The Long ViewMy perspective on how I balance the short and long term is rapidly changing.
My perspective on how I balance the short and long term is rapidly changing.
I have always been a long game player, as I believe that success largely comes from consistency over an extremely lengthy period of time.
But…in thinking more and more about my future, I realized that the long view is far out of reach. If I wanted to “change my life,” I also needed to focus on the micro, the short term, the today and tomorrow.
So I actually stopped focusing on the long view whatsoever, and rather, tried to optimize for the next few weeks, days, and hours. I realized that the world was moving so quickly, with so many new opportunities and exciting things to do and try out, that future planning too much would end up being a restrictor.
But then…I started thinking about how to best “optimize” for the short term if I do not know where I am optimizing for (aka the long term). I also think I underestimated the time horizon of the long view.
So here is my new working thesis.
It is that I have assumptions about where I want to be in 20 years. What type of person I want to be, but more importantly, how I want to feel. What types of people I want to be around. etc.
Very non-prescriptive things. These are not “jobs” I want to be doing, because I know, 20 years from now, the job environment will be tangibly different and new things will come and go.
With these abstract north stars in mind, I think build a set of experiments to test my assumptions. That is the short term.
And when I say short term, I mean weeks, literally days. I try not to plan anything that I do for more than a few weeks out.
It is this balance that allows me to not only be productive in the short term, but also take the long view.
Originally published at gonen.blog.
By jordangonen on November 28, 2017.
Exported from Medium on February 17, 2018.