Success: Long Term Thinking to Do More, Regret Less
How to use long term thinking to live better
I’ve been lying with my motivations for yoga.
Well, not actually lying per se, I haven’t shared my deeper motivations.
For 3 months, I dove deep into the world of yoga. I practiced or studied six days a week. Naturally, people ask me why I decided practice so much yoga.
I tell people I wanted to get better. I wanted to touch my toes. I wanted to balance on one leg without quivering. I wanted to one day, maybe do an impressive pose worthy of a skilled practitioner. In yoga parlance, I wanted to “deepen my practice.”
In reality, I practice yoga out of fear.
I fear for what health ailments could strike at anytime. Whether that’s months, years, or decades from now. Perhaps morbid, but I’m hyperaware that as years and decades go by, the probability of a condition or injury increases.
Yoga is a hedge to mitigate the impact of what may strike. It’s unpredictable what could happen. But it’s predictable that a sound body and mind lessens effect and chance of health issues.
I don’t tell people my deeper motivations. It’s too macabre to share I practice yoga to assist with possible mental disorders and physical injuries.
Yoga practice is part of my long term thinking.
Long term thinking is one of the most important things we can do within our own lives. It helps us steer and reach the lives we want. It helps us avoid the pain of regret and ill effects of long term bad habits. It helps ease daily decisions.
To think long term means to think of outcomes in the future. The timeframe depends on the desired outcome. Something like a physical fitness goal could entail thinking in a 6 month horizon. A retirement goal could be on a multi decade horizon.
The challenge is we’re wired for short term thinking. Our brain prefers immediate rewards and avoids immediate pain. It’s easier to binge one more show than to head to the gym. It’s more painful to do our chores than it is to scroll one more TikTok video. It takes conscious effort to override our short term orientation and to think about the long term.
In this post, I’ll cover some benefits of long term thinking, as well as ways we can build our ability to think more long term.
Benefits of Long Term Thinking
There are two perspectives I’d view benefits of long term thinking - it can help us achieve and it can help us avoid. Here are examples of each:
Achieve - Utilize compounding
When I started running, I struggled to run a mile. Lungs burning, heart thumping, the effort to not quit after 60 seconds was large. However, with continuous training the gains with the same (or even less) effort increased. The effort to go from 5 miles to 10 miles was no harder than the effort to go from 1 mile to 2 miles. By the time I completed my first half marathon, I found I could run subsequent half marathons with little additional effort and training.
I had reaped the benefits of compounding. In the short term, large efforts may bring small gains. But in the long term, our efforts bring increasingly large gains.
We can apply compounding to range of activities. From efficiency at our jobs, to fulfilling relationships, to save money for retirement. Long term performance and gains occur from effort and investments in the short term.
If we think long term, we can choose our future superpowers and keep at them to reap the benefits of compounding.
Avoid - An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure
Knowledge workers are mostly sedentary as we stare into computers hours on end. Years of sitting hunched over a computer (and somehow thinking slouching looked cool) has led me to have poor posture and limited range of motion. Tight chest and weak back muscles combine to roll my shoulders forward and inhibit shoulder mobility.
While I don’t currently experience pain, longer term I can imagine a life of increased difficulty in movement, susceptibility to injury, and the ‘cool’ slouch morphing to a hunchback aesthetic. We know that sustained sedentary behavior eventually causes problems. And we know the problems that occur can be painful and difficult to remedy.
The more we think about the long term path we’re headed on, the more we can make decisions now to avoid the negative path we may be on. Yoga and targeted exercises are tactics I now do to help mitigate the chance of the negative outcome.
Build more long term thinking
Here are some ways we can build more long term thinking:
Think about second order effects
Decisions can have a domino effect of outcomes. The first order effect of skipping a workout, is the avoidance of the pain and effort to workout. Feels good to lounge around instead. However, a second order effect may be we feel sluggish throughout the day. A third order effect would be a we create a habit to skip all workouts. The second and third order effects are a worse outcome for us than the first order effect gain.
The more we can take a moment to think about second, and even third, order effects of our decisions, the better we can make decisions for the long term.
Choose pain in the short term
I struggle to get up in the morning and practice my Japanese. However, the short term pain is for the long term gain of brain health and an ability in a foreign language. Many of our goals require us to endure pain in the short term for gains in the long term - the opposite of how we’re wired. For example, when we save money for the future or exercise for long term health, we are choosing pain in the short term for long term gains.
An easy rubric to follow - when given the choice of pain in the short term or pain in the long term, choose pain in the short term.
Anchor to a bigger vision
At the start of the year, I write a hypothetical future ‘Christmas card’ for the year. I pretend the year is over and I write about my efforts and accomplishments through the year.
A vision of our future acts as a north star for us, providing guidance for where we want to go. This is particularly important as we get caught up in the rush of our daily lives and longer term goals fall by the wayside (New Year’s resolutions, anyone?). The more we can anchor ourselves to a vision of ourselves for the future, the more we are to steer ourselves towards it.
Not everything in my future Christmas card becomes true, but just the act of imagining and writing a future state to be an effective guide.
Look Forward to Future You
We can all think of people we admire. People with qualities we wish we could have. People we’d love to associate ourselves with.
What if this person we admired was actually us? Imagine meeting a future version of yourself. And this future version of you inspires the same respect, admiration, and awe that we have for those we admire today.
Long term thinking helps create this reality.
I imagine future Tim. I beam with pride. He can touch his toes.