Balancing the Short- and Long-Term
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I write a bunch about the healthy tensions that keep us on the road—not in the middle of the road—and out of the ditches on either side. And the distinction between short- and long-term thinking is one of the more poignant examples of that principle. Sure, you have to maintain both short- and long-term thinking, but getting that balance wrong can really bite you.
We are so much better at this as humans, too. Think about your dog, for a minute. Our Plott Hound, Loki, will snarf his meal down in less than a minute as if there’s no other food to be found on planet earth. No matter what his immediate future holds, never, ever, will he save some food for later. If he was a squirrel, he’d never bury a single acorn. He lives entirely for the present.
You may be cuter and faster than Loki, but do you think beyond the current meal? Every day that ends in “y” will find you totally driven to serve clients. In fact, that’s the most significant mistake you can make in thinking like Loki instead of Mr. Squirrel:
The biggest mistake principals make about the long-term is neglecting their own marketing while serving clients in the short-term.
That’s it. That’s the big mistake. The only thing that pulls you from it is the dope slap of looking up from the grind one day and realizing that your lead funnel doesn’t look too good.
Now for the other side:
The biggest mistake principals make about the short-term is avoiding tough decisions around staff because they’re worried that things will turn around over the long-term and they won’t have the team to do the work.
These challenges are why you get paid the big bucks. (You are getting paid the big bucks, right?) These decisions are difficult and there aren’t any easy answers, but I do know for sure that you cannot put clients ahead of your own interests.
There’s tremendous hope for us, too. I love what Martin Seligman and John Tierney wrote in the NYT a few years ago:
But it is increasingly clear that the mind is mainly drawn to the future, not driven by the past. Behavior, memory and perception can’t be understood without appreciating the central role of prospection. We learn not by storing static records but by continually retouching memories and imagining future possibilities. Our brain sees the world not by processing every pixel in a scene but by focusing on the unexpected.
In other words, no matter how badly you’ve screwed up your own marketing efforts, year after year, the future can be different. And it really should be.
Back to our illustration. Squirrels don’t bury nuts because they know that a cold, hard winter is coming. They do it without any “prospection” and purely by instinct. You, however, know how lucky you’ll have to be if you want to succeed without doing the basics. The squirrel might have an excuse for not preparing, but we humans don’t. As the same authors suggest, “construct rich and detailed simulations of the future” and then do the basic (and fun) things that are necessary to get there.
You cannot consistently put clients ahead of your own interests. Build a really solid firm where you operate from a position of strength, and only then will you be free to do great work, free of distraction and with a generous spirit, and in everybody’s short- and long-term best interests.