How to Become a Long-Term Thinker

Thanks for tuning in for another edition of my newsletter - we’re in the final lap of 2021! This week, we have perspectives on long-term thinking from the executive director of The Long Now Foundation , Alexander Rose! And, if you are around later on today, join in on my weekly Newsweek interview series, Better, today at 12 pm EST / 9 am PST/5 pm GMT. This week’s guest is New York Times bestselling author Liz Wiseman ! We’ll be talking about how you can grow your impact as a leader. These discussions really take off the more you get involved with your questions and opinions - set yourself a reminder or join us here - I hope to see you today!

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The past two years have given everyone in the entire world time to think about their lives for the long term. It certainly gave me perspective as I wrote The Long Game . Alexander Rose, however, has taken that concept to an even larger playing field. His work with The Long Now Foundation includes projects like a 10,000-year-old clock , a living archive of 1,500 human languages , and the manual for civilization . Last week, Alexander talked with our audience about how long-term thinking awakens a new perspective in how we look at our time and how we can spend it. Below are a couple of moments from our talk I particularly enjoyed, and if you’d like, you can watch the interview in its entirety here .

Long-term thinking as a business:

“If you're a business leader and thinking about the product that you're making, think a little bit longer than you normally would about how that product or service is affecting society over the long-term. I think we're currently living in a world where a lot of people didn't think through that very well. Now we're stuck with a lot of things that we thought were really neat when they came out, but don’t seem very sustainable.”

Increasing optionality for the future:

“Are the things that you are doing increasing optionality for the future or decreasing it? Choices that increase optionality for the future are the ones that we wish our ancestors left us. If you look at something like the Bill of Rights, it was meant to be reinterpreted - it’s principle-based. And for better or worse, we continue to reinterpret those rights. Now, look at a modern law. They are a thousand pages long. The intent is very much to make sure the future can never interpret it in a different way. And yet, in the future, those people know way more about their present than we can possibly project from our point in their past. So the idea is rather than to restrict future generations, is to increase their optionality and to trust them that they will have a better view of their present than we ever possibly can.”

Framing your life in longer-terms:

“It's a little bit about looking back 10,000 years and seeing ourselves. I think that often, we kind of feel like, ‘Are we going to be around in 10,000 years?’ And we feel like we're potentially at the end of a 10,000-year-old story. But I think if you reframe that a little bit and you go, ‘Well, actually, maybe we're in the middle of at least a 20,000-year-old story.’ How would we act differently? How would you want to make your life better? And that I think is a really interesting way to think about the arc of your whole life, rather than ‘what is the job that I'm doing for the next day?’ What do you want to accomplish? How do you want to make the world better for the next generation?”

Thank you so much for reading this week’s newsletter - and join me for my interview with?Liz Wiseman !

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Wishing you health and success -?

Dorie