Last week, I wrote about designing life in seasons. But there’s another idea from my birthday reflections that I keep coming back to: be a long-term person in a world full of short-term people.

I think about the long game a lot: in my career, health, finances, relationships, and pretty much anything I care about. The problem is that thinking long-term is much easier than acting long-term. We experience life one day at a time, while the consequences of our choices accumulate over months, years, and decades. So maybe playing the long game requires a system that helps us regularly zoom out.

Tip of the Week: Your habits happen daily, but their consequences show up slowly. Build a reflection system that helps you zoom out and see what your daily actions are actually becoming.

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The Theory Behind

Our brains aren't particularly good at playing the long game. Tim Urban describes this brilliantly in his famous (and personal favorite) TED Talk on procrastination with the Instant Gratification Monkey. We know exercising will make us healthier, investing will make us wealthier, and practicing something for years will make us better at it. But those rewards live in the future. The couch, dessert, purchase, or Netflix episode is available now. Behavioral economists call this present bias: we tend to disproportionately value immediate rewards over larger future ones. The long game is difficult partly because we're constantly negotiating between what feels good today and what will be good for us later.

Discipline can make our days look boring while making our years look completely different. I recently came across a line that said "the curse of discipline is that every day looks the same. The curse of indiscipline is that every year looks the same." Compounding is remarkably unimpressive up close. You work out again. Save again. Read again. Practice again. Write again. Nothing particularly exciting happens. But repeat those boring actions for five years and the difference can be enormous. The things that change our lives rarely feel life-changing while we're doing them.

Reflection doesn't care about excuses. In Atomic Habits, James Clear recommends habit tracking partly because it gives us visible evidence of what we're actually doing. Imagine you planned to exercise today and didn't. No big deal. You were busy. You slept badly. Something came up. All perfectly reasonable. But now zoom out and ask: How many times did I exercise this month? If the answer is twice, suddenly we're not evaluating an isolated excuse, we're looking at a pattern. The same applies to saving, reading, calling our parents, having dates with our partners, or spending time with our kids. Tracking and reflection force us to look beyond the story of any individual day. Our days give us anecdotes. Aggregated time gives us evidence.

What I’ve Learned

You should occasionally borrow perspective from your future self. This was another of my birthday reflections, and I keep finding it useful. Today's inconvenience can feel enormous because we're standing right next to it. But what will your 60-year-old self think about this current decision we are making? What will seem important? What will seem ridiculous? What will you wish you had started earlier, or worried about less? We can't eliminate our short-term bias, but we can occasionally change the person we're asking to make the decision.

Make It Happen

1. Daily: Do the thing. Don't contemplate your ten-year plan every morning. Identify the few small behaviors you want to compound and focus on executing them.

2. Weekly: Notice the direction. Ask: Am I roughly behaving like the person I want to become? You're looking for consistency, not perfection.

3. Monthly: Aggregate the evidence. Count. How many times did you exercise? Write? See friends? Have a date? Call your parents? Save or invest? Whatever matters to you, stop judging the excuses and look at the aggregate.

4. Quarterly: Find what is compounding. Ask: What small behavior is producing disproportionate results? What do I keep saying matters that isn't showing up in my actual behavior? Double down or adjust.

5. Yearly: Update the game. Zoom out even further. Ask: Am I still pursuing something I actually want? Don't spend years optimizing a game you've stopped wanting to play.

Long-termly yours,

Jorge Luis Pando

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