Elon Musk, for example, imagines the possibility of traveling to Mars and living on the Red Planet, although space travel is a very new idea. Even after humans set foot on the moon's surface, traveling to Mars and living there remained a strange idea. However, Musk did not consider it impossible; he considered it a realizable challenge and sought to live on Mars.
Jeff Bezos is another great person who has shown the importance of long-term thinking; being the founder and CEO of Amazon proves he undoubtedly has long-term thinking.
Bezos is also involved in an additional project to build a giant 10,000-year clock with $42 million of his own money. When people asked Bezos why he wanted to focus on 10,000 years in the future, he said in a 1997 letter to Amazon shareholders, according to American Express, “We cannot realize our potential as individuals or as companies unless we plan long-term.”
As Bezos said in an interview with Wired magazine in 2011: “If everything you do requires working on a three-year time horizon, you are competing with a lot of people, so you should strengthen your long-term thinking if you want to be successful such as Bezos, Musk, and others because when you think about the future and make a plan to reach your long-term goals, what you do every day may not seem to lead to significant results, but you move slowly towards the future you want.
For example, if you want to vacation, you must first determine where you want to go. That is just like building your long-term vision because you need to know your destination and prepare what you must do now to get there. Therefore, long-term thinking is very essential, and you must make it part of your plan for success.
7 suggestions and tips that may help you
1. Focus on building your personality
First, to think long-term, you must focus on building your personality, building success habits, developing a growth mindset, and thinking about the distant future. For example, if you work in business, making a profit is one of the goals, but you must not ignore the development of yourself and your work because things are constantly changing, and what worked years ago may not work now. For instance, typing was a helpful profession decades ago, but with the development of computers, it was rendered obsolete.
In the world of e-marketing, writing articles and submitting them to web directories was a perfect way to develop your online business. However, this method is no longer effective. In addition, competition is also increasing, and if you do not innovate and improve yourself and your business, you will soon be out of the game, so you should focus on building your personality.
For this reason, successful people today read books and are dedicated to lifelong learning. Warren Buffet, one of the most successful investors, once said, “Read 500 pages daily because that is how you get knowledge. It accumulates, like compound interest, and you can all do it, but I am sure many of you do not.”
Here are some examples of successful people who read regularly:
- Bill Gates reads about 50 books a year by reading one book a week.
- Mark Cuban reads more than 3 hours every day.
- Elon Musk is an avid reader, and when asked how he learned to make rockets, he said, “I read books.”
- Mark Zuckerberg intended to read a book every two weeks throughout 2015.
- Oprah Winfrey selects one of her favorite books each month for Book Club members to read and discuss.
2. Consciously practice long-term thinking
The next thing you can do is make a conscious effort to think long-term by thinking about the distant future - 5, 10, 20 years, or even more.
Jeff Bezos says that he spends two days a week without plans to be able to free his mind and come up with new and innovative ideas, as he surfs the Internet sometimes and arranges his meetings at other times.
You can do something like Bezos and set aside time to do something that comes to mind or to come up with new ideas for the future. The idea is to dedicate your free time to creativity and forming a long-term vision, so we usually hear personal development experts tell us to review our goals constantly.
Take time every week or every day to imagine and think about your future because we somehow achieve the ideas that occupy our minds most of the time. So, consider purposefully in the long term and make this part of your daily habit, and when your way of thinking changes, your actions will change, and thus, the results you get and, ultimately, your life.
Remember, everything that is planned is done, so take your free time to develop your long-term thinking, think about the future you want, and you will live one day.
3. Eliminate your handcuffs
Most people may find it difficult to think long-term because there are some limitations in their lives, such as financial and language constraints, anxiety and fear, and other limiting beliefs that make it challenging to build a future vision or long-term thinking about what they want.
People will start to envision all the amazing things they will achieve, like owning a bigger house, driving a new luxury car, traveling to a beautiful city, or starting a multimillion-dollar business, if they try to reflect on their lives after five years, for instance. After that, they will think about their current situation, especially their financial situation, and discover that they owe a lot of money, so their dreams fade and lose value.
In other words, their long-term thinking will be affected by their current situation and what they lack, whether it is money, the language they do not know how to speak, or other limiting beliefs such as fears and anxiety. Most people never achieve their goals because of this, and everyone wants to succeed, but they need to envision the exciting future they will have. As a result, their actions reflect their thoughts, so don't let your self-limiting beliefs keep you from dreaming about the future.
If you want to create a successful blog in English, for example, but English is not your mother tongue, it should not prevent you from achieving this dream. So, eliminate all the restrictions, think like you are free and can achieve everything you want in the future. In this way, you can think long-term, and you will make your dreams exciting.
