Here’s a question for you, in your business (or career) are you currently aware how much of your strategy is long term and how much is short term?
It can be really easy to get caught up in the flow and not be too concerned or aware of this, but perhaps we should be.
My preference is to focus long term as much as possible, the way I look at it is as follows:
If I focused on long term 100% of the time, then I would likely be much better off in 1, 5 or 10 years time than if I focused on short term 100% of the time.
Unfortunately, it’s not usually possible to use all of our resources for the long term due to bills and other commitments.
For most people, you simply have to dedicate at least some, if not most of your time to the short term in order to get by… the key is to make sure you’re not dedicating all of your time to the short term.
Let me give you some examples.
Short term:
- Selling time for money (pay the bills)
- Watching Netflix (entertainment)
Long term:
- Building a business (physical asset)
- Writing content (digital asset)
- Improving your network (relationships)
- Going for a run (physical fitness)
So as we can see by some of these examples, focusing on long term usually involves the building of assets, whether they be financial or otherwise.
There are 168 hours in a week, as much as we often think we don’t have time… we can all easily find a couple of hours here or there.
Even if we start with 2 hours per week dedicated to our long term goals, at some point those gains start to compound and we can turn 2 into 3, 3 into 4 and 4 into more…
The gains compound, the victories get bigger and at some point, we can start making the majority of our decisions with a long term focus.
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