life’s too short. life is long. these statements always felt incomplete, dualistic in nature – a misrepresentation of the nuance that exists in between, either creating an unnecessary rush or a treading in the waters of complacency. context matters. ¿por qué no los dos? can both be true?
life is too short to not live authentically yet it is long enough to get it wrong, experiment, recover and try a different life. do the work to trust yourself to begin again, and courageously live through many lives. - juan maize 12.22
we humans have the natural tendency to over and underestimate what is possible via the negligent use of time horizons. time horizons should be used wisely. almost all if not all, non-physical time horizons are artificially made up constructs of our mind to induce some sort of outcome. short time horizons have their place. it’s true that artificially constructed time-bound execution can garner results. they can be used effectively as a constraint to drive focus and motivation, induce appropriate levels of stress for experimentation leading to an acceleration of the future, beating the competition or yourself. but if poorly set they carry the risk of reducing the quality of your decisions displacing you from your vision and your authenticity by igniting the ego inside a currency of zero-sum transactions with yourself and others. but when the blinkers are removed what possibilities begin to sprout within your field of vision when you open the aperture? long time horizons scales quality. they help you hold to higher standards absorb compound interest and new technologies, and remain authentic and motivated inside your pursuit for a greater impact. but longer time horizons too, carry their own risks — abusing their nature may lead to inaction inside complacency. how good are you at long-term thinking? or short term action? at balancing and trading the two? how would you decision-making change if your twelve month time horizon all of a sudden became twelve years? now reverse that question. context matters timing matters both horizons have their use learn to play both, and choose wisely.
a quick story
a perpetually impressive friend recently shared her frustration with where she was at professionally – not achieving the results she wanted against her peers or her own expectations. she’d restarted careers from scratch and had only been in her new game for two years. i asked the length of time her “peers” had been playing this game – let’s just say it was multiples on where she was at. i then asked her “how long do you intend to play this game?” she responded with “decades.” to which i responded with: “well then you have decades to be great. you can’t even imagine what’s possible inside ten, twenty or thirty years worth of dedication.”
"It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested." — Marcus Aurelius
if you’re one of the lucky ones who truly knows where to invest your energy – go long, don’t sell yourself short.