Long-Term Planning

2010.08.01   prev     next

Until recently, I always thought that most people are capable of long-term planning, and only a small minority have a problem with it. I thought that way because I noticed that most people seemed to have long-term careers, and only a relatively small minority crap out. But more recently, I’ve come to the belief that it’s the other way around.

The long-term successes that most people achieve are things for which there are immediate, short-term consequences to blow off. For example, if you’re a student studying for a degree on your parents’ dime, and you blow off your studies, then you will very shortly find yourself back living in your parents’ house, and they won’t be very happy to see you there. It won’t take four years before the university gives you the heave-ho; it’ll take less than four months. Or, if you’re climbing the corporate ladder, and you stop coming to work, or come to work and do lousy work, or no work, then you’ll quickly be cut off from your paycheck. They won’t wait until you reach retirement age and then ask for all that money back. You’ll be trying to survive in the street this year.

So even though most people think that the accomplishment of getting a degree, or holding down a job at a company for years, is evidence of long-term planning — those activities don’t really require much long-term planning. You just have to do what you’re told, being acutely aware of the short-term consequences of not doing so.

Real Planning

What about long-term goals for which there are no significant short-term consequences for blowing off? For example, what if you neglect fitness for a few days? You will not immediately become morbidly obese. If you blow off fitness for a few months, you probably won’t become morbidly obese that quickly either. And even if you do eventually become morbidly obese, you almost certainly won’t be cut loose from your job or your degree program for having done so.

Same thing with building your own business, or becoming in any way self-employed. If you blow off your efforts to do that, for a few days or weeks or months, nothing really bad will happen to you.

Society is OK with you being fat and not having your own successful business. Society is not OK with you refusing to do society’s drudge work (or study to eventually do so) while you don’t have your own successful business. Since most people are incapable of long-term planning on their own, society provides quick, devastating penalties to keep those people motivated to a degree that they cannot motivate themselves.