy”—and making sure others know it—may, consciously or subconsciously, be important to our self-esteem. And though we long for the time to do long-term thinking, possessing it may signal we’re just a little less essential than we thought we were.
There’s great existential comfort in feeling that you know what to do. When we’re busy and focused on execution, there’s no time to ask questions that might have discomfiting answers.
So often, we identify a path of what worked before, or what should work, or what we should want—and we stick to it at all costs, even when it makes us miserable.
if we venerate busyness, even subconsciously, we’ll make decisions that lead us in that direction. Instead, we need to get clear on what we want. And if it’s true mastery over our schedule, and the ability to plan and think that comes along with that, then we need to step up and be brave enough to choose accordingly.
“When you give yourself permission to work long hours, to work continuously, you allow these little systemic, strategic inefficiencies to crop up all over the place.”
July off,” or “I’m going to finish work by six o’clock every night,” it forces you to be creative in the systems you develop. You can spot inefficiencies—whether it’s a slow-running computer or an awkward scheduling system—because you can’t afford not to. And you’re compelled to ask big-picture questions: Should I be doing this task at all? Could I delegate it to someone else, or stop doing it altogether? Where should I focus my effort in order to get the biggest return? If I were starting fresh today, would I still choose to invest in this project?
“You want to determine what’s most important, and then you schedule that the soonest in your calendar,” he says. “Whatever is less important, you schedule it further out. Whatever is not important at all, you don’t schedule it at all. You get rid of it. You delegate it. You say no to it. If you start operating from the calendar rather than a to-do list, you take back control over your day.”
We have to be willing to make choices. And at a very basic level, we have to believe change is possible in the first place.
It takes zero time to have an innovative idea or to make a decision, but if you don’t have psychic space, those things are not necessarily impossible, but they’re suboptimal.”
But if you’re doing things right, as you get more experienced, you become much more in demand. And what started out as a smart move—saying yes to all kinds of opportunities and seeing where they lead—becomes a major liability. We have to adjust and become far more selective.
“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”1 The logic is inexorable: if you have free time in your calendar, unless you guard it vigilantly, it will get devoured.
“When deciding whether to do something, if you feel anything less than ‘Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!’—then say ‘no.’”
Sometimes the decisions we make aren’t guided by our current state of affairs, but by who we want to become.
When we say no, we’re forced to ask: Why put yourself through so much anguish? Am I an idiot to turn down such a coveted opportunity? Why risk incurring the wrath of friends and colleagues?
Meanwhile, it turned out that, paradoxically, the most successful companies were the ones who were unafraid to choose what to be bad at.
“Choosing to be bad is your only shot at achieving greatness. And resisting it is a recipe for mediocrity.”
Saying yes to everything means being average at everything. Saying no, conversely, is what gives us the rare opportunity to be great.
Requesting extra information, however, serves two powerful functions. First, it eliminates a certain percentage of requesters off the top (I’d estimate close to 25%), because some people are so disorganized that they simply won’t follow up a second time. Second, it enables you to make far better decisions about where, how, and how intensively you want to assist someone.
it’s useful—before agreeing to anything—to ask some questions to slow down the process, force them to think about what they want out of the encounter, and weed out people who aren’t willing to make an effort.
What Is the Total Commitment?
For every request, think through each step—including hidden or unstated obligations—and create a rough estimate of what’s actually involved. That alone may scare you into saying no.
What Is the Opportunity Cost?
But if you’re saying yes because it’s easier than saying no, it’s probably time to reconsider your approach.
What’s the Physical and Emotional Cost?
The problem—for Manbir, me, and most professionals—is knowing how to balance competing priorities when the offer is quite tempting. That’s why it’s so important to fully understand the hidden costs, including the physical and emotional, behind saying yes.
Would I Feel Bad in a Year If I Didn’t Do This?
We don’t know what the future holds, and our control over it is limited. But we can at least make better decisions if we broaden our time horizon and ask how we’d feel in a year (or five, or ten) as a result of our choices.
“Whenever you have a choice of what to do,” she told Marion, “choose the more interesting path.”
Find ways to learn incrementally, such as setting up informational interviews with people who work in the field, or reading several books on the topic, or asking a friend if you can shadow them at work for a day.
When you’re unsure of where your interests lie—or you feel like you used to know and have lost touch—go back to first principles and think about what inspired you at the beginning of your journey. Sometimes we just need to remember what got us started in the first place.
The real advantage of optimizing for interesting isn’t just that you can accumulate cool stories to tell at the bar. It’s that pursuing interesting experiences opens up possibilities that otherwise may have been hidden or inaccessible.
But the timing will never be exactly right, and there’ll always be something more important that takes precedence—if we let it. Playing the long game means acknowledging we aren’t already experts at everything, and that it’s OK to sometimes look foolish in service of becoming the person we want to be.
The whole point of playing the long game is understanding that ridiculous goals are ridiculous right now—not forever. When we force ourselves to take our goals to extremes—What would ultimate success look like?—we can create an honest road map for ourselves.
If a goal is worth pursuing, it’s worth pursuing the version of it we actually want—not one that’s watered down to protect our ego.
When you’re working toward something meaningful, that goal can carry you through the tedium of the small, everyday steps needed to accomplish it.
If you start with your present situation, you’re limiting yourself out of the gate to what seems attainable.
When we make the choice to optimize for interesting, we’re investing in our future selves. We don’t know where it will lead, and that’s the whole point.
