Source: Farnam Street
It’s easy to overestimate the importance of luck on success and underestimate the importance of investing in success every single day. Too often, we convince ourselves that success was just luck. We tell ourselves, the school teacher that left millions was just lucky. No. She wasn’t.
She was just playing a different game than you were.The long game isn’t particularly notable and sometimes it’s not even noticeable. But when someone chooses to play the long game from an early age, the results can be extraordinary. The long game changes how you conduct your personal and business affairs.
There is an old saying that I think of often, but I’m not sure where it comes from: If you do what everyone else is doing, you shouldn’t be surprised to get the same results everyone else is getting.
Ignoring the effect of luck on outcomes — the proverbial lottery ticket —doing what everyone else is doing pretty much ensures that you’re going to be average. Not average in the world, but average to people in similar circumstances. There are a lot of ways not to be average, but one of them is the tradeoff between the long game and the short game.
What starts small compounds into something more. The longer you play the long game, the easier it is to play and the greater the rewards. The longer you play the short game the harder it becomes to change and the bigger the bill when you do change.
The Short Game
The short game is putting off anything that seems hard for doing something that seems easy or fun. The short game offers visible and immediate benefits. The short game is seductive.
- Why do your homework when you can go out and play?
- Why wait to pay for a phone in cash, when you can put it on your credit card?
- Why go to the gym when you can go drinking with your friends?
- Why invest in your relationship with your partner today when you can work a little bit extra in the office?
- Why learn something boring that doesn’t change when you can learn something sexy that impresses people.
- Why bust your butt at work…
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