Take a long term view to every meaningful goal you are trying to achieve. Too many of us are stuck in the “have it now” economy and we have a very short attention span. Those people will be crushed by the people who can successfully practice patience.
It was an evolutionary advantage to have everything now. When we were hungry, we needed to hunt for food and get things now. Back then, immediacy was the most important. These days, it’s not as important now. When we want food, we don’t need to finish hunting by sundown or otherwise we’ll starve.
All we need to do is go over to a restaurant, pay for it with money, then be on our merry way. Times changed. Somewhere along the way, we no longer need to have everything now. There’s no need to focus on the short term. Many short term needs can be solved immediately these days.
However, although we don’t need things as quickly as before, our desire to want things now never changed. We still love to focus on the short term. We love to focus on what happened today and evaluate based on our results today. That is the incorrect approach. The short term is almost meaningless.
We need to take a long term view these days. The ones who are successful are the ones who can practice delayed gratification. The ones who can wait for an even bigger reward down the road. Whatever happened today, positive or negative, is not going to make or break your entire life. That’s not how it works.
You have time to make mistakes, see what’s working and what doesn’t. Therefore, don’t ever feel rushed to a decision because things rarely have to be done today.
What Does it Mean to Take a Long Term View?
So great! Now you’re asking, how many years does it take to take a long term view? The answer is about five to seven years. That’s when your results will actually start and begin to show where you feel like they are meaningful. The start will always feel like it is ineffective.
When I first started in my financial independence journey, I felt like I was throwing a rock at a glacier. I wasn’t even making a dent to cracking the code of financial independence. Even after two continuous years of saving the majority of my income, I still didn’t feel like I was making progress.
After three years, I began to feel like I was starting to make progress. Not even making progress, but starting to make progress. I’m in my fifth year and I feel much better in the journey with about a $350,000 net worth. Like the choices I’m making are actually making an Impact.
It’s actually working and I’m seeing differences in my life from before. However, this doesn’t just apply to financial independence but to any big long term life goals you are trying to achieve. Maybe it’s a career you are trying to move up in. You don’t start at the middle.
You start at the bottom. It will take about five to seven years before you start to feel mastery and that you are making an impact that makes a difference. When you feel like you’re going nowhere in the first coupe of years, that’s completely fine. You should feel that way. It would be abnormal if you didn’t.
As long as you know that showing up is half the battle and keep putting in that effort, you should feel mastery soon.
Why Take a Long Term View?
One way you can take a long term view is to SMASH that social share button and share to your favorite social media! Your friends might be in an impatient state of mind and they just need a gentle nudge to change their mindset. The short term thinkers will always be run over by the long term thinkers.
Therefore, why not give them a little push to think about it in long term mindset?
So with that said, let’s go into the reasons why the long term matters.
1) Results are Rarely Immediate
The results that actually matter rarely show up immediately. If you want to build a perfect body, it’s not going to happen overnight. Overnight successes just don’t happen. The overnight success stories you hear are of people who put in the work for decades at a time.
They took a long term view and put in the work every single day to get to where they want to be. You’re not going to build your perfect life coming out straight from the womb. That’s not real life. Life takes hard and deliberate effort, time, and hard work to build into something great.
Buildings weren’t built in a day. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Something as big as a perfect life will never be built in a single day. It takes meticulous attention and effort to get there one day. The effort you put in today will show up months, if not years down the road.
Therefore, you should take a long term view because you will not see results as quickly as you want it to be.
2) Results are Greater in the Future
Go or look outside your window right now. What do you see? More than likely, you see huge trees. How did that tree become so huge? It took years, if not decades of constant nurturing to grow into something meaningful. Years ago, that tree was just a tiny seed. Then now, it grew into something big.
If that tree analogy isn’t enough, look into your own life. Years and decades ago, you were just a thought in your parent’s mind. Someone that your parents wanted to have but not yet formed yet. Then your mom nurtured you for 9 months straight. Then you were born.
Now you are grown up into someone to be reckoned with. Constant nurturing breeds into greater rewards in the future. If you have to suffer short term losses for long term gains, that is completely fine. The rewards are almost always greater in the future as long as there’s enough input into building the future.
You should take a long term view for greater rewards down the road.
Things to Take a Long Term View On
So now that you understand why you should take a long term view, let’s go into the things that deserve that mindset.
1) Your Life
Your greatest project you will ever complete in your life is your life. It’s your single biggest and greatest project ever. That’s not an exaggeration. It’s factually correct. Therefore, if it’s going to be the biggest project you’re ever going to take in your entire life, why not look at it from a long term angle?
There’s no reason to beat yourself up for a tiny mistake you made in a single day. There’s no reason to be extremely proud of a tiny win you experienced today. It’s not a bad thing to be appropriately proud and celebrate in accordance. However, it will only be a tiny win the grand scheme of things.
Evaluate and look at what you’re producing in your life after a year, or two. Preferably five years. You can have quarterly evaluations to make sure you’re going on the right track. However, don’t evaluate and think about how good or bad your life is from one bad month. That’s not realistic nor is it a good approach.
2) Investing
They say that the first $100,000 is the hardest. It’s true. However, in the grand scheme of things, $100,000 is not a lot of money for your entire life that will impact you. For a 7% yearly return, it will produce $7,000 this year. Seven thousand dollars is not a lot of money. Maybe it’ll pay rent for 5 – 7 months.