4. Know what you want to achieve in the future
Discovering what you want to achieve in your life is one of the best ways to help you develop the habit of long-term thinking. However, the problem is that most people do not know what they want in their lives, which makes them lose clarity, which is the energy that drives them to pursue their dreams.
In his famous book The One Thing, Gary Keller says that to be productive, you must discover your purpose in life. That is, you must understand the type of life you want before you can be fruitful because when you set a clear goal, you can arrange your priorities based on it, which enables you to pursue clear goals and then achieve productivity.
If you do not know your purpose in life, there is no way you can be productive, so set your goals, form your vision, and imagine the kind of life you want. After that, you can make a plan and work on it daily to achieve your goals. Otherwise, you will not get the desired results if you do not discover what you want to achieve.
5. Be alone
Some people consider that one of the secrets of Warren Buffett's success is that he is devoid of himself because, besides his skill in finding companies with undervalued stocks, his ability to hold stocks even when the market fluctuates makes him one of the largest investors in the world. Buffett can ignore the performance of the market, distance himself from all the noise surrounding him, and stick to his stocks and decisions.
That requires a lot of determination and emotional stability. Most people are emotionally affected when stock prices fluctuate in the market and selling or buying prices change, making them afraid and nervous. The more money invested, the higher the emotional impact. If you invest a massive amount in the market, the price suddenly fluctuates and decreases, and those around you demand you to sell and put money into another company. Instead, you will be very worried. Thus, you are affected by your surroundings like many people do, but people who plan and think long-term are unaffected by their surroundings.
Stick to your decision and implement it until you get the desired results, whatever you want to do, or you create an e-commerce website, a blog, or anything else because it is unfortunate that others influence most people to talk and let others interfere with their dreams and goals. However, highly successful people realize what they want, stick to it, and ignore others if they tell them their dreams are impossible.
Elon Musk is a perfect example of this. Many people say that their dreams are impossible. They even say bad things about their projects, but he never gives up. That is the mindset you should have, so learn to isolate yourself and your dreams from your surroundings and the frustrations around you. Decide to pursue your goals to achieve them and not be influenced by others.
6. Understand that every major success takes time
You must understand that success takes time, particularly significant successes, only like planting a bamboo tree. When you plant a bamboo tree, you will notice that it does not grow intensively in the first few years, even if you water it daily and make sure that enough sunlight reaches it in fertile and healthy soil, but in the fifth year, you will be surprised by what happens. Trees will grow 80 feet in a short six weeks.
The moral of the story is that during the first few years, bamboo trees were growing, not up, but down; their roots cling deep in the ground to grow high, and the same principle applies to your life and dreams, so you have to learn how to grow and build a strong foundation like a bamboo tree. You must learn to walk before running, so success takes time and does not happen overnight.
Always be prepared to make an effort every day to develop yourself and grow your business, and when the time comes, your work will make significant progress and reach the sky like bamboo. Here is the importance of long-term thinking. So, be patient and broad to achieve your goals.
7. Evaluate the actions you take daily
Evaluating your daily actions is also a perfect way to help you think long-term, so you should ask yourself what you do every day, whether you do critical or urgent things. Most of the time, urgent things do not help achieve long-term success. On the other hand, essential matters are usually helpful for your long-term success, but they may not be serious.
For example, answering a call may be urgent, but the call itself is not essential, and cleaning your home is pressing but not very important.
If you want to work in e-marketing, creating a system to attract potential clients, promote your products, services, or websites you work with, and create new products is essential but not urgent. On the contrary, responding to emails, creating an attractive design or logo, reading relevant articles, and learning new marketing techniques are urgent.
In short, urgent things do not necessarily contribute to your future success; they are just things that you need to accomplish immediately, while essential things usually contribute to achieving your goals, even if they are not urgent, and you can postpone them for now.
So, evaluate your daily actions to manage urgent and critical tasks by identifying the essential work that will bring you the results you want in the long term because if you focus only on what is urgent without what contributes to your future success, you will not move forward. Set a date to start working on influential and crucial tasks.
People who think long-term work on significant tasks that achieve the best results for them without wasting their time on urgent but unnecessary matters, and they spend their most productive hours doing critical work and postponing everything that will not affect their success.
In conclusion
As we have seen, long-term thinking is essential, but don't overdo it. Some people are obsessed with their long-term thinking without making any real effort. Know that long-term and short-term thinking is equally significant because to achieve excellence and remarkable success in life, you must think about your future and what you need to do now.
In other words, you must think long-term to stay on track, and at the same time, you must think short-term so that you know what you need to do to reach your desired destination.
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