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Can Achieve So Much More When You Take The Long View
July 13th, 2009 by Gary
Hipworth
The universe began with the Big Bang about 14
thousand million years ago. You and I and everything else that exists is a result of that event and so nothing can
be explained unless we explain everything from that moment on. Makes one humble?
Life on earth has been around for around 4 thousand million years, land animals for
about 370 million years, humans for about 1 million years, city life and written language for about 6000
years.
Life is a copying process that is virtually immortal but the individual life form is
expendable. Life started out as a cooperative enterprise, but with bitter experience of being 'used' became
competitive to protect its own kind. Both cooperation and competition are aspects of the whole world we live
in.
Every action is either in accordance with survival or it is
not.
An animal has built-in instincts that enable it to survive, at
least in the short-term, but man does not and must rely on morals and conceptual knowledge about reality and so it
is a vastly more difficult task, and needs continuous awareness and life-long learning.
We are usually overly ambitious in what we
think we can achieve in 1 year, but at the same time underestimate what we think we can achieve in 5, 10 or 20
years.
A man is short-range if he acts on immediate satisfaction of impulses, without any weighing up of their future
long-range consequences, for example poor choice of a ‘friend’, or smoking, or poor diet or toxic working
conditions can kill you or make you very sick.
A man is long-range when he makes decisions with reference to such a future. In
essence, this would include a long-range purpose that integrates all his goals, main activities, values and desires
for living a happy life.
Being patient and having a long term
perspective gives you the best chance of creating and living a fulfilled life. Just ask the bacteria!
Saving the best reason for last – because the majority don’t think and act
long-range!