Even the next year will only return $7,490 as a return. In the short term of 5 – 10 years, investing will not make a lot of impact to your life. It just won’t. It’s not how it works. However, it’s the latter half of the game that will make the difference the most. 99% of Warren Buffett’s wealth was made after 52.
It will take decades before investing will have an impact to your financial life. When I first started, a 1% return gave me an extra $100. While that’s all well and all, I can easily spend a $100 in a single day. These days, a 1% return gives me an additional $3,500. That is meaningful in my life.
Investing will take a long time before it matters but it is well worth the wait.
3) Building a Business
Take a long term view to building a business. So many bloggers burn out after six months because they don’t see results after all the effort they pour into it. It takes a long time to nurture. Their effort is not supposed to make a big difference in just six short months.
When you want to build a business, focus on how it will look after 2 – 3 years of continuous effort. You will get better and better as it goes. Additionally, this applies to any other side hustle you pursue. A side hustle can be to buy stuff from estate sales for cheap and selling it on eBay down the road.
A business takes constant attention, effort, and work to build into something great. People rarely create overnight success businesses. Plant the seed today to grow it into huge crops down the road. You’re going to learn more things as time passes. The learning curve is steep so be patient and give it time before giving up.
4) Financial Independence
The last thing to take a long term view on is financial independence. If you read any of the financial independence blogs, there are very very few who reached it in their 20’s. Most became millionaires in their 30’s. At an average college graduation age of 22, it took them at least 8 years to perfect their craft.
At a minimum.
Do you think that you can save and invest 40%+ of your money for eight straight years? I’ve done it for five straight years and it’s sometimes still a struggle. It’s gotten easier but there’s still moments where I want to go all out and splurge. However, I practice self control and not let that happen.
I don’t let a short term gratification affect my long term goals. Give yourself a decade of saving and investing before you reach financial independence. You will be amazed at what you can accomplish in a decade. Many overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade.
You will have a mountain of a net worth if you consistently save and invest 40%+ of your income every year, at most income levels.
What Taking a Long Term View Actually Looks Like
So now, you want to actually see a visualization of what taking the long term view looks like. Here is a short 40 second video that shows exactly what it looks like. It’s the classic hare vs tortoise you read about. The race actually happened in real life.
As you can see from the video, the hare actually gave up half way. Although he had a huge head start, he only had a short term outlook on the race. The tortoise worked hard throughout the race and never stopped moving forward. The tortoise actually saw the race through even though he took him more effort and time to get there.
Don’t be the hare in the scenario. You don’t want to give up half way because you became impatient or bored. That’s what a short term thinker does. See things through. Slow and steady wins the race. The ones who lose the race usually don’t lose because others were better than them.
They lose because they gave up themselves. They realized how much work it was going to take to see it through so they give up halfway. The ones who didn’t take a long term view but rather wanted results immediately. Anything that’s worth doing will not show results immediately.
It will take consistent and constant time and effort in order to get there. That’s how a tortoise thinks. Tortoises are good role models to learn from. The slow and steady wins the race. Success rewards the patient ones. You can take temporary breaks in between but you should never take a permanent break.
Take a Long Term View and You Will Come Out a Winner
Winners aren’t born, they’re made. How do you make yourself into a winner? You show up every day and put in the effort. You look at the long term view. Leaders who take a short term view doesn’t realize it takes time and effort to build out a good team. Good teams are created, they are not made out of the blue at the snap of their fingers.
Leave behind people in the dust by focusing on what you can achieve five to seven years out. Don’t stress out over bad results or stagnant results in just six months. That’s too short of a time to accurately evaluate good or bad. You have to look at years of invested effort.
Six months is actually the start of something. Your first day is not the start. Six months is the start. Then a year is a solid time to evaluate your progress. There are people who made a six figure business in just a year. Those people have a lot of time on their hands to devote to the business. Don’t compare yourself against them.
Take your time with it and ignore the noise of other people’s successes. If you are juggling multiple projects, it’s a no brainer that you’re lagging behind them. As long as the end of your first year is better than day 0 of the year, you are doing fine. Don’t try to get there quickly.
Remember the story of Icarus who flew too close to the sun? You will be burned by trying for overly ambitious goals. The ones who got there in a single year isn’t the norm. They’re not even the exception. They’re the exception of the exception. Don’t obsess over these people.
Congrats on creating so much wealth even though you’re so young. 🙂 Do you think you’ll hit $400K before the end of this year?
A long term perspective is one of the best mentalities to adopt. There’s a lot less competition 10 years later because every year competitors drop out of the game. Ben Graham said, “The purpose of the margin of safety is to render the forecast unnecessary.” The more long term you think and the more flexibility you have the less you need to predict what happens next.
One can only hope!
I heard how great Ben Graham’s book was but I never really got into reading it. That quote actually is really great, I haven’t considered or looked at investing from that angle. I would have thought all the good contents of it was out in the internet already but I haven’t read that part of the book. I may actually start reading that book now.
Long term thinkers always beat out short term thinkers in the long run!
Great perspective. I’ve been working on this myself. You need to have some patience. I break down larger tasks into pieces and make progress on those steps. It can be career/ business or even personal tasks or projects around your house. Even those small wins builds a sense of accomplishment and momentum. Even just planting the seed and getting started is very important.
That is absolutely true. Half the battle isn’t about actually doing the work itself. Half the battle is just getting started and showing up. Then once you do that consistently over the long term, it’ll be amazing at what your results are showing and what you can accomplish.
Our efforts show up in a compounded way.