Long term
I find a lot of discussions I’m in can be boiled down to long term vs short term trade offs. And after seeing my typical stand points in several such discussions I’ve realized I’m a long to ultra long term thinker (a hint of where this is going)
For me I think this boils down to two basic aspects, the first being that I like perfection so I value and understand the effort of getting closer to it, and secondly I have pretty good mental stamina to absorb short term pain while getting closer to the goal.
For me I think this boils down to two basic aspects, the first being that I like perfection so I value and understand the effort of getting closer to it, and secondly I have pretty good mental stamina to absorb short term pain while getting closer to the goal.
A classical trade-off between long term and short term thinking is how much effort to invest in R&D. The future benefits may be great but they might not be that tempting as they will be realized in the far future, perhaps when the team members are not even working in the team any longer. On the other hand short term improvements will likely offer much more tangible value.
The biggest problem of R&D type of work is that the combined value of learning and improving things for the long run are hard to estimate, like compound interest on a bank account, all those small increments add up and down the road the value is incredible. As long as the effort is spent on things that maintain value over time rather than create cost, like training and automation of tooling the aggregated value produced is frequently underestimated.
Long term thinking is not a universal good thing, there are really good reasons to occasionally compromise the long term to avoid short term issues. When working with multiple types of persons there will always be those looking for a quicker fix and of course being frustrated waiting for the long term to actually happen. I even see people that never intend to be around for the long term at all and making decisions based on knowing this. It makes sense to know your general preference to be able to actively consider when there is a good case to do the opposite.
For some activities it really makes sense to think long term. When spending multi million figures on creating development teams optimizing for here and now is a really bad idea. Long term thinking is also valuable when changing larger organizations and evolve how things can be done better, it takes time to change how many persons think and act together.
One of the most frequent reasons to avoid short term compromises is that they tend to lead to regret and low motivation in the worst case short term decisions lead to sunk cost which can further reduce the willingness to abandon the current effort. Most professionals prefer doing high quality work rather than low quality work, that's how they became pro's in the first place. Eventually the long term arrives anyway, at which point you'll be thinking "if I had only started this 6 months ago" or "now we have to rebuild it from scratch because it's a spaghetti mess of a system" (or something similar).
There is generally no trade-off to have high ambitions and try to aim for perfect, you only need a strategy for surviving the short term until your long term investments start generating benefits. Only when you try really hard you will learn more about the road to get there. Usually one of the best ways is to actually get going, and the long term thinking mind should be happy as long as that movement gets you closer to perfection. There is nothing more frustrating than short term compromises that takes you on tracks away from the goal and in worst case are so flawed that they even miss the short term goal anyway.
The long term tends not to be so distant anyway. Frequently the additional effort is smaller than initially estimated and it’s not rare to see the best solution being very fast.
Long term thinking is not a universal good thing, there are really good reasons to occasionally compromise the long term to avoid short term issues. When working with multiple types of persons there will always be those looking for a quicker fix and of course being frustrated waiting for the long term to actually happen. I even see people that never intend to be around for the long term at all and making decisions based on knowing this. It makes sense to know your general preference to be able to actively consider when there is a good case to do the opposite.
For some activities it really makes sense to think long term. When spending multi million figures on creating development teams optimizing for here and now is a really bad idea. Long term thinking is also valuable when changing larger organizations and evolve how things can be done better, it takes time to change how many persons think and act together.
One of the most frequent reasons to avoid short term compromises is that they tend to lead to regret and low motivation in the worst case short term decisions lead to sunk cost which can further reduce the willingness to abandon the current effort. Most professionals prefer doing high quality work rather than low quality work, that's how they became pro's in the first place. Eventually the long term arrives anyway, at which point you'll be thinking "if I had only started this 6 months ago" or "now we have to rebuild it from scratch because it's a spaghetti mess of a system" (or something similar).
There is generally no trade-off to have high ambitions and try to aim for perfect, you only need a strategy for surviving the short term until your long term investments start generating benefits. Only when you try really hard you will learn more about the road to get there. Usually one of the best ways is to actually get going, and the long term thinking mind should be happy as long as that movement gets you closer to perfection. There is nothing more frustrating than short term compromises that takes you on tracks away from the goal and in worst case are so flawed that they even miss the short term goal anyway.
The long term tends not to be so distant anyway. Frequently the additional effort is smaller than initially estimated and it’s not rare to see the best solution being very fast.
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