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The Power of Long-Term Thinking

Author: Sidd Pagidipati
by Sidd Pagidipati
Posted: Apr 03, 2018

Running a business is hectic work. It involves managing employees, maintaining relationships with clients, tracking your income and expenses, figuring out whether your marketing strategies are working or not... and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

All those tasks take up a lot of time and energy, sure. But you shouldn’t allow short-term responsibilities to be your only concern.

I know all about the importance of long-term thinking. I’m Sidd Pagidipati, the founder of several successful businesses. I learned early on in my career as an entrepreneur that even when things seem to be going smoothly, you can’t be complacent. You need to keep planning for the future, and you must be willing to occasionally sacrifice short-term losses for long-term gains if you want your business to thrive.

Think Like The Iroquois

The Iroquois were one of the most powerful Native American societies. They got that way by thinking ahead.

The constitution of the United Iroquois nations contains this line: "In every deliberation, we must consider the impact on the seventh generation." In other words, when Iroquois leaders met to make major social planning decisions, they weighed the immediate impact of their decisions against the consequences their decisions would have in 100 years’ time.

Of course, when it comes to business, it is a little extreme to plan for a century from now. You should strike a middle ground between the Iroquois mindset and the 90-day quarterly cycles that business leaders so often get obsessed with.

Think Like Bill Gates

Microsoft founder Bill Gates is now worth $90 billion, but when his company was just starting out, getting rich quick wasn’t on his mind.

"We weren’t trying to just go public and get rich," Gates once said about Microsoft. "There was no near-term thing. It always was this many-decades thing where there were no shortcuts and we’d sort of put one foot in front of the other."

Success isn’t achieved instantly. Be patient, keep your eye on the prize, and one day your company just might be as big as Microsoft.

Think Like Jeff Bezos

Bill Gates was once the richest man in the world. That title now belongs to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

In 1997, Jeff Bezos sent out Amazon’s first annual shareholder letter, and it included a manifesto called "It's all about the long term." Bezos has attached this manifesto to every annual Amazon shareholder letter for the past 20+ years.

It’s easy to see why Bezos finds this message so important. Amazon started as an online bookstore. If Bezos was only concerned about his short-term goals, he would have done everything he needed to run his online bookstore and nothing more. He wouldn’t have made any moves that risked his short-term profits.

That’s not what Bezos did, though. He decided to take the money he made from his bookstore and use it to test out new ideas that had nothing to do with books. Those experiments yielded some huge money-makers, such as the cloud computing platform Amazon Web Services.

Long-term thinking allows you to handle failures without freaking out. Amazon has had plenty of misfires over the years, but by keeping his long-term vision in mind, Bezos was able to ride out those failures until he found success.

Billionaire businessmen like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos used long-term thinking to build empires and amass fortunes. You’d be wise to follow their lead.

About the Author

Sidd Pagidipati is a serial entrepreneur behind a couple of businesses used by millions of users worldwide. You can follow Sidd on Linkedin.

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Author: Sidd Pagidipati

Sidd Pagidipati

Member since: Mar 20, 2018
Published articles: 1

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