In the short game, you are rewarded for doing things well. In the long game, you are rewarded for consitently doing things well and for not making too many mistakes.
In business, this means that you should invest in your people, your products and your processes, fine tuning them to make them better. You should also focus on sustainability and longevity instead of quick wins or quarterly earnings.
In personal life, this means that you should invest in yourself by learning new skills and meeting new people. You should also focus on long-term relationships rather than short-term flings.
I know its easier said than done. It seems simple but its not that easy. Everyone has the opportunity to play the long game but not all of them will win the long game.
The Barriers To Winning The Long Game
A long game is about playing the game for the long term, and not just for short-term gains. This means that you have to be able to make sacrifices in order to win. It’s about taking into account the possible consequences of the future in every decision you made. Bad decisions can alter the trajectory of your life by a mile or more. If an aircraft goes off course by just a mile it might find itself far away from its landing destination.
There are some barriers that can stop you from winning the long game. These barriers include:
Building a comfortable life now by sacrificing opportunities or investments in future generations
Not taking care of your health and fitness
Not taking care of your finances
Putting too much weight on material possessions
There's nothing wrong with being comfortable now but it doesn't have to come at the expense of the future. The bad thing about not planning is that failure comes as a total surprise.
These barriers could hamper or interfere with you playing the long term. I think we can all agree that not taking care of your health and fitness is the most important out of them all. Good Health in itself is wealth.
The 5 Things Every Entrepreneur Needs to Know about the Long Game
The long game is a term used to describe a strategy where the player invests in the game for the long-term and focuses on maximizing their gains over time.
The five things that every entrepreneur should know about playing the long game are:
Understand your strengths and weaknesses.
Nobody is a jack of all trades. somethings are easy for you while other things are not that easy for you. Wealthy individuals bet on their strengths and outsource their weaknesses. From personal experience, it works pretty fine.Find your "sweet spot"
What seems to always work for you? What set of steps or processes always give you the same desired results? That's your sweet spot. Once you find it, its easier to scale and achieve considerable results.Know when to hold, know when to fold
This is a very hard lesson really, because it's not always easy to determine when to preserve or pivot. It's only in retrospection that you realised that you made the move way too early or way too late. However, over time, it becomes easier to know the when and the which.Be patient, it will pay off in the end
Sometimes, nothing seems to be working, a full week or month can go by and you don't seem to have achieve any 'perceived' progress. This are the times when most quit and just forget about it. No preferred results doesn't mean their are no results. What people miss is that those are the times when you're developing a thick skin and building momentum.Don't be afraid of failure
I won't lie. I have thrown in the towel a couple of times. Failure is like a hard punch in the gut that leaves you uncomfortable for awhile. But one should learn and look at it from a wider perspective, failure is part of the process. It takes both the day light and the night time to make a day. Both are equally needed.
These 5 are not just 'for entrepreneurs' per se. It also applies to any other profession. It's more of a general guideline about playing the long game.
Conclusion: Playing The Long Game Requires Patience, Grit, And A Plan
It's a mentality shift first and foremost. Hardly do we ponder much about the future, we're always thinking about the present, reacting to the charging circumstances around us. Thinking about the future can be boring or exciting depending on where you're looking at it from.
However, developing patience and grit or resiliency while also having a good plan is prerequisite in playing the long game.
In order for time to work for you, you have to learn how to move through time without getting fazed by the many trivial circumstances that you encounter every single day. Like I said in the beginning of this post, it's easier said than done. But it’s possible.
Thanks For Reading!
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