Skepsis #34: Myopia
The virtues of long-term thinking. Productivity at work and the myth of social mobility.
What I'm thinking about
Long-term thinking
What sets most great entrepreneurs, scientists, and innovators apart from the rest of us - aside from their innate intellect and creativity - is that they think and act with a long-term mindset. They think hundreds of years into the past and hundreds of years into the future. They focus on the things that don't change at the same time as they can imagine a world very different from the current one.
What is the world going to look like 10, 20, 100 years from now? What would you do differently if you really considered the long-term?
Asking yourself these sorts of questions puts you into a different state of mind, it lifts your head above the clouds and enables you to see the world in new ways - indeed it enables you to see your own predicament in new ways.
Thinking really long-term is also a competitive advantage because most businesses and people only focus on the next week, quarter, year, or maybe the next few years.
Consider Elon Musk's company Tesla. Musk is not interested in maximizing Tesla's short-term profits because he (allegedly) really cares about creating a world with abundant energy free from carbon emissions. He believes that we can live in a world with cheap and clean energy and that we can mitigate the worst effects of global warming. One part of creating that future is that we start driving electric vehicles. But it's not the end-game. They also produce batteries and solar roofs. It's why Tesla is not just a car company; Tesla's mission is to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy.
There's very little competition when you're building something for the really long term. It puts you into a league of your own because most people are unwilling or unable to make investments today that will only pay off in the far future - maybe even so far into the future that they won't be around to reap the rewards.
Applying long-term thinking is, at least in part, what people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos (Amazon) are doing and it's why the stock market has rewarded them with insane valuations. (Although they're not as crazy when you consider the future potential of those companies.)
Long-term decisions are good decisions
A long-term time horizon leads to better decision making because to be strategic, to think "strategically", is really just about being less myopic (short-sited) than you would be regularly. When you consider the second and third-order consequences of your actions (or that of others'), you're thinking long-term.
Long-term thinking enables you to realize that your current actions compound over time. Small changes today, tomorrow, or next week don't make much a of difference in the short-term, but they make all the difference in the long-term. If you're investing a bit every month in the stock market, you're applying long-term thinking to your savings. You understand that a small "sacrifice" - less spending power today - will yield much larger returns in the future as a result of compounding growth. The same principle applies to many other areas of life too.
Long-term thinking also enables you to get out of the present. It puts you in a proactive frame of mind. It makes you think of your future self. It makes you less reactive to your current circumstances and emotions. In this sense, long-term thinking is a superpower.
It's that thing that makes inventors and entrepreneurs look so unbelievably smart when all they've really done is just thought more about the long-term than the rest of us. It’s like they're living in the future.
Can you be too long-term focused?
Obviously, it is possible to be so future-focused that you completely discount your needs in the present. So there exists a dichotomy between long-term and short-term thinking that's not always easy to resolve:
In some circumstances, it makes perfect sense to focus more on the short-term. Surviving, hitting the quarterly goals, solving an urgent problem, etc. In a typical business setting, what does it matter if you make sound long-term decisions when you might not survive long enough to see the results? People can be forgiven for focusing more on the short-term than on the long-term.
But sometimes, maybe most often, you're better off thinking more long-term. Working on the important things and making decisions as if you're still gonna be around 10, 20, 50 years from now to see the fruits of those decisions.
The signature of a good leader and decision-maker is someone who's able to apply the right time frame to the right circumstance.
When you think about it, nearly all self-help advice really boils down to advice and tactics about how to be less short-term oriented and more long-term oriented. You want to publish a novel but right now you just want to watch TV. You want to look good naked but right now you really want to eat that cake. Habit formation and goal setting is really all about how we can adjust our short-term behavior to better align with our longer-term goals or ambitions.
So a good question to ask yourself in many decisive moments is, therefore: Would doing what I'm doing now every day bring me closer to my long-term goals or further away from them? Adjust your behavior accordingly.
What I'm reading
The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done
Cal Newport, Computer Science professor at Georgetown University and author of Deep Work, writes about the current state of productivity for knowledge workers in the modern work environment. It's a timely critique of the way we get things done and how we communicate at work.
Cal argues that, contrary to what most people assume, the ease with which we can communicate through team chats and email is actually making us less productive - and more stressed. Instead of enabling us to quickly coordinate work, it leads us into a frenzy of wasteful back-and-forth messaging and constant context switching to keep up with everything that's going. This detracts from our ability to do Deep Work and get the really important things done.
Moreover, we have left the productivity of people into their own hands, rather than establishing coordinated systems and processes for how work should get done in our organizations. This creates a sort of tragedy of the commons where our individual attempts at maximizing our own personal productivity is hurting our collective productivity within our teams or companies.
"It seems likely that any successful effort to reform professional life must start by making it easier to figure out who is working on what, and how it’s going. Because so much of our effort in the office now unfolds in rapid exchanges of digital messages, it’s convenient to allow our in-boxes to become an informal repository for everything we need to get done. This strategy, however, obscures many of the worst aspects of overload culture. When I don’t know how much is currently on your plate, it’s easy for me to add one more thing. When I cannot see what my team is up to, I can allow accidental inequities to arise, in which the willing end up overloaded and the unwilling remain happily unbothered."
What I'm watching
Becoming an Interplanetary Species: First Steps
Speaking of long-term thinking. In this video, Isaac Arthur reviews 12 milestones for space settlement created by the National Space Society - a roadmap for becoming an Interplanetary Species. Although it looks like we might be going to mars during the coming decade, what does it actually take to become an interplanetary species? A civilization that has not just visited other planets but actively inhabits them?
I find this inspiring and exciting, but also a little depressing because I probably won't live to see us having colonized the solar system - not to mention the stars.
What I'm listening to
The causes of the industrial revolution and the myth of social mobility
Fascinating interview about two very consequential topics: the history of the industrial revolution and why there is much less social mobility than we think.
"We’d like to think of our societies as places with a lot of social mobility, in which individuals can climb the ladder by working hard. But by tracking families with rare surnames across the centuries, Gregory Clark, an economist, has shown that social mobility is much rarer than we’d like to think. The descendants of 14th century Florentine aristocrats, 18th century Korean civil servants and 19th century Swedish notables, research Clark conducted or inspired has shown, are much more likely to work in prestigious professions or own a lot of money in the 21st century. Why could that be?"
Further reading by Gregory Clark: Your Ancestors, Your Fate
Capitalism has not led to pervasive, rapid mobility. Nor have democratization, mass public education, the decline of nepotism, redistributive taxation, the emancipation of women, or even, as in China, socialist revolution.
If your surname is rare, and someone with that surname attended Oxford or Cambridge around 1800, your odds of being enrolled at those universities are nearly four times greater than the average person. This slowness of mobility has persisted despite a vast expansion in public financing for secondary and university education, and the adoption of much more open and meritocratic admissions at both schools.
Big shoutout to Juan Pablo a.k.a J.P. that designed the new logo for Skepsis! 🙏🏼
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As always, stay safe out there.
/Phil