One thing I've heard more and more often as time goes by is that people claim they have never had any long-term plan. They often say that as they don’t even know what comes tomorrow, so why bother planning for the next 3, or even 5 or 10 years in the future.
At first, that line of reasoning seems convincing, doesn’t it? The pace of living nowadays is so fast, that no matter how hard one tries, one often feels a strong sense of being left behind: because of all new information, new technologies, new discoveries in all fields, and also new events happening all around the world.
With that, it seems rather impossible to form any prediction about the future. Hence, any plan for the future will become, at least partly, ridiculous when the time comes.
However, there’s actually a very different way of thinking long-term, which is, I would like to call, micro long-term thinking.
It’s about applying the long-term view on every single act that you carry on during your day right now.
For example:
- If I continue taking these cookies, eventually I’ll be obese
- If I keep shopping for fun, eventually I’ll be deep in debt
- And if I keep getting these seemingly innocent apps/social platforms, eventually I’ll not be able to control my time and focus anymore
To be honest, this way of thinking is not novel. The famous Mr Warren Buffett, once wrote:
“If you don’t want to own a stock for 10 years, don’t bother owning it for 10 minutes”
Also, Naval Ravikant has stated something pretty similar in the book “The almanack of Naval Ravikant”, when he suggests that you shouldn’t work with a person for a day if you can’t imagine working with him/her for the whole life.
Because, as Derek Silvers states in his book “How to live: 27 conflicting answers and one weird conclusion”, this is what you should remember:
