WE WANT social media in seconds, new skills in a week, bonus in a quarter, promotions in a year. But when you look at the largest private equity or venture funds, they invest in companies with a seven-year cycle in mind. Long-term horizon and patience is the key part of their investment thesis.
So your career, your startups, your impact. They will test your endurance. Your skills and your reputation behave just like any index fund. Painfully slow and flat at first and then explosive later.
The problem is that most people don’t keep investing during this flat part of the curve and they change directions right before the inflection point hits. The ones who stay in the game and keep investing long enough get almost all the upside.
Take this column in Panay News for example, “New Way of Seeing” . For the first four, five, six months we had very few people paying attention. I had two goals from Day 1:
One, I wasn’t going to worry about audience traction or monetization, and two, I had a 10-year plan. When no one was showing up and the numbers were flat for a long time, what did we do? Nothing different. We kept focusing on making articles that I wish someone had made for me when I was in my 20s.
Week after week, I asked a simple question. Would the 22-year-old version of me find this article useful?
If the answer was yes, I would make it.
When would the channel grow or if it would grow at all was never in my hands. That’s decided by the viewers and readers, which is a beast. You can’t reverse-engineer that. So, we kept showing up every week. That’s the upside of long-term planning.
So, here’s a simple framework to check your time horizon that balances speed with endurance. Think in three timelines.
First, for your 90-day timeline, be visible. Ask yourself, what am I doing in the next 90 days that will make me more visible to others? This is your proof of work and contribution.
Second, for your 12 to 18 month timeline, be valuable. What am I going to build in the next year that will still be valuable to others and to me for years to come? This is your compounding engine. You know, building skills, systems, products, companies, relationships, reputation.
And for your five-year timeline, be a visionary. What are my long-term bets? This is the marathon of transformation in skills, in your career arcs, in entrepreneurship, even in your identity.
When I think about that oak story, I always ask myself, am I planting flowers or am I planting oaks?
Flowers look great for a season and then they’re gone. Oaks hold up for centuries. But there’s one final principle that the top 1% rely on because thinking long-term only matters if you have the identity to sustain it. And that is the fifth principle.
Over time, your skills may change, your titles may change, even the industries around you will mutate faster than you expect. Your identity is the only continuity, the only constant that you can architect on purpose. This leads to the question that splits all performers into two camps.
Most people ask what will this decision get me? But a very small group will ask a harder question. What will this decision make me?
The first question is about getting more than what you deserve. The second is about deserving more than what you get. The problem with optimizing for titles and money is that you can extract more in the short run.
You might lack the capacity to sustain it forever. What’s our action item here? Before any major decision, ask if I make this choice, what kind of a person will I become? And is that someone I’m proud to become?
Why ask that question?
Because if you want to take risks, you’ll need that strong and stable sense of self, your identity. If losing a game means losing yourself, you’ll always play it safe. And a life where you play it safe is a life without real pain, but it’s also a life without real joy.
When I was in my late teens and early 20s, I was a total mess. I didn’t know who I was, what I was good at, if I was good at anything, what I could become, nothing. And that’s when I found Christ’s Youth in Action or CYA that took care of me with great compassion. He told me, “You’re not lost. You just can’t see around the corner yet. You’re meant for so much more, for a different world.”
Those words have always stayed with me. They guided my identity because nothing shapes you more than someone believing in you more than you believe in yourself. So now I want to pass that wish on to you in case you ever need it.
No, you’re not lost. You just can’t see around the corner yet. You’re meant for so much more for a different world. Go find it. If you enjoyed this article , you’ll probably enjoy this one, too, on lessons I learned during my years at the United Arab Emirates and how it shapes the way top performers think./PN
