Think Long Term

People respect those who persevere. We respect people with university degrees because we know they sacrificed and stuck with it. We respect athletes - most of whom sacrifice a lot to succeed. The same is true in business. I get a lot of respect because I have been doing this for 25+ years.?

There is power in delayed gratification.

Most success happens over the long term. In my Ted talk I talked about taking 7 years to get to $10,000,000 in sales and then another 8 years to hit $100,000,000. And when I was doing over $1B, I never grew by less than $100,000,000/year and often that much in a quarter.

People who can put off immediate rewards and work towards longer term ones tend to be more successful. Procrastination is often caused by people taking the short term reward (sitting on the couch and watching TV) over the short term sacrifice (going for a run or learning) to achieve the long term reward (fitness or knowledge)

One of my favourite quotes is “we tend to over estimate what we can accomplish in a day but underestimate what we can accomplish in a year or a decade.”

A friend of mine recently emailed me the following:

“The race is not always to the swift, but to those who keep on running.”